There are Alards buried in Winchelsea church—they lie in the south aisle on their altar tombs, with lions at their feet. At least one of them went to the Crusades and lies there cross-legged—the first Gervase Alard, Admiral of the Cinque Ports and Bailiff of Winchelsea, a man of mighty stature.
Those were the days just after the Great Storm, when the sea swallowed up the first parish of St. Thomas à Becket, and King Edward laid out a new town on the hoke above Bukenie. The Alards then were powerful on the marsh, rivals of De Icklesham and fighters of the Abbot of Fécamps. They were ship-owners, too, and sent out to sea St. Peter, Nostre Dame and La Nave Dieu. Stephen Alard held half a knight’s fee in the manors of Stonelink, Broomhill and Coghurst, while William Alard lost thirty sailors, thirty sergeants-at-arms, and anchors and ropes, in Gascony.
In the fifteenth century the family had begun to dwindle—its power was passing into the hands of the Oxenbridges, who, when the heiress of the main line married an Oxenbridge, adopted the Alard arms, the lion within a border charged with scallop shells. Thus the trunk ended, but a branch of the William Alards had settled early in the sixteenth century at Conster Manor, near the village of Leasan, about eight miles from Winchelsea. Their shield was argent, three bars gules, on a canton azure a leopard’s head or.
Peter Alard re-built Conster in Queen Elizabeth’s day, making it what it is now, a stone house with three hipped gables and a huge red sprawl of roof. It stands on the hill between Brede Eye and Horns Cross, looking down into the valley of the river Tillingham, with Doucegrove Farm, Glasseye Farm and Starvecrow Farm standing against the woods beyond.
The Alards became baronets under Charles the First, for the Stephen Alard of that day was a gentleman of the bedchamber, and melted down the Alard plate in the King’s lost cause. Cromwell deprived the family of their lands, but they came back at the Restoration, slightly Frenchified and intermarried with the Papist. They were nearly in trouble again when Dutch William was King, for Gervase Alard, a son in orders, became a non-juror and was expelled from the family living of Leasan, though a charge of sedition brought against him collapsed from lack of substance.
Hitherto, though ancient and honourable, the Alards had never been rich, but during the eighteenth century, successful dealings with the East India Company brought them wealth. It was then that they began to buy land. They were no longer content to look across the stream at Doucegrove, Glasseye and Starvecrow, in the hands of yeomen, but one by one these farms must needs become part of their estate. They also bought all the fine woodlands of the Furnace, the farms of Winterland and Ellenwhorne at the Ewhurst end of the Tillingham valley, and Barline, Float and Dinglesden on the marshes towards Rye. They were now big landowners, but their land-hunger was still unsatisfied—Sir William, the Victorian baronet, bought grazings as far away as Stonelink, so that when his son John succeeded him the Alards of Conster owned most of the land between Rye and Ewhurst, the Kent Ditch and the Brede river.
John Alard was about thirty years old when he began to reign. He had spent most of his grown-up life in London-the London of gas and crinolines, Disraeli and Nellie Farren, Tattersalls and Caves of Harmony. He had passed for a buck in Victorian society, with its corruption hidden under outward decorum, its romance smothered under ugly riches in stuffy drawing-rooms. But when the call came to him he valiantly settled down. In Grosvenor Square they spoke of him behind their fans as a young man who had sown his wild oats and was now an eligible husband for the innocent Lucy Kenyon with her sloping shoulders and vacant eyes. He married her as his duty and begat sons and daughters.
He also bought more land, and under him the Alard estates crept over the Brede River and up Snailham hill towards Guestling Thorn. But that was only at the beginning of his squireship. One or two investments turned out badly, and he was forced to a standstill. Then came the bad days of the landowners. Lower and lower dropped the price of land and the price of wheat, hop-substitutes became an electioneering cry in the Rye division of Sussex and the noble gardens by the river Tillingham went fallow. Then came Lloyd George’s Land Act—the rush to the market, the impossibility of sale. Finally the European war of 1914 swept away the little of the Alard substance that was left. They found themselves in possession of a huge ramshackle estate, heavily mortgaged, crushingly taxed.
Sir John had four sons—Hugh, Peter, George and Gervase—and three daughters, Doris, Mary and Janet. Hugh and Peter both went out to fight, and Hugh never came back. George, following a tradition which had ruled in the family since the days of the non-juring Gervase, held the living of Leasan. Gervase at the outbreak of hostilities was only in his second term at Winchester, being nearly eighteen years younger than his brother George.
Of the girls, only Mary was married, though Doris hinted at a number of suitors rejected because of their unworthiness to mate with Alard. Jenny was ten years younger than Mary—she and Gervase came apart from the rest of the family, children of middle age and the last of love.
A few days before Christmas in the year 1918, most of the Alards were gathered together in the drawing-room at Conster, to welcome Peter the heir. He had been demobilised a month after the Armistice and was now expected home, to take on himself the work of the estate in the place of his brother Hugh. The Alards employed an agent, and there were also bailiffs on one or two of the farms, but the heir’s presence was badly needed in these difficult days. Sir John held the authority, and the keenness of his interest was in no wise diminished by his age; but he was an old man, nearly seventy-five, and honourably afflicted with the gout. He could only seldom ride on his grey horse from farm to farm, snarling at the bailiff or the stockman, winking at the chicken girl—even to drive out in his heavy Wolsey car gave him chills. So most days he sat at home, and the work was done by him indeed, but as it were by current conducted through the wires of obedient sons and servants.
This afternoon he sat by the fire in the last patch of sunlight, which his wife hankered to have shut off from the damasked armchair.
“It really is a shame to run any risks with that beautiful colour,” she murmured from the sofa. “You know it hasn’t been back from Hampton’s a week, and it’s such very expensive stuff.”
“Why did you choose it?” snarled Sir John.
“Well, it was the best—we’ve always had the best.”
“Next time you can try the second best as a new experience.”
“Your father really is hopeless,” said Lady Alard in a loud whisper to her daughter Doris.
“Sh-sh-sh,” said Doris, equally loud.
“Very poor as an aside, both of you,” said Sir John.
The Reverend George Alard coughed as a preliminary to changing the conversation.
“Our Christmas roses are better than ever this year,” he intoned.
His wife alone supported him.
“They’ll come in beautifully for the Christmas decorations—I hope there’s enough to go round the font.”
“I’d thought of them on the screen, my dear.”
“Oh no! Christmas roses are so appropriate to the font, and besides”—archly—“Sir John will let us have some flowers out of the greenhouse for the screen.”
“I’m damned if I will.”
Rose Alard flushed at the insult to her husband’s cloth which she held to lie in the oath; none the less she stuck to her coaxing.
“Oh, but you always have, Sir John.”
“Have I?—Well, as I’ve just told my wife, there’s nothing like a new experience. I don’t keep three gardeners just to decorate Leasan church, and the flowers happen to be rather scarce this year. I want them for the house.”
“Isn’t he terrible?” Lady Alard’s whispered moan to Doris once more filled the room.
Jenny laughed.
“What are you laughing at, Jenny?”
“Oh, I dunno.”
She was laughing because she wondered if there was anything she could say which would not lead to a squabble.
“Perhaps Gervase will come by the same train as Peter,” she ventured.
“Gervase never let us know when to expect him,” said her mother. “He’s very thoughtless. Now perhaps Appleby will have to make the journey twice.”
“It won’t kill Appleby if he does—he hasn’t had the car out all this week.”
“But Gervase is very thoughtless,” said Mrs. George Alard.
At that moment a slide of wheels was heard in the drive, and the faint sounds of a car coming to anchor.
“Peter!” cried Lady Alard.
“He’s been quick,” said Doris.
George pulled out his watch to be sure about the time, and Jenny ran to the door.
The drawing-room was just as it had always been.... The same heavy dignity of line in the old walls and oak-ribbed ceiling spoilt by undue crowding of pictures and furniture. Hothouse flowers stood about in pots and filled vases innumerable ... a water-colour portrait of himself as a child faced him as he came into the room.
“Peter, my darling!”
His mother’s arms were stretched out to him from the sofa—she did not rise, and he knelt down beside her for a moment, letting her enfold him and furiously creating for himself the illusion of a mother he had never known. The illusion seemed to dissipate in a faint scent of lavender water.
“How strange you look out of uniform—I suppose that’s a new suit.”
“Well, I could scarcely have got into my pre-war clothes. I weigh thirteen stone.”
“Quite the heavy Squire,” said Sir John. “Come here and let’s have a look at you.”
Peter went over and stood before his father’s chair—rather like a little boy. As it happened he was a man of thirty-six, tallish, well-built, with a dark, florid face, dark hair and a small dark moustache. In contrast his eyes were of an astounding blue—Saxon eyes, the eyes of Alards who had gone to the Crusades, melted down their plate for the White King, refused to take the oath of allegiance to Dutch William; eyes which for long generations had looked out on the marshes of Winchelsea, and had seen the mouth of the Rother swept in spate from Romney sands to Rye.
“Um,” said Sir John.
“Having a bad turn again, Sir?”
“Getting over it—I’ll be about tomorrow.”
“That’s right, and how’s Mother?”
“I’m better today, dear. But Dr. Mount said he really was frightened last week—I’ve never had such an attack.”
“Why didn’t anyone tell me? I could have come down earlier.”
“I wanted to have you sent for, dear, but the children wouldn’t let me.”
The children, as represented by George Alard and his wife, threw a baffled glance at Peter, seeking to convey that the “attack” had been the usual kind of indigestion which Lady Alard liked to enoble by the name of Angina Pectoris.
Meanwhile, Wills the butler and a young footman were bringing in the tea. Jenny poured it out, the exertion being considered too great for her mother. Peter’s eyes rested on her favourably; she was the one thing in the room, barring the beautiful, delicate flowers, that gave him any real pleasure to look at. She was a large, graceful creature, with a creamy skin, wide, pale mouth, and her mother’s eyes of speckled brown. Her big, beautifully shaped hands moved with a slow grace among the teacups. In contrast with her Doris looked raddled (though she really was moderate and skillful in the make-up of her face and hair) and Rose looked blowsy. He felt glad of Jenny’s youth—soft, slow, asleep.
“Where’s Mary?” he asked suddenly, “I thought she was coming down.”
“Not till New Year’s eve. Julian can’t come with her, and naturally he didn’t want her to be away for Christmas.”
“And how is the great Julian?”
“I don’t know—Mary didn’t say. She hardly ever tells us anything in her letters.”
The door opened and the butler announced—
“Dr. Mount has come to see her ladyship.”
“Oh, Dr. Mount” ... cried Peter, springing up.
“He’s waiting in the morning room, my lady.”
“Show him in here—you’d like him to come in, wouldn’t you, Mother?”
“Yes, of course, dear, but I expect he’ll have had his tea.”
“He can have another. Anyhow, I’d like to see him—I missed him last leave.”
He crossed over to the window. Outside in the drive a small green Singer car stood empty.
“Did Stella drive him over?—She would never stay outside.”
“I can’t see anyone—Hello, doctor—glad you’ve come—have some tea.”
Dr. Mount came into the room. He was a short, healthy little man, dressed in country tweeds, and with the flat whiskers of an old-time squire. He seemed genuinely delighted to see Peter.
“Back from the wars? Well, you’ve had some luck. They say it’ll be more than a year before everyone’s demobbed. You look splendid, doesn’t he, Lady Alard?”
“Yes—Peter always was healthy, you know.”
“I must say he hasn’t given me much trouble. I’d be a poor man if everyone was like him. How’s the wound, Peter? I don’t suppose you even think of it now.”
“I can’t say I do—it never was much. Didn’t Stella drive you over?”
“No—there’s a lot of medicine to make up, so I left her busy in the dispensary.”
“What a useful daughter to have,” sighed Lady Alard. “She can do everything—drive the car, make up medicines——”
“Work in the garden and cook me a thundering good dinner besides!” The little doctor beamed. “I expect she’ll be over here before long, she’ll be wanting to see Peter. She’d have come today if there han’t been such a lot to do.”
Peter put down his teacup and walked over again to the window. Rose Alard and her husband exchanged another of those meaning looks which they found a useful conversational currency.
Jenny soon wearied of the drawing-room, even when freshened by Dr. Mount. She always found a stifling quality in Conster’s public rooms, with their misleading show of wealth, and escaped as early as she could to the old schoolroom at the back of the house, looking steeply up through firs at the wooded slope of Brede Eye.
This evening the room was nearly dark, for the firs shut out the dregs of twilight and the moon that looked over the hill. She could just see the outlines of the familiar furniture, the square table on which she and Gervase had scrawled abusive remarks in the intervals of their lessons, the rocking chair, where the ghost of Nurse sometimes still seemed to sit and sway, the bookcase full of children’s books—“Fifty-two Stories for Girls” and “Fifty-two Stories for Boys,” the “Girls of St. Wode’s” and “With Wallace at Bannockburn”—all those faded gilded rows which she still surreptitiously enjoyed.
Now she had an indefinite feeling that someone was in the room, but had scarcely realised it when a shape drew itself up against the window square, making her start and gasp.
“It’s only me,” said an apologetic voice.
“Gervase!”
She switched on the light and saw her brother standing by the table.
“When did you come?”
“Oh, twenty minutes ago. I heard you all gassing away in the drawing-room, so thought I’d come up here till you’d finished with Peter.”
“How sociable and brotherly of you! You might have come in and said how d’you do. You haven’t seen him for a year.”
“I thought I’d be an anti-climax—spoil the Warrior’s Return and all that. I’ll go down in a minute.”
“How was it you and Peter didn’t arrive together? There hasn’t been another train since.”
“I expect Peter came by Ashford, didn’t he? I came down on the other line and got out at Robertsbridge. I thought I’d like the walk.”
“What about your luggage?”
“I left that at Robertsbridge.”
“Really, Gervase, you are the most unpractical person I ever struck. This means we’ll have to send over tomorrow and fetch it—and Appleby has something better to do than tear about the country after your traps.”
“I’ll fetch ’em myself in Henry Ford. Don’t be angry with me, Jenny. Please remember I’ve come home and expect to be treated kindly.”
He came round the table to her and offered her his cheek. He was taller than she was, more coltish and less compact, but they were both alike in being their mother’s children, Kenyons rather than Alards. Their eyes were soft and golden-brown instead of clear Saxon-blue, their skins were pale and their mouths wide.
Jenny hugged him. She was very fond of Gervase, who seemed specially to belong to her at the end of the long, straggled family.
“I’m so glad you’ve come,” she murmured—“come for good. Though I suppose you’ll be off to a crammer’s before long.”
“I daresay I shall, but don’t let’s worry about that now. I’m here till February, anyway. Who’s at home?”
“Everybody except Mary, and she’s coming after Christmas.”
“I wish she’d come before. I like old Mary, and I haven’t seen her for an age. Is Julian coming too?”
“I don’t suppose so. He and Father have had a dreadful row.”
“What about?”
“He wouldn’t lend us any of the money he profiteered out of those collapsible huts.”
“Well, I call it rather cheek of Father to have asked him.”
“It was to be on a mortgage of course; but I quite see it wouldn’t have been much of an investment for Julian. However, Father seems to think it was his duty as a son-in-law to have let us have it. We’re nearly on the rocks, you know.”
“So I’ve been told a dozen times, but the place looks much the same as ever.”
“That’s because Father and Mother can’t get out of their grooves, and there are so few economies which seem worth while. I believe we need nearly fifty thousand to clear the estate.”
“But it’s silly to do nothing.”
“I don’t see what we can do. But I never could understand about mortgages.”
“Nor could I. The only thing I can make out is that our grandfather was a pretty awful fool.”
“He couldn’t read the future. He couldn’t tell the price of land was going down with a bump, and that there would be a European war. I believe we’d have been all right if it hadn’t been for the war.”
“No we shouldn’t—we were going down hill before that. The war only hurried things on.”
“Well certainly it didn’t do for us what it did for Julian—Seventy thousand pounds that man’s made out of blood.”
“Then I really do think he might let us have some of it. What’s Mary’s opinion?”
Jenny shrugged.
“Oh, I dunno. He’s had a row with her too.”
“What?—about the same thing?”
“No—about a man she’s friends with. It’s ridiculous really, for he’s years and years older than she is—a retired naval officer—and awfully nice; I lunched with them both once in town. But it pleases Julian to be jealous, and I believe poor Mary’s had a hideous time.”
“Lord! What upheavals since I was home last! Why doesn’t anyone ever write and tell me about these things?”
“Because we’re all too worried and too lazy. But you’ve heard everything now—and you really must come down and see Peter.”
“I’m coming in a moment. But tell me first—has he changed at all? It’s more than a year since I saw him.”
“I don’t think he’s changed much, except that he’s got stouter.”
“I wonder what he’ll do with himself now he’s home. Is there really a rumour, or have I only dreamed, that he’s keen on Stella Mount?”
“Oh, I believe he’s keen enough. But she hasn’t got a penny. Father will be sick if he marries her.”
She switched off the light, and the window changed from a deep, undetailed blue to a pallid, star-pricked grey, swept across by the tossing branches of trees.
At Conster Manor dinner was always eaten in state. Lady Alard took hers apart in her sitting-room, and sometimes Doris had it with her. On his “bad days” Sir John was wont to find Doris a convenient butt, and as she was incapable either of warding off or receiving gracefully the arrows of his wrathful wit, she preserved her dignity by a totally unappreciated devotion to her mother. Tonight, however, she could hardly be absent, in view of Peter’s return, and could only hope that the presence of the heir would distract her father from his obvious facilities.
George and Rose had stayed to dinner in honour of the occasion or rather had come back from a visit to Leasan Vicarage for the purpose of changing their clothes. Rose always resented having to wear evening dress when “just dining with the family.” At the Rectory she wore last year’s summer gown, and it seemed a wicked waste to have to put on one of her only two dance frocks when invited to Conster. But it was a subject on which Sir John had decided views.
“Got a cold in your chest, Rose?” he had inquired, when once she came in her parsonage voile and fichu, and on another occasion had coarsely remarked: “I like to see a woman’s shoulders. Why don’t you show your shoulders, Rose? In my young days every woman showed her shoulders if she’d got any she wasn’t ashamed of. But nowadays the women run either to bone or muscle—so perhaps you’re right.”
Most of the Alard silver was on the table—ribbed, ponderous stuff of eighteenth century date, later than the last of the lost causes in which so much had been melted down. Some fine Georgian and Queen Anne glass and a Spode dinner-service completed the magnificence, which did not, however, extend to the dinner itself. Good cooks were hard to find and ruinously expensive, requiring also their acolytes; so the soup in the Spode tureen might have appeared on the dinner-table of a seaside boarding-house, the fish was represented by greasily fried plaice, followed by a leg of one of the Conster lambs, reduced by the black magic of the kitchen to the flavour and consistency of the worst New Zealand mutton.
Peter noted that things had “gone down,” and had evidently been down for a considerable time, judging by the placidity with which (barring a few grumbles from Sir John) the dinner was received and eaten. The wine, however, was good—evidently the pre-war cellar existed. He began to wonder for the hundredth time what he had better do to tighten the Alard finances—eating bad dinners off costly plate seemed a poor economy. Also why were a butler and two footmen necessary to wait on the family party? The latter were hard-breathing young men, recently promoted from the plough, and probably cheap enough, but why should his people keep up this useless and shoddy state when their dear lands were in danger? Suppose that in order to keep their footmen and their silver and their flowers they had to sell Ellenwhorne or Glasseye—or, perhaps, even Starvecrow....
After the dessert of apples from Conster orchard and a dish of ancient nuts which had remained untasted and unchanged since the last dinner-party, the women and Gervase left the table for the drawing-room. Gervase had never sought to emphasise his man’s estate by sitting over his wine—he always went out like this with the women, and evidently meant to go on doing so now he had left school. George on the other hand remained, though he rather aggressively drank nothing but water.
“It’s not that I consider there is anything wrong in drinking wine,” he explained broad-mindedly to Sir John and Peter, “but I feel I must set an example.”
“To whom?” thundered Sir John.
“To my parishioners.”
“Well, then, since you’re not setting it to us, you can clear out and join the ladies. I won’t see you sit there despising my port—which is the only good port there’s been in the Rye division since ’16—besides I want a private talk with Peter.”
The big clergyman rose obediently and left the room, his feelings finding only a moment’s expression at the door, when he turned round and tried (not very successfully) to tell Peter by a look that Sir John must not be allowed to drink too much port in his gouty condition.
“He’s a fool,” said his father just before he had shut the door. “I don’t know what the church is coming to. In my young days the Parson drank his bottle with the best of ’em. He didn’t go about being an example. Bah! who’s going to follow Georgie’s example?”
“Who, indeed?” said Peter, who had two separate contempts for parsons and his brother George, now strengthened by combination.
“Well, pass me the port anyhow. Look here, I want to talk to you—first time I’ve got you alone. What are you going to do now you’re back?”
“I don’t know, Sir. I’ve scarcely had time to think.”
“You’re the heir now, remember. I’d rather you stayed here. You weren’t thinking of going back into Lightfoot’s, were you?”
“I don’t see myself in the city again. Anyhow I’d sooner be at Conster.”
“That’s right. That’s your place now. How would you like to be Agent?”
“I’d like it very much, Sir. But can it be done? What about Greening?”
“He’s an old fool, and has been muddling things badly the last year or two. He doesn’t want to stay. I’ve been talking to him about putting you in, and he seemed glad.”
“I’d be glad too, Sir.”
“You ought to know more about the estate than you do. It’ll be yours before long—I’m seventy-five, you know. When Hugh was alive I thought perhaps a business career was best for you, so kept you out of things. You’ll have to learn a lot.”
“I love the place, Sir—I’m dead keen.”
“Yes, I remember you always wanted.... Of course I’ll put you into Starvecrow.”
“Starvecrow!”
“Don’t repeat my words. The Agent has always lived at Starvecrow, and there are quite enough of us here in the house. Besides there’s another thing. How old are you?”
“Thirty-six.”
“Time you married, ain’t it?”
“I suppose it is.”
“I was thirty, myself, when I married, but thirty-six is rather late. How is it you haven’t married earlier?”
“Oh, I dunno—the war I suppose.”
“The war seems to have had the opposite effect on most people. But my children don’t seem a marrying lot. Doris ... Hugh ... there’s Mary, of course, and George, but I don’t congratulate either of ’em. Julian’s a mean blackguard, and Rose——” Sir John defined Rose in terms most unsuitable to a clergyman’s wife.
“You really must think about it now,” he continued—“you’re the heir; and of course you know—we want money.”
Peter did not speak.
“We want money abominably,” said Sir John, “in fact I don’t know how we’re to carry on much longer without it. I don’t want to have to sell land—indeed, it’s practically impossible, all trussed up as we are. Starvecrow could go, of course, but it’s useful for grazing and timber.”
“You’re not thinking of selling Starvecrow?”
“I don’t want to—we’ve had it nearly two hundred years; it was the first farm that Giles Alard bought. But it’s also the only farm we’ve got in this district that isn’t tied—there’s a mortgage on the grazings down by the stream, but the house is free, with seventy acres.”
“It would be a shame to let it go.”
Peter was digging into the salt-cellar with his dessert knife.
“Well, I rely on you to help me keep it. Manage the estate well and marry money.”
“You’re damn cynical, Sir. Got any especial—er—money in your mind?”
“No, no—of course not. But you ought to get married at your age, and you might as well marry for the family’s advantage as well as your own.”
Peter was silent.
“Oh, I know there’s a lot to be said against getting married, but in your position—heir to a title and a big estate—it’s really a duty. I married directly my father died. But don’t you wait for that—you’re getting on.”
“But who am I to marry? There’s not such a lot of rich girls round here.”
“You’ll soon find one if you make up your mind to it. My plan is first make up your mind to get married and then look for the girl—not the other way round, which is what most men do, and leads to all kinds of trouble. Of course I know it isn’t always convenient. But what’s your special objection? Any entanglement? Don’t be afraid to tell me. I know there’s often a little woman in the way.”
Peter squirmed at his father’s Victorian ideas of dissipation with their “little women.” He’d be talking of “French dancers” next....
“I haven’t any entanglement, Sir.”
“Then you take my words to heart. I don’t ask you to marry for money, but marry where money is, as Shakespeare or somebody said.”
Peter found a refreshing solitude in the early hours of the next day. His mother and Doris breakfasted upstairs, his father had characteristically kept his promise to “be about tomorrow,” and had actually ridden out before Peter appeared in the morning room at nine. Jenny, who was a lazy young woman, did not come down till he had finished, and Gervase, in one of those spasms of eccentricity which made Peter sometimes a little ashamed of him, had gone without breakfast altogether, and driven off in the Ford lorry to fetch his luggage, sustained by an apple.
The morning room was full of early sunlight—dim as yet, for the mists were still rising from the Tillingham valley and shredding slowly into the sky. The woods and farms beyond the river were hidden in the same soft cloud. Peter opened the window, and felt the December rasp in the air. Oh, it was good to be back in this place, and one with it now, the heir.... No longer the second son who must live away from home and make his money in business.... He stifled the disloyalty to his dead brother. Poor old Hugh, who was so solemn and so solid and so upright.... But Hugh had never loved the place as he did—he had never been both transported and abased by his honour of inheritance.
As soon as he had eaten his breakfast Peter went out, at his heels a small brown spaniel, who for some reason had not gone with the other dogs after Sir John. They went down the garden, over the half melted frost of the sloping lawns, through the untidy shrubbery of fir, larch and laurel, to the wooden fence that shut off Conster from the marshes of the Tillingham. The river here had none of the pretensions with which it circled Rye, but was little more than a meadow-stream, rather full and angry with winter. Beyond it, just before the woods began, lay Beckley Furnace with its idle mill.
And away against the woods lay Starvecrow ... just as he had dreamed of it so many times in France, among the blasted fields. “Starvecrow”—he found himself repeating the name aloud, but not as it was written on the map, rather as it was written on the lips of the people to whom its spirit belong—“Starvycrow ... Starvycrow.”
It was a stone house built about the same time as Conster, but without the compliment to Gloriana implied in three gables. It lacked the grace of Conster—the grace both of its building and of its planting. It stood foursquare and forthright upon the slope, with a great descent of wavy, red-brown roof towards the mouth of the valley, a shelter from the winds that came up the Tillingham from the sea. It seemed preeminently a home, sheltered, secure, with a multitude of chimneys standing out against the background of the woods. From one of them rose a straight column of blue smoke, unwavering in the still, frost-thickened air.
Peter crossed the stream by the bridge, then turned up Starvecrow’s ancient drive. There was no garden, merely an orchard with a planting of flowers under the windows. Peter did not ring, but walked straight in at the side door. The estate office had for long years been at Starvecrow, a low farmhouse room in which the office furniture looked incongruous and upstart.
“I’ll change all this,” thought Peter to himself—I’ll have a gate-legged table and Jacobean chairs.
The room was empty, but the agents wife had heard him come in.
“That you, Mr. Alard? I thought you’d be over. Mr. Greening’s gone to Winterland this morning. They were complaining about their roof. He said he’d be back before lunch.”
Peter shook hands with Mrs. Greening and received rather abstractedly her congratulations on his return. He was wondering if she knew he was to supplant them at Starvecrow.
She did, for she referred to it the next minute, and to his relief did not seem to resent the change.
“We’re getting old people, and for some time I’ve been wanting to move into the town. It’ll be a good thing to have you here, Mr. Alard—bring all the tenants more in touch with the family. Not that Sir John doesn’t do a really amazing amount of work....”
She rambled on, then suddenly apologised for having to leave him—a grandchild staying in the house was ill.
“Shall you wait for Mr. Greening? I’m afraid he won’t be in for an hour at least.”
“I’ll wait for a bit anyway. I’ve some letters to write.”
He went into the office and sat down. The big ugly rolltop desk was littered with papers—memoranda, bills, estimates, plans of farms, lists of stock-prices. He cleared a space, seized a couple of sheets of the estate note-paper, and began to write.
“My loveliest Stella,” he wrote.
He had nearly covered the two sheets when the rattle of a car sounded in the drive below. He looked up eagerly and went to the window, but it was only Gervase lurching over the ruts in the Ford, just scraping past the wall as he swung round outside the house, just avoiding a collision with an outstanding poplar, after the usual manner of his driving.
The next minute he was in the office.
“Hullo! They told me you were over here. I’ve just fetched my luggage from Robertsbridge.”
He sat down on the writing-table and lit a cigarette. Peter hastily covered up his letter. Why did Gervase come bothering him now?
“I wanted to speak to you,” continued his brother. “You’ll be the best one to back me up against Father.”
“What is it now?” asked Peter discouragingly.
“An idea came to me while I was driving over. I often get ideas when I drive, and this struck me as rather a good one. I think it would be just waste for me to go to a crammer’s and then to Oxford. I don’t want to go in for the church or the bar or schoolmastering or anything like that, and I don’t see why the family should drop thousands on my education just because I happen to be an Alard. I want to go in for engineering in some way and you don’t need any ’Varsity for that. I could go into some sort of a shop....”
“Well, if the way you drive a car is any indication——”
“I can drive perfectly well when I think about it. Besides, that won’t be my job. I want to learn something in the way of construction and all that. I always was keen, and it strikes me now that I’d much better go in for that sort of thing than something which won’t pay for years. There may be some sort of a premium to fork out, but it’ll be nothing compared to what it would cost to send me to Oxford.”
“You talk as if we were paupers,” growled Peter.
“Well, so we are, aren’t we?” said Gervase brightly. “Jenny was talking to me about it last night. She says we pay thousands a year in interest on mortgages, and as for paying them off and selling the land, which is the only thing that can help us....”
“I don’t see that it’s your job, anyway.”
“But I could help. Really it seems a silly waste to send me to Oxford when I don’t want to go.”
“You need Oxford more than any man I know. If you went there you might pick up some notions of what’s done, and get more like other people.”
“I shouldn’t get more like other people, only more like other Oxford men.”
Peter scowled. He intensely disapproved of the kid’s verbal nimbleness, which his more weighty, more reputable argument could only lumber after.
“You’ve got to remember you’re a gentleman’s son,” he remarked in a voice which suggested sitting down just as Gervase’s had suggested a skip and a jump.
“Well, lots of them go in for engineering. We’re in such a groove. I daresay you think this is just a sudden idea of mine——”
“You’ve just told me it is.”
“I know, but I’ve been thinking for ages that I didn’t want to go to Oxford. If I took up engineering I could go into a shop at Ashford.... But I’ll have to talk to Father about it. I expect he’ll be frightfully upset—the only Alard who hasn’t been to the Varsity and all that ... but, on the other hand, he’s never bothered about me so much as about you and George, because there’s no chance of my coming into the estate.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure,” gibed Peter.
“Yes, of course, you might both die just to spite me—but it wouldn’t be sporting of you. I don’t want to be Sir Gervase Alard, Bart.—I’d much rather be Alard and Co., Motor-engineers.”
“You damn well shan’t be that.”
“Well, it’s a long time ahead, anyway. But do back me up against Father about not going to Oxford. It really ought to help us a lot if I don’t go—a son at the ’Varsity’s a dreadful expense, and when that son’s me, it’s a waste into the bargain.”
“Well, I’ll see about it. My idea is that you need Oxford more than—hullo, who’s that?”
“Dr. Mount,” said Gervase looking out of the window.
Peter rose and looked out too, in time to see the doctor’s car turning in the sweep. This morning he himself was not at the wheel, but was driven by what looked like a warm bundle of furs with a pair of bright eyes looking out between collar and cap.
Peter opened the window.
“Stella!” he cried.
A minute later Stella Mount was in the room. Gervase had not seen her for several years; during the greater part of the war she had been away from home, first at a munition factory, then as an auxiliary driver to the Army Service Corps. When last they had met the gulf between the schoolboy of fourteen and the girl of twenty had yawned much wider than between the youth of eighteen and the young woman of twenty-four. Stella looked, if anything, younger than she had looked four years ago, and he was also of an age to appreciate her beauty which he had scarcely noticed on the earlier occasions.
In strict point of fact Stella was not so much beautiful as pretty, for there was nothing classic in her little heart-shaped face, with its wide cheek-bones, pointed chin and puckish nose. On the other hand there was nothing of that fragile, conventional quality which prettiness is understood to mean. Everything about Stella was healthy, warm and living—her plump little figure, the glow on her cheeks, the shine of her grey eyes between their lashes, like pools among reeds, the decision of her chin and brows, the glossy, tumbling masses of her hair, all spoke of strength and vigour, a health that was almost hardy.
She came into the room like a flame, and Gervase felt his heart warming. Then he remembered that she was Peter’s—Jenny had said so, though she had not blessed Peter’s possession.
“How d’you do, Stella?” he said, “it’s ages since we met. Do you know who I am?”
“Of course I do. You haven’t altered much, except in height. You’ve left Winchester for good now, haven’t you?”
“Yes—and I’ve just been arguing with Peter about what I’m to do with myself now I’m home.”
“How very practical of you! I hope Peter was helpful.”
“Not in the least.”
He could feel Peter’s eyes upon him, telling him to get out of the way and leave him alone with his bright flame....
“Well, I must push off—they may be wanting the Ford at home.”
He shook hands with Stella, nodded to Peter, and went out.
For a moment Peter and Stella faced each other in silence. Then Peter came slowly up to her and took her in his arms, hiding his face in her neck.
“O Stella—O my beauty!...”
She did not speak, but her arms crept round him. They could scarcely meet behind his broad back—she loved this feeling of girth which she could not compass, combined as it was with a queer tender sense of his helplessness, of his dependence on her——
“O Peter,” she whispered—“my little Peter....”
“I was writing to you, darling, when you came.”
“And I was on my way to see you at Conster. Father was going there after he’d called on little Joey Greening. I wouldn’t come yesterday—I thought your family would be all over you, and I didn’t like....”
She broke off the sentence and he made no effort to trim the ragged end. Her reference to his family brought back into his thoughts the conversation he had had with his father over the wine. She had always felt his family as a cloud, as a barrier between them, and it would be difficult to tell her that now he was the heir, now he was home from the war, instead of being removed the cloud would be heavier and the barrier stronger.
“I’m so glad you came here”—he breathed into her hair—“that our first meeting’s at Starvecrow.”
“Yes—I’m glad, too.”
Peter sat down in the leather-covered office chair, holding Stella on his knee.
“Child—they’re going to give me Starvecrow.”
“O Peter!”...
“Yes—Greening wants to leave, and my father’s making me agent in his place.”
“How lovely! Shall you come and live here?”
“Yes.”
The monosyllable came gruffly because of the much more that he wanted to say. It was a shame to have such reserves spoil their first meeting.
“I’m so awfully, wonderfully glad, Peter darling.”
She hid her soft, glowing face in his neck—she was lying on his breast like a child, but deliciously heavy, her feet swung off the floor.
“Stella—my sweetheart—beautiful....”
His love for her gave him a sweet wildness of heart, and he who was usually slow of tongue, became almost voluble——
“Oh, I’ve longed for this—I’ve thought of this, dreamed of this.... And you’re lovelier than ever, you dear.... Stella, sweetheart, let me look into your eyes—close to—like that ... your eyelashes turn back like the petals of a flower.... O you wonderful, beautiful thing ... And it’s so lovely we should have met here instead of at home—the dearest person in the dearest place ... Stella at Starvecrow.”
“Starvycrow,” she repeated gently.
For a moment he felt almost angry that she should have used his name—his private music. But his anger melted into his love. She used his name because she, alone in all the world, felt his feelings and thought his thoughts. Perhaps she did not love Starvecrow quite as he did, but she must love it very nearly as much or she would not call it by its secret name. They sat in silence, her head upon his shoulder, his arms about her, gathering her up on his knees. On the hearth a log fire softly hummed and sighed. Ages seemed to flow over them, the swift eternities of love.... Then suddenly a voice called “Stella!” from the drive.
She started up, and the next moment was on her feet, pushing away her hair under her cap, buttoning her high collar over her chin.
“How quick Father’s been! I feel as if I’d only just come.”
“You must come again.”
“I’m coming to dinner on Christmas day, you know.”
“That doesn’t count. I want you here.”
“And I want to be here with you—always.”
The last word was murmured against his lips as he kissed her at the door. He was not quite sure if he had heard it. During the rest of the morning he sometimes feared not—sometimes hoped not.
“It will be a green Christmas,” said Dr. Mount.
Stella made no answer. The little car sped through the lanes at the back of Benenden. They had driven far—to the very edge of the doctor’s wide-flung practice, by Hawkhurst and Skullsgate, beyond the Kent Ditch. They had called at both the Nineveh farms—Great Nineveh and Little Nineveh—and had now turned south again. The delicate blue sky was drifted over with low pinkish clouds, which seemed to sail very close to the field where their shadows moved; the shadows swooped down the lane with the little car, rushing before it into Sussex. Stella loved racing the sky.
On her face, on her neck, she could still feel cold places where Peter had kissed her. It was wonderful and beautiful, she thought, that she should carry the ghosts of his kisses through Sussex and Kent. And now she would not have so long to be content with ghosts—there would not be those terrible intervals of separation. She would see Peter again soon, and the time would come—must come—when they would be together always. “Together always” was the fulfilment of Stella’s dream. “They married and were together always” sounded better in her ears than “they married and lived happy ever after.” No more partings, no more ghosts of kisses, much as she loved those ghosts, but always the dear, warm bodily presence—Peter working, Peter resting, Peter sleepy, Peter hungry, Peter talking, Peter silent—Peter always.
“It will be a green Christmas,” repeated Dr. Mount.
“Er—did you speak, Father dear?”
“Yes, I said it would be a gr——but never mind, I’m sure your thoughts are more interesting than anything I could say.”
Stella blushed. She and her father had a convention of silence between them in regard to Peter. He knew all about him, of course, but they both pretended that he didn’t; because Stella felt she had no right to tell him until Peter had definitely asked her to be his wife. And he had not asked her yet. When they had first fallen in love, Hugh Alard was still alive and the second son’s prospects were uncertain; then when Hugh was killed and Peter became the heir, there was still the war, and she knew that her stolid, Saxon Peter disapproved of war-weddings and grass widows who so often became widows indeed. He had told her then he could not marry her till after the war, and she had treated that negative statement as the beginning of troth between them. She had never questioned or pressed him—it was not her way—she had simply taken him for granted. She had felt that he could not, any more than she, be satisfied with less than “together always.”
But now she felt that something definite must happen soon, and their tacit understanding become open and glorious. His family would disapprove, she knew, though they liked her personally and owed a great deal to her father. But Stella, outside and unaware, made light of Conster’s opposition. Peter was thirty-six and had five hundred a year of his own, so in her opinion could afford to snap his fingers at Alard tyranny. Besides, she felt sure the family would “come round”—they would be disappointed at first, but naturally they wouldn’t expect Peter to give up his love-choice simply because she had no money. She would be glad when things were open and acknowledged, for though her secret was a very dear one, she was sometimes worried by her own shifts to keep it, and hurt by Peter’s. It hurt her that he should have to pretend not to care about her when they met in public—but not so much as it would have hurt her if he hadn’t done it so badly.
“Well, now he’s back, I suppose Peter will take the eldest son’s place,” said Dr. Mount, “and help his father manage the property.”
“Yes—he told me this morning that Sir John wants him to be agent instead of Mr. Greening, and he’s to live at Starvecrow.”
“At Starvecrow! You’ll like that—I mean, it’s nice to think Peter won’t have to go back and work in London. I always felt he belonged here more than Hugh.”
“Yes, I don’t think Hugh cared for the place very much, but Peter always did. It always seemed hard lines that he should be the second son.”
“Poor Hugh,” said Dr. Mount—“he was very like Peter in many ways—Sober and solid and kind-hearted; but he hadn’t Peter’s imagination.”
“Peter’s very sensitive,” said Stella—“in spite of his being such a big, heavy thing.”
Then she smiled, and said in her heart—“Peter’s mine.”
Christmas was celebrated at Conster in the manner peculiar to houses where there is no religion and no child. Tradition compelled the various members of the family to give each other presents which they did not want and to eat more food than was good for them; it also compelled them to pack unwillingly into the Wolsey car and drive to Leasan church, where they listened in quite comprehensible boredom to a sermon by brother George. Peter was able to break free from this last superstition, and took himself off to the office at Starvecrow—his family’s vague feeling of unrest at his defection being compensated by the thought that there really wouldn’t have been room for him in the car.
But Starvecrow was dim and sodden on this green Christmas day, full of a muggy cloud drifting up from the Tillingham, and Peter was still sore from the amenities of the Christmas breakfast table—that ghastly effort to be festive because it was Christmas morning, that farce of exchanging presents—all those empty rites of a lost childhood and a lost faith. He hated Christmas.
Also he wanted Stella, and she was not to be had. She too had gone to church—which he would not have minded, if she had not had the alternative of being with him here at Starvecrow. He did not at all object to religion in women as long as they kept it in its proper place. But Stella did not keep hers in its proper place—she let it interfere with her daily life—with his ... and she had not gone to church at Leasan, which was sanctified to Peter by the family patronage and the family vault, but to Vinehall, where they did not even have the decencies of Dearly Beloved Brethren, but embarrassing mysteries which he felt instinctively to be childish and in bad taste.
In Stella’s home this Christmas there would be both religion and children, the latter being represented by her father and herself. Last night when he called at Hollingrove—Dr. Mount’s cottage on the road between Leasan and Vinehall—to ask her to meet him here today at Starvecrow, he had found her decorating a Christmas tree, to be put in the church, of all places. She had asked him to stop and go with her and her father to the Midnight Mass—“Do come, Peter—we’re going to make such a lovely noise at the Gloria in Excelsis. Father Luce has given the boys trays to bang this year.” But Peter had declined, partly because he disapproved of tray-banging as a means of giving glory to God, but mostly because he was hurt that Stella should prefer going to church to being with him at Starvecrow.
She had made a grave mistake, if only she’d known it—leaving him here by himself today, with his time free to think about her, and memories of her dark side still fresh in his mind. For Stella had her dark side, like the moon, though generally you saw as little of it as the moon’s. In nearly all ways she was Peter’s satisfaction. He loved her with body and mind, indeed with a sort of spiritual yearning. He loved her for her beauty, her sense, her warmth, her affectionate disposition which expressed itself naturally in love, her freedom from affectation, and also from any pretensions to wit or cleverness, and other things which he distrusted. But for two things he loved her not—her religion and her attitude towards his family.
Hitherto neither had troubled him much. Their meetings had been so few that they had had but little talk of anything save love. He had merely realised that though she held the country round Vinehall and Leasan as dear as even his idolatry demanded she was very little impressed with the importance of the family to whom that country belonged. But up in London that had scarcely mattered. He had also realised that Stella, as she put it, “tried to be good.” At first he had thought her wanton—her ready reception of his advances, her ardent affection, her unguarded manner, had made him think she was like the many young women filling London in those years, escaped from quiet homes into a new atmosphere of freedom and amorousness, making the most of what might be short-lived opportunities. But he was glad when he discovered his mistake. Peter approved of virtue in women, though he had occasionally taken advantage of its absence. He certainly would never have married a woman who was not virtuous, and he soon discovered that he wanted to marry Stella.
But in those days everything flowed like a stream—nothing was firm, nothing stood still. Things were different now—they could flow no longer, they must be established; it was now that Peter realised how much greater these two drawbacks were than they had seemed at first. Stella’s religion did not consist merely in preserving his treasure whole till he was ready to claim it, but in queer ways of denial and squander, exacting laws, embarrassing consecrations. And her attitude towards the family gave him almost a feeling of insult—she was so casual, so unaware ... she did not seem to trouble herself with its requirements and prohibitions. She did not seem to realise that the House of Alard was the biggest thing on earth—so big that it could crush her and Peter, their hope and romance, into dust. But she would soon find out what it was—whether they married or not, she would find out.
Sometimes—for instance, today—he was almost savagely glad when he thought how sure she was to find out. Sometimes he was angry with her for her attitude towards the family, and for all that she took for granted in his. He knew that she expected him to marry her whatever happened—with a naïvety which occasionally charmed but more often irritated him. She imagined that if his father refused to let them live at Starvecrow, he would take her and live with her in some cottage on five hundred a year ... and watch the place go to ruin without him. She would be sorry not to have Starvecrow, but she would not care about anything else—she would not fret in the least about the estate or the outraged feelings of those who looked to him to help them. She would not even have cared if his father had had it in his power—which he had not—to prevent her ever becoming Lady Alard. Stella did not care two pins about being Lady Alard—all she wanted was to be Mrs. Peter. He had loved her for her disinterestedness, but now he realised that it had its drawbacks. He saw that his choice had fallen on a woman who was not a good choice for Alard—not merely because she had no money, but because she had no pride. He could not picture her at Conster—lady of the Manor. He could picture her at Starvecrow, but not at Conster.
... He bowed his head upon the table—it felt heavy with his thought. Stella was the sweetest, loveliest thing in life, and sometimes he felt that her winning was worth any sacrifice, and that he would pay her price not only with his own renunciation but with all the hopes of his house. But some unmovable, fundamental part of him showed her to him as an infatuation, a witch-light, leading him away from the just claims of his people and his land, urging him to a cruel betrayal of those who trusted to him for rescue.
After all, he had known her only a year. In a sense, of course, he had known her from her childhood, when she had first come with her father to Vinehall, but he had not loved her till he had met her in London a year ago. Only a year.... To Peter’s conservative soul a year was nothing. For nearly two hundred years the Alards had owned Starvecrow—and they had been at Conster for three hundred more. Was he going to sacrifice those century-old associations for the passion of a short year? He had loved her only a year, and these places he had loved all his life—and not his life only, but the lives of those who had come before him, forefathers whose spirit lived in him, with love for the land which was his and theirs.
The Christmas tension at the Manor was relieved at dinnertime by the arrival of George Alard and his wife, Dr. Mount and Stella, and a young man supposed to be in love with Jenny. A family newly settled at the Furnace had also been invited and though it had always been the custom at Conster to invite one or two outside people to the Christmas dinner, Rose Alard considered that this year’s hospitality had gone too far.
“It’s all very well to have Dr. Mount and Stella,” she said to Doris, “but who are these Hursts? They haven’t been at the Furnace six months.”
“They’re very rich, I believe,” said Doris.
“They may be—but no one knows how they made their money. I expect it was in trade,” and Rose sniffed, as if she smelt it.
“There’s a young man, I think; perhaps he’ll marry Jenny—he’s too young for me.”
“But Jenny’s engaged to Jim Parish, isn’t she?”
“Not that it counts—he hasn’t got a bean, or any prospects either. We don’t talk of them as engaged.”
“Is she in love with him?”
“How can I possibly tell?” snapped Doris, who had had a trying afternoon with her mother, and had also been given “The Christian Year” for the second time as a present from Rose.
“Well, don’t bite my head off. I’m sure I hope she isn’t, and that she’ll captivate this young Hurst, whoever he is. Then it won’t be so bad having them here, though otherwise I should feel inclined to protest; for poor George is worn out after four services and two sermons, and it’s rather hard to expect him to talk to strangers—especially on Christmas day.”
Doris swallowed her resentment audibly—she would not condescend to quarrel with Rose, whom she looked upon much as Rose herself looked upon the Hursts, George having married rather meanly in the suburb of his first curacy.
When the Hursts arrived, they consisted of agreeable, vulgar parents, a smart, modern-looking daughter and a good-looking son. Unfortunately, the son was soon deprived of his excuse as a possible husband for Jenny by his mother’s ready reference to “Billy’s feeonsay”—but it struck both Rose and Doris separately and simultaneously that it would do just as well if the daughter Dolly married Peter. She really was an extraordinarily attractive girl, with her thick golden hair cut square upon her ears like a mediæval page’s. She was clever, too—had read all the new books and even met some of the new authors. Never, thought Rose and Doris, had wealth been so attractively baited or “trade” been so effectively disguised. It was a pity Peter was in such bad form tonight, sitting there beside her, half-silent, almost sullen.
Peter knew that Dolly Hurst was attractive, he knew that she was clever, he knew that she was rich, he knew that she had come out of the gutter—and he guessed that his people had asked her to Conster tonight in hopes that through him her riches might save the house of Alard. All this knowledge crowned by such a guess had the effect of striking him dumb, and by the time Wills and the footmen had ushered in with much ceremony a huge, burnt turkey, his neighbour had almost entirely given up her efforts to “draw him out,” and had turned in despair to George Alard on her right.
Peter sat gazing unhappily at Stella. She was next to Gervase, and was evidently amusing him, to judge by the laughter which came across the table. That was so like Stella ... she could always make you laugh. She wasn’t a bit clever, but she saw and said things in a funny way. She was looking devilish pretty tonight, too—her hair was done in such a pretty way, low over her forehead and ears, and her little head was round and shining like a bun ... the little darling ... and how well that blue frock became her—showing her dear, lovely neck ... yes, he thought he’d seen it before, but it looked as good as new. Stella was never tumbled—except just after he had kissed her ... the little sweet.
He was reacting from his thoughts of her that morning—he felt a little ashamed of them. After all, why shouldn’t she have gone to church if she wanted to? Wasn’t it better than having no religion at all, like many of the hard young women of his class who shocked his war-born agnosticism with theirs?—or than having a religion which involved the whole solar system and a diet of nuts? And as for her treatment of his family—surely her indifference was better than the eager subservience more usually found—reverence for a title, an estate, and a place in the charmed exclusiveness of the “County.” No, he would be a fool if he sacrificed Stella for any person or thing whatsoever. He had her to consider, too. She loved him, and he knew that, though no troth had yet passed between them, she considered herself bound to the future. What would she say if she knew he did not consider himself so bound?... Well, he must bind himself—or let her go free.
He longed to talk to her, but his opportunity dragged. To his restlessness it seemed as if the others were trying to keep them apart. There was Gervase, silly fool, going out with the women as usual and sitting beside her in the drawing-room—there was George, sillier fool, keeping the men back in the dining-room while he told Mr. Hurst exactly why he had not gone for an army chaplain. Then directly they had joined the ladies, both Doris and Rose shot up simultaneously from beside Dolly Hurst and disposed of themselves one beside Lady Alard, the other beside Stella. He had to sit down and try again to be intelligent. It was worse than ever, for he was watching all the time for Miss Hurst to empty her coffee-cup—then he would go and put it down on the Sheraton table, which was not so far from Stella, and after that he would sit down beside Stella no matter how aggressively Rose was sitting on her other side.
The coffee-cup was emptied in the middle of a discussion on the relative reputations of Wells and Galsworthy. Peter immediately forgot what he was saying....
“Let me put your cup down for you.”
He did not wait for a reply, but the next minute he was on the other side of the room. He realised that he had been incredibly silly and rude, but it was too late to atone, for Jim Parish, Jenny’s ineligible young man, had sat down in the chair he had left.
Stella was talking to Rose, but she turned round when Peter came up and made room beside her on the sofa. Rose felt annoyed—she thought Stella’s manner was “encouraging,” and began to say something about the sofa being too cramped for three. However, at that moment Lady Alard called her to come and hear about Mrs. Hurst’s experiences in London on Armistice Day, and she had regretfully to leave the two ineligibles together, with the further complication that the third ineligible was sitting beside Dolly Hurst—and though Jim Parish was supposed to be in love with Jenny, everyone knew he was just as much in need of a rich wife as Peter.
“Stella,” said Peter in a low voice—“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry! What for, my dear?”
He realised that of course she did not know what he had been thinking of her that morning.
“Everything,” he mumbled, apologizing vaguely for the future as well as the past.
Stella had thought that perhaps this evening “something would happen.” At Conster—on Christmas night ... the combination seemed imperative. But Peter did not, as she had hoped, draw her out of that crowded, overheated room into some quiet corner of the house or under the cold, dark curtains of the night. Peter could not quite decide against the family—he must give it time to plead. He leaned back on the sofa, his eyes half-closed, tired and silent, yet with a curious peace at his heart.
“You’re tired, boy,” said Stella—“what have you been doing today?”
“I’ve had a hateful day—and I was tired—dog tired; but I’m not tired any longer now—now I’m with you.”
“Oh, Peter, am I restful?”
“Yes, my dear.”
Stella was satisfied. She felt that was enough—she did not ask anything more of the night.
It was Gervase, not Peter, who lay awake that night, thinking of Stella Mount. He had been glad when he was told to take her in to dinner, and the meal which had been so unspeakably trying to his brother had passed delightfully for him. On his other side sat Doris, deep in conversation with Charles Hurst, so he did not have to bother about her—he could talk to Stella, who was so easy to talk to....
Afterwards in the drawing-room he had not felt so easy. He knew that he must not monopolise Stella, for she was Peter’s. So when he heard the men crossing the hall, he made some excuse and left her, to see Rose sit down by her side directly Peter came in. He was glad when poor old Peter had managed to get near her at last ... though he hadn’t seemed to make much of his opportunities. He had sat beside her, stupid and silent, scarcely speaking a word all the evening through.
Upstairs in bed, in his little misshapen room under the north gable, where he had slept ever since the night-nursery was given up, Gervase shut his eyes and thought of Stella. She came before the darkness of his closed eyes in her shining blue dress—a dress like midnight.... She was the first woman he had really noticed since in far-back childish days he had had an infatuation for his rather dull daily governess—his “beautiful Miss Turner” as he had called her and thought of her still.... But Stella was different—she was less of a cloud and a goddess, more of a breathing person. He wondered—was he falling in love? It was silly to fall in love with Stella, who was six years older than he ... though people said that when boys fell in love it was generally with women older than themselves. But he mustn’t do it. Stella was Peter’s.... Was she?... Or was it merely true that he wanted to take her and she wanted to be taken?
He did not think there was any engagement, any promise. Circumstances might finally keep them apart. Rose, Doris, Jenny, his father and mother—the whole family—did not want Peter to marry Stella Mount whose face was her fortune. It was the same everlasting need of money that was making the same people, except Jenny of course, shrug at poor Jim Parish, whose people in their turn shrugged at portionless Jenny. Money—money ... that was what the Squires wanted—what they must have if their names were to remain in the old places.
Gervase felt rather angry with Peter. He was angry to think that he who had the power was divided as to the will. How was it possible that he could stumble at such a choice? What was money, position, land or inheritance compared to simple, solid happiness?... He buried his face in the pillow, and a kind of horror seized him at the cruel ways of things. It was as if a bogey was in the room—the kind that used to be there when he was a child, but no longer visible in the heeling shadows round the nightlight, rather an invisible sickness, the fetish of the Alards dancing in triumph over Stella and Peter.
It was strange that he should be so hurt by what was after all not his tragedy—he was not really in love with Stella, only felt that, given freedom for her and a few more years for him, he could have been and would have been. And he was not so much hurt as frightened. He was afraid because life seemed to him at once so trivial and so gross. The things over which people agonised were, after all, small shoddy things—earth and halfpence; to see them have such power to crush hopes and deform lives was like seeing a noble tree eaten up by insects. In time he too would be eaten up ... No, no! He must save himself, somehow. He must find happiness somewhere. But how?
When he tried to think, he was afraid. He remembered what he used to do in the old days when he was so dreadfully afraid in this room. He used to draw up his knees to his chin and pray—pray frantically in his fear. That was before he had heard about the Ninety-nine Just Sheep being left for the one that was lost; directly he had heard that story he had given up saying his prayers, for fear he should be a Just Sheep, when he would so much rather be the lost one, because the shepherd loved it and had carried it in his arms.... He must have been a queer sort of kid. Now all that was gone—religion ... the school chapel, confirmation classes, manly Christians, the Bishop’s sleeves ... he could scarcely realise those dim delicate raptures he had had as a child—his passionate interest in that dear Friend and God walking the earth ... all the wonderful things he had pondered in his heart. Religion was so different after you were grown up. It became an affair of earth and halfpence like everything else.
Stella’s religion still seemed to have some colour left in it, some life, some youth. It was more like his childhood’s faith than anything he had met so far. She had told him tonight that there were two Christmas trees in church, one each side of the Altar, all bright with the glass balls and birds that had made his childhood’s Christmas trees seem almost supernatural.... Yggdrasils decked for the eternal Yule ... he was falling asleep.... He was sorry for Stella. She had told him too about the Christmas Crib, the little straw house she had built in the church for Mary and Joseph and the Baby, for the ox and the ass and the shepherds and their dogs and the lambs they could not leave behind.... She had told him that she never thought of Christ as being born in Bethlehem, but in the barn at the back of the Plough Inn at Udimore.... He saw the long road running into the sunrise, wet and shining, red with an angry morning. Someone was coming along it carrying a lamb ... was it the lost sheep—or just one of the lambs the shepherds could not leave behind? ... all along the road the trees were hung with glass balls and many-coloured birds. He could feel Stella beside him, though he could not see her. She was trying to make him come with her to the inn. She was saying “Come, Peter—oh, do come, Peter,” and he seemed to be Peter going with her. Then suddenly he knew he was not Peter, and the earth roared and the trees flew up into the sky, which shook and flamed.... He must be falling asleep.
Gervase’s feelings towards Alard being what they were, anybody might wonder he should think of giving up Oxford for the family’s sake. Indeed, he almost changed his mind in the throes of that wakeful, resentful night, and resolved to take his expensive way to Christ’s or Balliol. But by morning he had come to see himself more clearly and to laugh at his own pretences. He wasn’t “giving up” Oxford—he didn’t want to go there—he had always shrunk from the thought of Oxford life with its patterns and conventions—and then at the end of it he would still be his father’s youngest son, drawing a youngest son’s allowance from depleted coffers. He would far rather learn his job as an engineer and win an early independence. Going to his work every morning, meeting all sorts of men, rough and smooth, no longer feeling irrevocably shut up in a class, a cult, a tradition ... in that way he might really win freedom and defy the house of Alard. “My name’s Gervase Alard,” he said to himself—“and I’m damned if Gervase shall be sacrificed to Alard, for he’s the most important of the two.”
If only he could persuade his father to see as he saw—not quite, of course, but near enough to let him make a start. Peter had not seen very well, still he had nearly agreed when the argument was broken up. Sir John must be found in a propitious hour.
The next day provided none such, for Christmas had not unexpectedly brought a return of the Squire’s twinges, but these passed off with unusual quickness, and on Innocents’ Day his indomitable pluck mounted him once again on his grey horse to ride round the farms. Gervase found him finishing his breakfast when he came down for his own, and seeing by whip and gaiters what was planned, he realised that a favourable time had come. So he rushed into his request while he was helping himself to bacon.
To his surprise his father heard him without interruption.
“Have you any bent for engineering?” he asked at the end.
“Oh, yes, Sir. I can drive any sort of car and mess about with their insides. I always was keen.”
“You’ve been keen on a good many things if I remember right, but not always proficient. All my sons have been to Oxford.”
“But think what a lot it ’ud cost you, Sir, to send me.”
“I expect it ’ud cost me nearly as much to make an engineer of you.”
“Oh, no, Sir—you’ll only have to plank down about a hundred to start with, and in time they’ll pay me some sort of a screw. And if I go into a shop at Ashford I can live at home and cost you nothing.”
“You think you’ll cost nothing to keep at home? What ull you live on, you damned fool?”
“Oh, relatively I meant, Sir. And if I get, say, fifteen bob a week, as I shall in time....”
“It’ll be a proud day for me, of course.”
“Things have changed since the war, and lots of chaps who’d have gone up to the ’Varsity now go straight into works—there’s Hugh’s friend, Tom Daubernon, opened a garage at Colchester....”
“That will be your ambition in life—to open a garage?”
“No, Sir—Alard and Co., motor-engineers and armament makers—that’s my job, and not so bad either. Think of Krupps.”
Sir John laughed half angrily.
“You impudent rascal! Have it your own way—after all, it’ll suit me better to pay down a hundred for you to cover yourself with oil and grease than a thousand for you to get drunk two nights a week at Oxford” ... a remark which affected Gervase in much the same way as the remark on “little women” had affected Peter.
The conversation was given a more romantic colour when Sir John retailed it to Peter on the edge of the big ploughed field by Glasseye Farm. Peter was going out after duck on the Tillingham marshes—he had that particularly solitary look of a man who is out alone with a gun.
“I must say I think the boy has behaved extremely well,” said his father—“it must have cost him a lot to give up Oxford. He thinks more of our position than I imagined.”
“I don’t see that it’ll add much to the dignity of our position to have him in a workshop.”
“It mayn’t add much to our dignity—but he’s only the youngest son. And what we want more than dignity is money.”
“Gervase giving up Oxford won’t save you more than a few hundred, and what’s that when it’ll take fifty thousand to pay off the mortgages?”
“You’re a sulky dog, Peter,” said Sir John. “If you’d only do as well as your brother, perhaps you could pull us out of this.”
“What d’you mean, Sir?”
“Gervase has done his best and given up the only thing he had to give up—Oxford. If you could sink your personal wishes for the family’s sake....”
Peter turned crimson and his pale Saxon eyes darkened curiously.
“D’you know what I mean?” continued his father.
“You mean marry a rich woman ... you want me to marry Dolly Hurst.”
For a moment Sir John was silent, then he said in an unexpectedly controlled voice——
“Well, what’s wrong with Dolly Hurst?”
“Nothing that I know of ... but then I know nothing ... and I don’t care.”
“I’m told,” continued the baronet, still calmly, “that you have already formed an attachment.”
“Who told you?”
“Never mind who. The point is, I understand there is such an attachment.”
Peter sought for words and found none. While he was still seeking, Sir John shook the reins, and the grey horse moved off heavily up the side of the field.
On the spur of the hill below Barline stands that queer edifice known as Mocksteeple. It has from the distance a decided look of a steeple, its tarred cone being visible for many miles down the river Tillingham. It was built early in the eighteenth century by an eccentric Sir Giles Alard, brother of non-juring Gervase and buyer of Starvecrow. A man of gallantries, he required a spot at which to meet his lady friends, and raised up Mocksteeple for their accommodation—displaying a fine cynicism both towards the neighbours’ opinion—for his tryst was a landmark to all the district—and towards the ladies themselves, whose comforts could have been but meagrely supplied in its bare, funnel-shaped interior.
Today it had sunk to a store-house and was full of hop-poles when Peter approached it from the marshes and sat down to eat his sandwiches in the sunshine that, even on a December day, had power to draw a smell of tar from its walls. At his feet squatted the spaniel Breezy, with sentimental eyes fixed on Peter’s gun and the brace of duck that lay beside it. Peter’s boots and leggings were caked with mud, and his hands were cold as they fumbled with his sandwiches. It was not a good day to have lunch out of doors, even in that tar-smelling sunshine, but anything was better than facing the family round the table at Conster—their questions, their comments, their inane remarks....
It was queer how individually and separately his family irritated him, whereas collectively they were terrible with banners. His father, his mother, Doris, Jenny, George, Gervase—so much tyranny, so much annoyance ... the Family—a war-cry, a consecration. It was probably because the Family did not merely stand for those at Conster now, but for Alards dead and gone, from the first Gervase to the last, a whole communion of saints.... If Conster had to be sold, or stripped to its bare bones, it would not be only the family now sitting at luncheon that would rise and upbraid him, but all those who slept in Leasan churchyard and in the south aisle at Winchelsea.
Beside him, facing them all, would stand only one small woman. Would her presence be enough to support him when all those forefathers were dishonoured, all those dear places reproached him?—Glasseye, Barline, Dinglesden, Snailham, Ellenwhorne, Starvecrow ... torn away from the central heart and become separate spoil ... just for Stella, whom he had loved only a year.
Leaning against the wall of the Mocksteeple, Peter seemed to hear the voice of the old ruffian who had built it speaking to him out of the tar—deriding him because he would take love for life and house it in a Manor, whereas love is best when taken for a week and housed in any convenient spot. But Peter had never been able to take love for a week. Even when he had had adventures he had taken them seriously—those independent, experience-hunting young women of his own class who had filled the place in his life which “little women” and “French dancers” had filled in his father’s. They had always found old Peter embarrassingly faithful when they changed their minds.
Now at last he had found love, true love, in which he could stay all his life—a shelter, a house, a home like Starvecrow. He would be a fool to renounce it—and there was Stella to be thought of too; he did not doubt her love for him, she would not change. Their friendship had started in the troublesome times of war and he had given her to understand that he could not marry till the war was over. Those unsettled conditions which had just the opposite effect on most men, making them jump into marriage, snatch their happiness from under the cannon wheels, had made Peter shrink from raising a permanent relation in the midst of so much chaos. Marriage, in his eyes, was settling down, a state to be entered into deliberately, with much background.... And Stella had agreed, with her lips at least, though what her heart had said was another matter.
But now the war was over, he was at home, the background was ready—she would expect.... Already he was conscious of a sharp sense of treachery. At the beginning of their love, Hugh had been alive and the Alard fortunes no direct concern of Peter’s—he had expected to go back into business and marry Stella on fifteen hundred a year. But ever since Hugh’s death he had realised that things would be different—and he had not told her. Naturally she would think his prospects improved—and he had not undeceived her, though on his last leave, nine months ago, he had guessed the bad way things were going.
He had not behaved well to her, and it was now his duty to put matters right at once, to tell her of his choice ... if he meant to choose.... Good God! he didn’t even know yet what he ought to do—even what he wanted to do. If he lost Stella he lost joy, warmth, laughter, love, the last of youth—if he lost Alard he lost the First and Last Things of his life, the very rock on which it stood. There was much in Stella which jarred him, which made him doubt the possibility of running in easy yoke with her, which made him fear that choosing her might lead to failure and regret. But also there was much in Alard which fell short of perfection—it had an awkward habit of splitting up into its component parts, into individuals, every separate one of which hurt and vexed. That way, too, might lead to emptiness. It seemed that whichever choice he made he failed somebody and ran the risk of a vain sacrifice.
But he must decide. He must not hold Stella now if he did not mean to hold her forever. He saw that. His choice must be made at once, for her sake, not in some dim, drifting future as he had at first imagined. He was not going to marry the Hurst girl—he almost hated her—and to marry a girl for her money was like prostitution, even though the money was to save not him but his. But if he was not going to marry Stella he must act immediately. He had no right to keep her half bound now that the time had come to take her entirely. Oh, Stella!...
Breezy the spaniel came walking over Peter’s legs, and licked his hands in which his face was hidden.
That night Peter wrote to Stella:—
My own dear—
I’ve been thinking about you all today—I’ve been thinking about you terribly. I took my gun out this morning after duck, but I had a rotten day because I was thinking of you all the time. I had lunch down by the Mocksteeple, and Stella, I wanted you so that I could have cried. Then afterwards when I was at home I wanted you. I went in to Lambard and we cut some pales, but all the time I was thinking of you. And now I can think no longer—I must write and tell you what I’ve thought.
Child, I want to marry you. You’ve known that for a long time, haven’t you? But I wanted to wait till the end of the war. I don’t believe in marrying a girl and then going out and getting killed, though that is what a lot of chaps did. Well, anyhow the war’s over. So will you marry me, Stella child? But I must tell you this. My people will be dead against it, because they’re looking to me to save the family by making a rich marriage. It sounds dreadful, but it’s not really so bad as it sounds, because if we don’t pick up somehow we shall probably go smash and lose almost everything, including Starvecrow. But I don’t care. I love you better than anything in the world. Only I must prepare you for having to marry me quietly somewhere and living with me in London for a bit. My father won’t have me as agent, I’m quite sure, if I do this, but perhaps he’ll come round after a time. Anyhow Stella, darling, if we have each other, the rest won’t matter, will it? What does it matter even if we have to sell our land and go out of Conster? They’ve got no real claim on me. Let Jenny marry somebody rich, or Doris—it’s not too late. But I don’t see why I should sacrifice my life to the family, and yours too, darling child. For I couldn’t do this if I didn’t believe that you love me as much as I love you.
I think this is the longest letter than I have ever written to you, but then it is so important. Dearest, we must meet and talk things over. The Greenings are going into Hastings on Tuesday to look at a house, so will you come to me at Starvecrow?
My kisses, you sweet, and all my love. PETER.
It was nearly midnight when he had finished writing at the table in his bedroom. He folded up the letter and slipped it under the blotting paper, before getting into bed and sleeping soundly.
But the next morning he tore it to pieces.
On the last day of the old year Mary Pembroke came down to Conster Manor, arriving expensively with a great deal of luggage. Her beauty was altogether of a more sophisticated kind than Jenny’s and more exotic than Doris’s—which, though at thirty-eight extinct in the realm of nature, still lived in the realm of art. Mary was thirty-one, tall and supple, with an arresting fineness about her, and a vibrant, ardent quality.
The family was a little restless as they surrounded her in the drawing-room at tea. She had that same element of unexpectedness as Gervase, but with the difference that Gervase was as yet raw and young and under control. Mary gave an impression of being more grown up than anyone, even than Lady Alard and Sir John; life with her was altogether a more acute affair.
Only Lady Alard enquired after the absent Julian.
“I wonder he didn’t come down with you,” she murmured. “I sent him a very special invitation.”
“Bah!” said Sir John.
“Why do you say ‘Bah,’ dear?”
“Doris, tell your mother why I said ‘Bah.’”
“Oh, Father, how do I know?”
“You must be very stupid, then. I give leave to any one of you to explain why I said ‘Bah,’” and Sir John stumped out of the room.
“Really, your father is impossible,” sighed Lady Alard.
Mary did not talk much—her tongue skimmed the surface of Christmas: the dances they had been to, the people they had had to dinner. She looked fagged and anxious—strung. At her first opportunity she went upstairs to take off her travelling clothes and dress for dinner. Of dressing and undressing Mary made always a lovely ceremony—very different from Jenny’s hasty scuffle and Doris’s veiled mysteries. She lingered over it as over a thing she loved; and Jenny loved to watch her—all the careful, charming details, the graceful acts and poses, the sweet scents. Mary moved like the priest of her own beauty, with her dressing table for altar and her maid for acolyte—the latter an olive-skinned French girl, who with a topknot of black hair gave a touch of chinoiserie to the proceedings.
When Mary had slipped off her travelling dress, and wrapped in a Mandarin’s coat of black and rose and gold, had let Gisèle unpin her hair, she sent the girl away.
“Je prendrai mon bain à sept heures—vous reviendrez.”
She leaned back in her armchair, her delicate bare ankles crossed, her feet in their brocade mules resting on the fender, and gazed into the fire. Jenny moved about the room for a few moments, looking at brushes and boxes and jars. She had always been more Mary’s friend than Doris, whose attitude had that peculiar savour of the elder, unmarried sister towards the younger married one. But Jenny with Mary was not the same as Jenny with Gervase—her youth easily took colour from its surroundings, and with Mary she was less frank, more hushed, more unquiet. When she had done looking at her things, she came and sat down opposite her on the other side of the fire.
“Well—how’s life?” asked Mary.
“Oh, pretty dull.”
“What, no excitements? How’s Jim?”
“Oh, just the same as usual. He hangs about, but he knows it’s no good, and so do I—and he knows that I know it’s no good, and I know that he knows that I know—” and Jenny laughed wryly.
“Hasn’t he any prospects?”
“None whatever—at least none that are called prospects in our set, though I expect they’d sound pretty fine to anyone else. He’ll have Cock Marling when his father dies.”
“You shouldn’t have fallen in love with a landed proprietor, Jen.”
“Oh, well, it’s done now and I can’t help it.”
“You don’t sound infatuated.”
“I’m not, but I’m in love right enough. It’s all the hanging about and uncertainty that makes me sound bored—in self-defence one has to grow a thick skin.”
Mary did not speak for a moment but seemed to slip through the firelight into a dream.
“Yes,” she said at last—“a thick skin or a hard heart. If the average woman’s heart could be looked at under a microscope I expect it would be seen to be covered with little spikes and scales and callouses—a regular hard heart. Or perhaps it would be inflamed and tender ... I believe inflammation is a defence, against disease—or poison. But after all, nothing’s much good—the enemy always gets his knife in somehow.”
She turned away her eyes from Jenny, and the younger sister felt abashed—and just because she was abashed and awkward and shy, for that very reason, she blurted out——
“How’s Julian?”
“Oh, quite well, thank you. I persuaded him not to come down because he and father always get on so badly.”
“It’s a pity they do.”
“A very great pity. But I can’t help it. I did my best to persuade him to advance the money, but he’s not a man who’ll lend without good security, even to a relation. I’m sorry, because if he would stand by the family, I shouldn’t feel I’d been quite such a fool to marry him.”
Though the fiction of Mary being happily married was kept up only by Lady Alard, it gave Jenny a faint shock to hear her sister speak openly of failure. Her feelings of awkwardness and shyness returned, and a deep colour stained her cheeks. What should you say?—should you take any notice?... It was your sister.
“Mary, have you ... are you ... I mean, is it really quite hopeless?”
“Oh, quite,” said Mary.
“Then what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know—I haven’t thought.”
Jenny crossed and uncrossed her large feet—she looked at her sister’s little mules, motionless upon the fender.
“Is he—I mean, does he—treat you badly?”
Mary laughed.
“Oh, no—husbands in our class don’t as a rule, unless they’re qualifying for statutory cruelty. Julian isn’t cruel—he’s very kind—indeed probably most people would say he was a model husband. I simply can’t endure him, that’s all.”
“Incompatibility of temperament.”
“That’s a very fine name for it, but I daresay it’s the right one. Julian and I are two different sorts of people, and we’ve found it out—at least I have. Also he’s disappointed because we’ve been married seven years and I haven’t had a child—and he lets me see he’s disappointed. And now he’s begun to be jealous—that’s put the lid on.”
She leaned back in her chair, her hands folded on her lap, without movement and yet, it seemed, without rest. Her body was alert and strung, and her motionlessness was that of a taut bowstring or a watching animal. As Jenny’s eyes swept over her, taking in both her vitality and her immaculacy, a new conjecture seized her, a sudden question.
“Mary—are you ... are you in love?—with someone else, I mean.”
“No—what makes you think so?”
“It’s how you look.”
“Jen, you’re not old enough yet to know how a woman looks when she’s in love. Your own face in the glass won’t tell you.”
“It’s not your face—it’s the way you behave—the way you dress. You seem to worship yourself....”
“So you think I must be in love—you can’t conceive that my efforts to be beautiful should be inspired by anything but the wish to please some man! Jen, you’re like all men, but, I’d hoped, only a few women—you can’t imagine a woman wanting to be beautiful for her own sake. Oh, my dear, it’s just because I’m not in love that I must please myself. If I was in love I shouldn’t bother half so much—I’d know I pleased somebody else, which one can do with much less trouble than one can please oneself. I shouldn’t bother about my own exactions any more. The day you see me with untidy hair and an unpowdered skin you’ll know I’m in love with somebody who loves me, and haven’t got to please myself any more.”
“But, Mary ... there’s Charles. Don’t you love Charles?”
“No, I don’t. I know it’s very silly of me not to love the man my husband’s jealous of, but such is the fact. Nobody but Julian would have made a row about Charles—he’s just a pleasant, well-bred, oldish man, who’s simple enough to be restful. He’s more than twenty years older than I am, which I know isn’t everything, but counts for a good deal. I liked going about with him because he’s so remote from all the fatigue and fret and worry of that side of life. It was almost like going about with another woman, except that one had the advantage of a man’s protection and point of view.”
“Does he love you?”
“I don’t think so for a moment. In fact I’m quite sure he doesn’t. He likes taking out a pretty woman, and we’ve enough differences to make us interesting to each other, but there the matter ends. As it happens, I’m much too fond of him to fall in love with him. It’s not a thing I’d ever do with a man I liked as a friend. I know what love is, you see, and not so long ago.”
“Who was that?”
“Julian,” said Mary dryly.
A feeling of panic and hopelessness came over Jenny.
“Oh, God ... then one can never know.”
Gervase’s scheme of going into a workshop materialised more quickly than his family, knowing his rather inconsequent nature, had expected. The very day after he had obtained his father’s consent he drove into Ashford and interviewed the manager of Messrs. Gillingham and Golightly, motor engineers in the station road. After some discussion it was arranged that he should be taken into the works as pupil on the payment of a premium of seventy-five pounds to cover three years’ instruction, during which time he was to receive a salary starting at five shillings a week and rising to fifteen.
The sarcasm that greeted his first return on Saturday afternoon with his five shillings in his pocket was equalled only by his own pride. Here at last was money of his own, genuinely earned and worked for—money that was not Alard’s, that was undimmed by earth, having no connection with the land either through agriculture or landlordism. Gervase felt free for at least an hour.
“We can launch out a bit now,” said Sir John at luncheon—“Gervase has come to our rescue and is supporting us in our hour of need. Which shall we pay off first, Peter?—Stonelink or Dinglesden?...”
Peter scowled—he seemed to find his father’s pleasantry more offensive than Gervase, who merely laughed and jingled the coins in his pocket.
The youngest Alard threw himself with zest into his new life. It certainly was a life which required enthusiasm to make it worth living. Every morning at nine he had to be at the works, driving himself in the Ford farm-lorry, which had been given over to his use on its supplanting by a more recent make. He often was not back till seven or eight at night, worn out, but with that same swelling sense of triumph with which he had returned from his first day’s work. He was still living at home, still dependent on his people for food and clothing if not for pocket money, but his feet were set on a road which would take him away from Conster, out of the Alard shadow. Thank God! he was the youngest son, or they wouldn’t have let him go. He enjoyed the hardness of the way—the mortification of those early risings, with the blue, star-pricked sky and the deadly cold—the rattling drive in the Ford through all weathers—the arrival at the works, the dirt, the din, the grease, the breaking of his nails, his filthy overalls, his fellow workmen with their unfamiliar oaths and class-grievances, the pottering over bolts and screws, the foreman’s impatience with his natural carelessness—the exhausted drive home over the darkness of the Kent road ... Gable Hook, Tenterden, Newenden, Northiam, Beckley, going by in a flash of red windows—the arrival at Conster almost too tired to eat—the welcome haven of bed and the all too short sweet sleep.
Those January days in their zeal and discipline were like the first days of faith—life ceased to be an objectless round, a slavery to circumstances. Generally when he was at home he was acutely sensitive to the fret of Conster, to the ceaseless fermentation of those lives, so much in conflict and yet so combined—he had always found his holidays depressing and been glad to go back to school. Now, though he still lived in the house, he did not belong to it—its ambitions and its strife did not concern him, though he was too observant and sensitive not to be affected by what was going on.
He saw enough to realise that the two main points of tension were Mary and Peter. Mary was still at Conster, though he understood that Julian had written asking her to come home—February was near, and she stayed on, though she spoke of going back. As for Peter, he had become sulky and self-absorbed. He would not go for walks on Sundays, or shooting on Saturday afternoons—he had all the painful, struggling manner of a plain man with a secret—a straightforward man in the knots of a decision. Gervase was sorry for him, but a little angry too. Over his more monotonous jobs at the works, in his rare wakeful moments, but most of all in his long familiar-contemptible drives to and from Ashford, he still thought of Stella. His feeling for her remained much the same as it had been at Christmas—a loving absorption, a warm worship. He could not bear that she should suffer—she was so very much alive that he felt her suffering must be sharper than other people’s. He could guess by his own feelings a little of what she suffered in her love for Peter—and once he got further than a guess.
During those weeks he had never met her anywhere, either at Conster or outside it; but one Saturday at noon, as he was coming away from the shop, he met her surprisingly on foot in the station road. He pulled up and spoke to her, and she told him she was on her way to the station in hopes of an early train. The Singer had broken down with magneto trouble and she had been obliged to leave it for repair—meantime her father wanted her back early, as there was always a lot of dispensary work to do on a Saturday afternoon.
“Well, if you don’t mind a ride in a dying Ford....”
He hardly dared listen to her answer, he tried to read it as it came into her eyes while he spoke.
“Of course I don’t mind. I should love it—and it’s really most frightfully good of you.”
So she climbed up beside him, and soon her round bright eyes were looking at him from between her fur cap and huge fur collar, as they had looked that first morning at Starvecrow.... He felt the love rising in his throat ... tender and silly ... he could not speak; and he soon found that she would rather he didn’t. Not only was the Ford’s death-rattle rather loud but she seemed to find the same encouragement to thought as he in that long monotonous jolt through the Weald of Kent. He did not have to lift himself far out of the stream of his thoughts when he looked at her or spoke, but hers were evidently very far away. With a strange mixture of melancholy and satisfaction, he realised that he must count for little in her life—practically nothing at all. Even if she were not Peter’s claim she could never be his—not only on account of her age, six years older than he, but because the fact that she loved Peter showed that it was unlikely she could ever love Gervase, Peter’s contrast.... In his heart was a sweet ache of sorrow, the thrill which comes with the first love-pain.
But as they ran down into Sussex, across the floods that sheeted the Rother levels, and saw the first outposts of Alard-Monking and Horns Cross Farms with the ragged line of Moat Wood—his heart suddenly grew cold. In one of his sidelong glances at Stella he saw a tear hanging on the dark stamen of an eyelash ... he looked again as soon as he dared, and saw another on her cheek. Was it the cold?...
“Stella, are you cold?” he asked, fearing her answer.
“No, thank you, Gervase.”
He dared not ask “Why are you crying?” Also there was no need—he knew. The sweetness had gone out of his sorrow, he no longer felt that luxurious creep of pain—instead his heart was heavy, and dragged at his breast. It was faint with anger.
When they came to the Throws where the road to Vinehall turns out of the road to Leasan, he asked her if she wouldn’t come up to Conster for tea—“and I’ll drive you home afterwards.” But again she said in her gentle voice “No thank you, Gervase.” He wished she wouldn’t say it like that.
What did Peter mean?
That was the question Stella had asked herself at intervals during the past month, that she had been asking herself all the way from Ashford to Vinehall, and was still asking when Gervase set her down on the doorstep of Hollingrove and drove away. What did Peter mean?
She would not believe that he meant nothing—that their friendship had been just one of those war-time flirtations which must fade in the light of peace. It had lasted too long, for one thing—it had lasted a year. For a whole year they had loved each other, written to each other almost every day, hungered for meetings, and met with kisses and passionate playful words. It is true that he had never spoken to her of marriage except negatively, but she knew his views and had submitted if not agreed. All that was over now—he was no longer a soldier, holding his life on an uncertain lease; and more, he was now the heir—their prospects had improved from the material and practical point of view. He might, like so many men, have found it difficult to get back into business, recover his pre-war footing in the world; but there need be no concern for that now—he was not only the heir, but his father’s agent, already established with home and income, and his home that dearest of all places, Starvecrow....
She would not believe that he had been playing with her, that he had only taken her to pass the time, and now was looking for some decent pretext for letting her go. He was not that sort of man at all. Peter was loyal and honest right through. Besides, she saw no sign that his love had grown cold. She was sure that he loved her as much as ever, but more painfully, more doubtingly. Their meetings had lately been given over to a sorrowful silence. He had held her in his arms in silent, straining tenderness. He would not talk, he would not smile. What did he mean?
Probably his family was making trouble. She had been only once to Conster since she had dined there on Christmas Day, and it had struck her then that Doris and Lady Alard had both seemed a little unfriendly. Everyone in Leasan and Vinehall said that the Squire’s son would have to marry money if he meant to keep the property going. She had often heard people say that—but till now she had scarcely thought of it. The idea had seemed impossible, almost grotesque. But now it did not seem quite impossible—Peter’s behaviour, his family’s behaviour, all pointed to its being a factor in the situation; and since she could not refuse to see that something was keeping him silent when he ought to speak, it was easier to believe in a difficulty of this kind than in any commonplace cooling or change. Once she had thought that nothing, not even Alard, could come between them—now she must alter her faith to the extent of believing that nothing could come between them except Alard.
She could not help being a little angry with Peter for this discovery. It seemed to her a shameful thing that money should count against love. As for herself, she did not dare think what she would not sacrifice for love—for Peter if occasion arose. And he, apparently, would not sacrifice for her one acre of Conster, one tile of Starvecrow.... Was it the difference between men and women which made the difference here? If she was a man would she be able to see the importance of Peter’s family, the importance of keeping his property together even at the expense of happiness and faith? She wondered.... Meanwhile she was angry.
She wished he would have things out with her, try to explain. That he did not was probably due to the mixture of that male cowardice which dreads a “scene” with that male stupidity which imagines that nothing has been noticed which it has not chosen to reveal. But if he didn’t tell her soon she would ask him herself. She knew that such a step was not consistent with feminine dignity either ancient or modern. According to tradition she should have drooped to the masculine whim, according to fashion she should have asserted her indifference to it. But she could do neither. She could not bear her own uncertainty any longer—this fear of her hopes. Oh, she had planned so materially and wildly! She had planned the very furnishing of Starvecrow—which room was to be which—the dining-room, the best bedroom, the spare bedroom, Peter’s study ... cream distemper on the walls and for each room different colours ... and a kitchen furnished with natural oak and copper pots and pans....
The tears which up till now had only teased the back of her eyes, brimmed over at the thought of the kitchen. The dark January afternoon, clear under a sky full of unshed rain, was swallowed up in mist as Stella wept for her kitchen and copper pans.
She was still on the doorstep, where she had stood to see the last of Gervase, and even now that she was crying she did not turn into the house. The iron-black road was empty between its draggled hedges, and she found a certain kinship in the winter twilight, with its sharpness, its sighing of low, rain-burdened winds. After a few moments she dried her eyes and went down the steps to the gate. Thanks to Gervase, she had come home nearly an hour earlier than she need—she would go and sit for a few minutes in church. She found church a very good place for thinking her love affairs into their right proportion with all time.
The village of Vinehall was not like the village of Leasan, which straggled for nearly a mile each side of the high road. It was a large village, all pressed together like a little town. Above it soared the spire of Vinehall church, which, like many Sussex churches, stood in a farmyard. Its lovely image lay in the farmyard pond, streaked over with green scum and the little eddies that followed the ducks.
Stella carefully shut out a pursuing hen and went in by the tower door. The church was full of heavy darkness. The afternoon sun had left it a quarter of an hour ago, showing only its pale retreat through the slats of the clerestory windows, white overhead, and night lay already in the aisles. She groped her way to the east end, where the white star of a lamp flickered against a pillar guarding a shrine. She flopped down on the worn stones at the foot of the pillar, sitting back on her heels, her hands lying loosely and meekly in her lap.
She had no sense of loneliness or fear in the dark—the white lamp spoke to her of a presence which she could feel throughout the dark and empty church, a presence of living quiet, of glowing peace. Outside she could hear the fowls ducking in the yard, with every now and then the shrill gobble-gobble of a turkey. She loved these homely sounds, which for years had been the accompaniment of her prayers—her prayers which had no words, but seemed to move in her heart like flames. Oh, it was good to be here, to have this place to come to, this Presence to seek.
Now that she was here she could no longer feel angry with Peter, however stupid, obstinate and earthy he was. Poor Peter—choosing it for himself as well as for her ... she could not be angry with him, because she knew that if he pulled catastrophe down upon them, he of the two would suffer the most. Unlike her, he had no refuge, no Presence to seek, no unseen world that could become real at a thought.... His gods were dead Squires who had laid up wealth to be his poverty. Her God was a God who had beggared Himself, that she through His poverty might become rich.
This beggar and lover and prisoner, her God, was with her here in the darkness, telling her that if she too wished to be a lover she too must become a beggar and a prisoner. She would be Peter’s beggar, Peter’s slave. She would not let him go from her without pleading, without fighting, but if he really must go, if this half-known monster, Alard, was really strong enough to take him, he should not go wounded by her detaining clutch as well as by its claws. He should not go shamed and reproached, but with goodwill. If he really must go, and she could no longer hold him, she would make his going easy.... He should go in peace.... Poor Peter.
At the end of January Mary left Conster. She could not in any spirit of decorum put off her return longer—her husband had wired to her to come home.
“Poor Julian,” said Lady Alard—“he must be missing you dreadfully. I really think you ought to go back, Mary, since he can’t manage to come here.”
Mary agreed without elaboration, and her lovely hats and shoes with the tea-gowns and dinner-frocks which had divided the family into camps of admiration and disapproval, were packed away by the careful, brisk Gisèle. The next day she was driven over to Ashford, with Jenny and Peter to see her off.
There had been no intimate talks between the sisters since the first night of her coming. Jenny was shy, and typically English in her dislike of the exposure of anything which seemed as if it ought to be hidden, and Mary either felt this attitude in her sister or else shrank from disillusioning her youth still further. They had arrived a little too early for the train, and stood together uneasily on the platform while Gisèle bought the tickets and superintended the luggage.
“I wish you didn’t have to go,” said Jenny politely.
“So do I—but it couldn’t be helped after that telegram.”
“Julian sounded rather annoyed—I hope he won’t make a fuss when you get back.”
“I’m not going back.”
There was a heavy silence. Neither Peter nor Jenny thought they had quite understood.
“Wh-what do you mean?” stammered Jenny at last—“not going back to Chart? Isn’t Julian there?”
“Of course he’s there. That’s why I’m not going back. Gisèle is taking the tickets to London.”
“But”—It was Peter who said ‘But,’ and had apparently nothing else to say.
“Do you mean that you’re leaving him?” faltered Jenny.
“I’m not going to live with him any more. I’ve had enough.”
“But why didn’t you tell us?—tell the parents?”
“I’d rather not bring the family into it. It’s my own choice though Julian is sure to think you’ve been influencing me. I didn’t make up my mind till I got his telegram; then I saw quite plainly that I couldn’t go back to him.”
“You’re not going to that other fellow—what’s his name—Commander Smith?” cried Peter, finding his tongue rather jerkily.
“Oh, no. As I’ve told Jenny, making a mess of things with one man doesn’t necessarily encourage me to try my luck with another. Besides, I’m not fond of Charles—in that way. I shall probably stay at my Club for a bit, and then go abroad.... I don’t know.... All I know is that I’m not going back to Julian.”
“Shall you—can you divorce him?”
“No. He hasn’t been cruel or unfaithful, nor has he deserted me. I’m deserting him. It’s simply that I can’t live with him—he gets on my nerves—I can’t put up with either his love or his jealousy. I couldn’t bear the thought even of having dinner with him tonight ... and yet—” the calm voice suddenly broke—“and yet I married for love....”
Both the brother and sister were silent. Peter saw Gisèle coming up with a porter and the luggage, and went off like a coward to meet them. Jenny remained uneasily with Mary.
“I’m sorry to have had to do this,” continued the elder sister—“it’ll upset the parents, I know. They don’t like Julian, but they’ll like a scandal still less.”
“Do you think he’ll make a row?”
“I’m sure of it. For one thing, he’ll never think for a minute I haven’t left him for someone else—for Charles. He won’t be able to imagine that I’ve left a comfortable home and a rich husband without any counter attraction except my freedom. By the way, I shall be rather badly off—I’ll have only my settlements, and they won’t bring in much.”
“Oh, Mary—do you really think you’re wise?”
“Not wise, perhaps—nor good.” She pulled down her veil. “I feel that a better or a worse woman would have made a neater job of this. The worse would have found an easier way—the better would have stuck to the rough. But I—oh, I’m neither—I’m neither good nor bad. All I know is that I can’t go back to Julian, to put up with his fussing and his love and his suspicion—and, worse still, with my own shame because I don’t love him any more—because I’ve allowed myself to be driven out of love by tricks—by manner—by outside things.”
“—London train—Headcorn, Tonbridge and London train—”
The porter’s shouting was a welcome interruption, though it made Jenny realise with a blank feeling of anxiety and impotence that any time for persuasion was at an end.
“Do you want us to tell Father and Mother?” she asked as Mary got into the train.
“You needn’t if you’d rather not. I’ll write to them tonight.”
She leaned back in the carriage, soft, elegant, perfumed, a little unreal, and yet conveying somehow a sense of desperate choice and mortal straits.
Peter and Jenny scarcely spoke till they were back in the car driving homewards. Then Jenny said with a little gasp—
“Isn’t it dreadful?”
“What?—her going away?”
“No, the fact that she married Julian for love.”
Peter said nothing.
“If she’d married out of vanity, or greed, or to please the family, it would have been better—one would have understood what’s happened now. But she married him for love.”
Peter still said nothing.
He sat waiting at Starvecrow on an early day in February. Outside the rain kept the Feast of the Purification, washing down the gutters of Starvecrow’s mighty roof, lapping the edges of the pond into the yard, and further away transforming all the valley of the Tillingham into a lake—huge sheets and spreads of water, out of which the hills of Barline and Brede Eye stood like a coast. All the air was fresh and washed and tinkling with rain.
The fire was piled high with great logs and posts, burning with a blue flame, for they had been pulled out of the barns of Starvecrow, which like many in the district were built of ships’ timbers with the salt still in them. The sound of the fire was as loud as the sound of the rain. Both made a sorrowful music together in Peter’s head.
He sat with his hands folded together under his chin, his large light blue eyes staring without seeing into the grey dripping world framed by the window. The clock in the passage struck three. Stella would not come till a quarter past. He had arranged things purposely so that he should be alone for a bit at Starvecrow before meeting her, strengthening himself with the old loyalties to fight the brief, sweet faithfulness of a year.
He felt almost physically sick at the thought of what lay before him, but he had made up his mind to go through with it—it had got to be done; and it must be done in this way. Oh, how he had longed to send Stella a letter, telling her that they must never see each other again, begging her to go away and spare him! But he knew that was a coward’s escape—the least he owed her was an explanation face to face.... What a brute he had been to her! He had no right to have won her love if he did not mean to keep it—and though when he had first sought her he had thought himself free to do so, he had behaved badly in not telling her of the new difficulties created by his becoming the heir. It was not that he had meant to hide things from her, but he had simply shelved them in his own mind, hoping that “something would turn up,” that Alard’s plight would not be as bad as he had feared. Now he saw that it was infinitely worse—and he was driven to a definite choice between his people and Stella. If he married Stella he would have failed Alard—if he stood by Alard he would have failed Stella. It was a cruel choice—between the two things in the world that he loved best. But he must make it now—he could not keep Stella hanging on indefinitely any longer. Already he could see how uncertainty, anxiety and disappointment were telling on her. She was looking worn and dim. She had expected him, on his return home after the wars, to proclaim their love publicly, and he was still keeping it hidden, though the reasons he had first given her for doing so were at an end. She was wondering why he didn’t speak—she was hesitating whether she should speak herself.... He guessed her struggle and knew he must put an end to it.
Besides, now at last his choice was made. He no longer had any uncertainty, any coil of argument to encumber him. Mary’s words on Ashford platform had finally settled his difficulty—“And yet I married for love.” Seven years ago Mary had loved this man from whom she was now escaping, the very sight of whom in her home she could not bear. Love was as uncertain as everything else—it came and it was gone. Mary had once loved Julian as Peter now loved Stella—and look at her!... Oh, you could never be sure. And there was so much in Stella he was not sure of—and she might change—he might change; only places never changed—were always the same. Starvecrow would always be to him, whether at eighteen, thirty-eight or eighty, the same Starvecrow.... How could he fail the centuries behind him for what might not live more than a few years? How could he fail the faithful place for that which had change for its essence and death for its end?
Far away he could hear the purring of a car—it drew nearer, and Peter, clenching his hands, found the palms damp. All his skin was hot and moist—oh, God, what had he to face? The scene that was coming would be dreadful—he’d never get through it unless Stella helped him, and he’d no right to expect help from her. Here she was, driving in at the gate ... outside the door ... inside the room at last.
He sought refuge in custom, and going up to her, laid his hands on her shoulders and kissed her gravely. Then he began to loosen the fur buttons of her big collar, but she put up her hand and stopped him.
“No—I’ll keep it on. I can’t stop long. Father’s waiting for me at Barline.”
“It’s good of you to come—there’s something I’ve got to say.”
“You want to tell me we must end it.”
He had not expected her to help him so quickly. Then he suddenly realised that his letter had probably told her a lot—his trouble must have crept between the lines—into the lines ... he wasn’t good at hiding things.
“Oh, Stella.”
He stood a few paces from her, and noticed—now that his thoughts were less furiously concentrated on himself—that she was white, that all the warm, rich colour in her cheeks was gone. He pulled forward one of the office chairs, and she sank into it. He sat down opposite her, and took her hand, which she did not withdraw.
“Oh, Stella, my darling ... my precious child ... it’s all no use. I’ve hoped and I’ve tried, but it’s no good—I must let you go.”
“Why?”
The word came almost sharply—she wasn’t going to help him, then, so much.
“Darling, I know I’m a cad. I ought never to have told you I loved you, knowing that ... at least when Hugh died I should have told you straight out how things were. But I couldn’t—I let myself drift, hoping matters would improve ... and then there was the war....”
“Peter, I wish you would tell me things straight out—now’s better than never. And honestly I can’t understand why you’re not going to marry me.”
He was a little shocked. Tradition taught him that Stella would try to save her face, and he had half expected her to say that she had never thought of marrying him. After all, he had never definitely asked her, and she might claim that this was only one of those passionate friendships which had become so common during the war. If she had done so, he would have conceded her the consolation without argument—a girl ought to try and save her face; but Stella apparently did not care about her face at all.
“Why aren’t you going to marry me? You’ve never given me any real reason.”
“Surely you know”—his voice was a little cold.
“How can I know? I see you the heir of a huge estate, living in a big house with apparently lots of money. You tell me again and again that you love me—I’m your equal in birth and education. Why on earth should I ‘know’ that you can’t marry me?”
“Stella, we’re in an awful mess—all the family. The estate is mortgaged almost up to the last acre—we can hardly manage to pay the yearly interest, and owing to the slump in land we can’t sell.”
Stella stared at him woodenly.
“Can’t you understand?”
“No—” she said slowly—“I can’t. I’ve heard that the war has hit you—it’s hit all the big landowners; but you’re—good heavens! you’re not poor. Think of the servants you keep, and the motor-cars——”
“Oh, that’s my hopeless parents, who won’t give up anything they’ve been accustomed to, and who say that it’s not worth while making ourselves uncomfortable in small things when only something colossal can save us. If we moved into the Lodge tomorrow and lived on five hundred a year it would still take us more than a lifetime to scrape up enough to free the land.”
“Then what do you propose to do?”
“Well, don’t you see, if I live at home I can manage somehow to keep down expenses, so that the interest on the mortgages gets paid—and when Greening’s gone and I’m agent I can do a lot to improve the estate, and send the value up so that we can sell some of the outlying farms over by Stonelink and Guestling—that’ll bring in ready money, and then perhaps I’ll be able to pay off some of the mortgages.”
“But couldn’t you do all that if you married me?”
“No, because for one thing I shouldn’t be allowed to try. Father wouldn’t have me for agent.”
“Why?”
“Oh, Stella darling, don’t make it so difficult for me. It’s so hard for me to tell you ... can’t you see that my people want to get money above all things—lots of it? If I marry you it’ll be the end of all their hopes.”
“They want you to marry money.”
“They want us all to marry money. Oh, don’t think I’m going to do it—I couldn’t marry anyone I didn’t love. But I feel I’ve got my duty to them as well as to you ... and it’s not only to them ... oh, Stella sweetheart, don’t cry!”
“I—I can’t help it. Oh, Peter, it all sounds so—so dreadful, so sordid—and so—so cruel, to you as well as to me.”
He longed to take her in his arms, but dared not, partly for fear of his own weakness, partly for fear she would repulse him.
“Darling—I’m not explaining well; it’s so difficult. And I know it’s sordid, but not so sordid as you think. It’s simply that I feel I must stand by my family now—and I don’t mean just my people, you know; I mean all the Alards ... all that ever were. I can’t let the place be sold up, as it will have to be if I don’t save it. Think of it ... and the first part to be sold would have to be Starvecrow, because it’s the only free, unmortgaged land we’ve got. Oh, Stella, think of selling Starvycrow!”
She took away her hands and looked at him through her streaming tears.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that—don’t reproach me. What I’m doing is only half selfish—the other half is unselfish, it’s sacrifice.”
“But, Peter, what does it matter if the land is sold? What good is the land doing you?—what good will it ever do you, if it comes to that? Why should we suffer for the land?”
“I thought you’d have understood that better.”
“I don’t understand at all.”
“Not that I must stand by my people?”
“I don’t understand why your people can’t be happy without owning all the land in three parishes.”
“Oh, my dear....”
He tried to take her hand, but this time she pulled it away.
“It’s no good, Peter. I understand your selfish reason better than your unselfish one. I fail to see why you should sacrifice me and yourself to your family and their land. I can see much better how you can’t bear the thought of losing Starvecrow. I know how you love it, because I love it too-but much as I love it, I never could sacrifice you to it, my dear, nor any human soul.”
“I know—I know. I’m a beast, Stella—but it’s like this ... human beings change—even you may change—but places are always the same.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I love you now—but how do I know ... Mary married for love.”
“What’s Mary got to do with it?”
“She’s shown me that one can never be sure, even with love.”
“You mean to say you’re not sure if you’d be happy with me?”
“Darling, I’m as sure as I can ever be with any human being. But one never can be quite sure, that’s the terrible thing. And oh, it would be so ghastly if you changed—or I changed—and I had left the unchanging place for you.”
Stella rose quietly to her feet.
“I understand now, Peter.”
For a moment she stood motionless and silent, her mouth set, her eyes shining out beyond him. He wondered if she was praying.
“Stella—don’t hate me.”
“I don’t hate you—I love you. But I quite understand that you don’t love me. Your last words have shown me that. And your not loving me explains it all. If you really loved me all these difficulties, all these ambitions would be like—like chaff. But you don’t love me, at least not much; and I don’t want you, if you only love me a little. I’m relieved in a way—I think you’d be doing a dreadful thing if you gave me up while you really loved me. But you don’t really love me, so you’re quite right to give me up and stand by your family and Starvecrow. Oh, I know you love me enough to have married me if everything had been easy....”
“Stella, don’t—It isn’t that I don’t love you; it’s only that I can’t feel sure of the future with you—I mean, there are so many things about you I can’t understand—your way of looking at life and things....”
“Oh, I know, my dear—don’t trouble to explain to me. And don’t think I’m angry, Peter—only sick—sick—sick. I don’t want to argue with you any more—it’s over. And I’ll make things as easy for you as I can, and for myself too. I’ll go away—I’ll have to. I couldn’t bear meeting you after this—or seeing Starvecrow....”
She went to the door, and he hoped she would go straight out, but on the threshold she suddenly turned——
“I’m not angry, Peter—I’m not angry. I was, but I’m not now ... I’m only miserable. But I’ll be all right ... if I go away. And some day we’ll be friends again....”
The door crashed behind her. She was gone.