“Father,” said Stella Mount—“I’m afraid I must go away again.”
“Go away, child? Why?”
“I—I can’t fall out of love with Peter.”
“But I thought you’d fallen out of love with him long ago.”
“Yes—I thought so too. But I can’t have done it really, or if I did I must have fallen in again. I’m frightfully sorry about it ... leaving you a second time, just because I’m not strong-minded enough to.... But it’s no use.... I can’t help....”
“Don’t worry, dear. If you’re unhappy you shall certainly go away. But tell me what’s happened. How long have you been feeling like this?”
“Ever since I knew Peter still cared.”
“Peter!—he hasn’t said anything to you, has he?”
“Oh, no—not a word. But I could see—I could see he was jealous of Gervase.”
“How could he possibly be jealous of Gervase?”
“He was. I met him one day in Icklesham street, and he congratulated me ... he said someone had told him Gervase and I were engaged....”
“The idea!—a boy six years younger than yourself!”
“Yes, I know. I never took him seriously—that was my mistake. Peter was ever so worked up about it, and when I told him it wasn’t true he seemed tremendously relieved. And every time I’ve met him since his manner’s been different. I can’t describe it, but he’s been sort of shy and hungry—or else restless and a bit irritable; and for a long time I could see he was still jealous—and it worried me; I felt I couldn’t bear doing anything Peter didn’t like, and I was wild at people talking, and upsetting him, so I pushed off poor Gervase and became cold and unfriendly.”
“Is that why he’s given up coming here on Sundays?”
“No—not exactly. We had rather a scene when he last came, just before his holiday, and he said he wouldn’t come back. You see he cares, Father—he cares dreadfully. I’m ever so sick with myself for not having realised it. I was so wrapped up in Peter.... I thought it was only a rave, like what the Fawcett boy had—but now I’m sure he really cares, and it must be terrible for him. That’s why I want to go away, for I’ll never be able to care for anyone else while I feel for Peter as I do.”
“But, my dear, it’s just as well you shouldn’t fall in love with Gervase. He’s a nice boy, but he’s much too young.”
“Yes, I know—it isn’t that. It’s being sure that however much he was the right age I couldn’t have cared—not because of anything lacking in him—but because of what’s lacking in me ... because of all that I’ve given to Peter, and that Peter can’t take.... Oh, Father, I’ve made some discoveries since Gervase went. I believe I refused Tom Barlow because of Peter. The reason I’m single now is because for years I’ve been in love with a man I can’t have. And that’s wrong—I know it’s wrong. It sounds ‘romantic’ and ‘faithful’ and all that—but it isn’t really—it’s wrong. Not because Peter’s a married man, but because I’m an unmarried woman. He’s keeping me unmarried, and I ought to get married—I don’t like Spinsters—and I know I was meant to be married.”
“So do I; and I’m sure that one day you will be.”
“But I can’t fall in love with anyone while I love Peter ... that’s why I must go away. I ought to go somewhere really far, out of the country perhaps. I feel dreadful leaving you, daddy, but I know I must go. It’s even more necessary than it was the first time. And there’s no good saying I could help Peter if I stayed—I don’t help him—I can see that I only make him unhappy; I’m not cold enough to be able to help him. A calm strong dignified woman might be able to help him, but I’m not that sort. I want his love, his kisses, his arms round me.... I want to give.... O Father, Father....”
She sobbed breathlessly, her face hidden in the back of her chair. Dr. Mount stood beside her in silence; then he touched her gently and said—
“Don’t cry like that my dear—don’t—I can’t bear it. You shall go away—we’ll both go away. I’ve been in this place twenty years, and it’s time I moved on.”
“But you don’t want to go, and you mustn’t. You’re happy here, and I’d never forgive myself if you left because of me.”
“I’d like to see a bit more of the world before I retire. This isn’t the first time I’ve thought of a move, and if you want to go away, that settles it. I might get a colonial practice....”
Stella thought of some far away country with flat roofs and dust and a devouring sun, she thought of hundreds of miles of forest and desert and ocean lying between her and Peter, and her tears were suddenly dried up as with the hot breath of that far land. Dry sobs tore her throat, as she clutched the back of the chair. She pushed her father away—
“Go, dear—don’t stay—when I’m like this.”
He understood her well enough to go.
For a few seconds she sobbed on, then checked herself, and perfunctorily wiped her eyes. The four o’clock sun of early November was pouring into the room, showing all its dear faded homeliness, giving life to the memories that filled it. Long ago Peter had sat in that chair—she had sat on the arm ... she seemed to feel his warm hand on her cheek as he held her head down to his shoulder. O Peter, Peter—why had he left her when he loved her so?... Oh, yes, she knew he had treated her badly, and had only himself to blame. But that didn’t make her love him less. She felt now that she had been in love with him the whole time—all along—all through and since their parting. All the time that she thought she was indifferent, and was happy in her busy life—driving the car, seeing her friends, talking and writing to Gervase, cooking and sewing and going to church, wearing pretty frocks at the winter dances and summer garden-parties—all that time her love for Peter was still alive, growing and feeding itself with her life. It had not died and been buried as she had thought but had entered a second time into its mother’s womb to be born. She had carried it secretly, as a mother carries her child in her womb, nourishing it with her life, and now it was born—born again—with all the strength of the twice-born.
It would be difficult to say how the rumour got abroad in Vinehall and Leasan that the Mounts were going away. It may have been servants’ gossip, or the talk of some doctor come down to view the practice. But, whatever the source, the story was in both villages at the end of the month, and in the first week of December Rose Alard brought it to Starvecrow.
She had come to have tea with Vera, and Peter was there too. Vera was within three months of the heir, and displayed her condition with all the opulence of her race. Not even her purple velvet tea-gown could hide lines reminiscent of Sarah’s and Hannah’s exulting motherhood. Her very features seemed to have a more definitely Jewish cast—she was now no longer just a dark beauty, but a Hebrew beauty, heir of Rebecca and Rachel and Miriam and Jael. As Jenny had once said, one expected her to burst into a song about horses and chariots. She had for the time lost those intellectual and artistic interests which distinguished her from the other Alards. She no longer seemed to care about her book, for which she had so far been unable to find a publisher, but let it lie forgotten in a drawer, while she worked at baby clothes. Nevertheless she was inclined to be irritable and snap at Peter, and Peter himself seemed sullen and without patience. Rose watched him narrowly—“He’s afraid it’s going to be a girl.”
Aloud she said—
“Have you heard that the Mounts are leaving Vinehall?”
Her news caused all the commotion she could have wished.
“The Mounts leaving!”—“When?”—“Why?”—“Both of them?”
“Yes, both. I heard it at the Hursts; they seemed quite positive about it, and you know they’re patients.”
“But where are they going?” asked Vera.
“That I don’t know—yet. The Hursts said something about a colonial appointment.”
“I’m surprised, I must say. Dr. Mount’s getting old, and you’d think he’d want to stay on here till he retired—not start afresh in a new place at his age.”
“If you ask me, it’s Miss Stella’s doing. She’s lived here nearly all her life and hasn’t got a husband, so she thinks she’ll go and try somewhere else before it’s too late.”
“Then they’d certainly better go to the Colonies—there are no men left in England. But I’m sorry for Dr. Mount.”
“I suppose you know it’s all over between her and Gervase?”
“Oh, is it—at last?”
“Yes—he hasn’t been there since his holiday in September. He has his dinner on Sundays either at the Church Farm or alone with Mr. Luce.”
“Rose, how do you find out all these things?”
“The Wades told me this. They say she’s been looking awful.”
“Peter!” cried Vera irritably, as a small occasional table went to the ground.
“No harm done,” he mumbled, picking it up.
“But you’re so clumsy. You’re always knocking things over....” She checked herself suddenly, pleating angry folds in her gown.
Peter got up and went out.
“I’m glad he’s gone,” said Rose—“it’s much easier to talk without a man in the room. I really do feel sorry for Stella—losing her last chance of becoming Lady Alard.”
“You think it’s Gervase who’s cooled off, not she who’s turned him down?”
“Oh, she’d never do that. She’s much too keen on getting married.”
“Well, so I thought once. But I’m not so sure now. I used to think she was in love with Gervase, but now I believe she only kept him on as a blind.”
“To cover what?”
“Peter.”
“You mean....”
“That they’ve been in love with each other the whole time.”
“Vera!”
Excitement at the disclosure was mingled in Rose’s voice with disappointment that she had not been the one to make it.
“Yes,” continued her sister-in-law in a struggling voice—“they’ve always been in love—ever since he married me—ever since he gave her up. They’ve never been out of it—I know it now.”
“But I always thought it was all on her side.”
“Oh, no, it wasn’t. Peter was infatuated with her, for some strange reason—she doesn’t seem to me at all the sort of girl a man of his type would take to. Being simple himself, you’d think he’d like something more sophisticated.”
“But Stella is sophisticated—she’s artful. Look how she got Gervase to change his religion, and break his poor brother’s heart. I often think that it was Gervase’s religion which killed poor George, and Stella was responsible for that. She may have pretended to be in love with him just to get him over. You see she can be forgiven anything she does by just going to confession.”
“Well, she needs forgiveness now if she never did before. So it’s just as well she knows where to get it.”
“But, Vera, do you really think there’s anything—I mean anything wicked between them?”
“I don’t know what you call wicked, Rose, if keeping a man’s affections away from his wife who’s soon going to have her first child ... if that isn’t enough for you.... No, I don’t suppose he’s actually slept with her”—Vera liked shocking Rose—“She hasn’t got the passion or the spunk to go so far. But it’s bad enough to know Peter’s heart isn’t mine just when I need him most—to know he only married me just to put the estate on its legs, and now is bitterly regretting it”—and Vera began to cry.
“But how do you know he’s regretting it? He doesn’t go about with Stella, I can tell you that. I’d be sure to have heard if he did.”
“No, I daresay he doesn’t go about with her. I shouldn’t mind if he did, if only his manner was the same to me. But it isn’t—every time we’re together I can see he doesn’t love me any more. He may have for a bit—he did, I know—but Stella got him back, and now every time he looks at me I can see he’s regretting he ever married me. And if the baby’s a girl ... my only justification now is that I may be the mother of an heir ... if the baby’s a girl, I hope I’ll die. Oh, I tell you, Stella may be Lady Alard yet.”
She threw herself back among the cushions and sobbed unrestrainedly. Rose felt a thrill. She had always looked upon Vera as a superior being, remote from the commonplaces of existence in Leasan; and here she was behaving like any other jealous woman.
“Oh, I wish I’d never married,” sobbed Vera—“at least not this sort of marriage. My life’s dull—my husband’s dull—my only interests are bearing his children and watching his affair with another woman. I’m sick of the County families—they’ve got no brains, they’ve got no guts—I’d much better have married among my own people. They at least are alive.”
Rose was shocked. However, she valiantly suppressed her feelings, and patted the big olive shoulder which had shrugged abandonedly out of the purple wrappings.
“Don’t worry, dear,” she soothed—“you’re upset. I’m sure Peter’s all right. It’s often rather trying for men in times like these ...” she heaved on the edge of an indelicate remark ... “so they notice other women more. But I’m quite sure there’s nothing really wrong between him and Stella; because if there was,” she added triumphantly, “Stella wouldn’t be going away.”
“Oh, wouldn’t she!”
“No, of course not. I expect she’s going only because she knows now definitely that she’ll never get Peter back.”
“Nonsense.”
“It isn’t nonsense, dear. Don’t be so cross.”
“I’m sorry, Rose, but I’m ... anyhow Dr. Mount can’t go before I’m through, and that’s three months ahead. I’ve half a mind not to have him now. I feel sick of the whole family.”
“That would be very silly of you, Vera. Dr. Mount’s the best doctor round here for miles, and it would only be spiting yourself not to have him. After all he’s not responsible for Stella’s behaviour.”
“No, I suppose not. Oh, I daresay I’m an ass, going on like this.”
She sat up, looking more like the author of “Modern Rhymes.” Rose, who had always been a little afraid of her, now had the privileged thrill of those who behold the great in their cheaper moments.
“You’ll be all right, dear,” she said meaningly “in three months’ time.”
“All right, or utterly done in. O God, why can’t someone find out a way of deciding the sex of children? I’d give all I possess and a bit over to be sure this is going to be a boy. Not that I want a boy myself—I like girls much better—but I don’t want to see Peter go off his head or off with Stella Mount.”
“I don’t believe she’s got a single chance against you once you’re yourself again. Even now I could bet anything that it’s all on her side.”
“She’s got no chance against me as a woman, but as an Ancient Habit she can probably do a lot with a man like Peter. But I’m not going to worry about her any more—I’ve given way and made an utter fool of myself, and it’s done me good, as it always does. Rose, you promise not to say a word of this to anyone.”
“Of course I won’t. But I might try to get at the facts....”
“For God’s sake don’t. You’ll only make a mess.”
As she revived she was recovering some old contempt for her sister-in-law.
The post arrived just as Stella was setting out with the car one day early the next month to meet her father in Ashford. He had been in Canterbury for a couple of days, attending a dinner and some meetings of the Medico-Chirurgical Society, and this afternoon she was to meet him at Ashford Station and drive him home. She was in plenty of time, so when she saw Gervase’s writing on the envelope handed to her, she went back into the house and opened it.
It was now three months since she had spoken to Gervase or heard anything directly from him. He still came over to Vinehall on Sundays and to certain early masses in the week, but he never called at Dr. Mount’s cottage, nor had she seen him out of church, not heard his voice except in dialogue with the Priest—“I will go unto the Altar of God” ... “Even unto the God of my joy and gladness”....
She wondered what he could have to say to her now. Perhaps he had recovered, and was coming back. She would be pleased, for she missed his company—also it would be good to have his letters when she was out in Canada.... But Stella knew what happened to people who “recovered” and “came back,” and reflected sadly that it would be her duty to discourage Gervase if he thought himself cured.
But the letter did not contain what she expected.
Leasan.
Sussex.
“Jan. 2, 1922
“My dear Stella,
“I’m writing to tell you something rather funny which has happened to me. I don’t mean that I’ve fallen out of love with you—I never shall and don’t want to. But I’m going to do something with my love which I never expected.
“You know that in September, I went ‘into retreat’ for four days at Thunders Abbey. I was sure I’d hate it—and so I did in a way—but when I’d got there I saw at once that it was going to be more important than I’d thought. At first I thought it was just a dodge of Father Luce’s for making me uncomfortable—you know he looks upon me as a luxury-loving young aristocrat, in need of constant mortification. I don’t know what it was exactly that made me change—it was partly, I think, the silence, and partly, I know, the Divine Office. At the end of my visit I knew that Office as the great work of prayer, and Thunders Abbey as just part of that heart of prayer which keeps the world alive. And, dear, I knew that my place was in that heart. I can’t describe to you exactly what I felt—and I wouldn’t if I could. But you’re a Catholic, so you won’t think I’m talking nonsense when I say that I feel I belong there, or, in plainer language, that I have a vocation. You don’t believe that vocations come only to priggish maidens and pious youth, but much more often to ordinary healthy, outdoor people like you and me. Of course I know that even you will think (as Father Luce and the Father Superior have thought) that my vocation may possibly be another name for disappointment in love. I’ve thought it myself, but I don’t believe it. Anyhow it’s at last been settled that I’m going to be allowed to try. As soon as I’ve finished at Gillingham’s I shall go. You know the Community, of course. It’s an order for work among the poor, and has houses in London, Birmingham and Leeds. At Thunders Abbey there’s a big farm for drunkards, epileptics, idiots, and other pleasant company. I’d be useful there, as they’ve just started motor traction, but I don’t know where they’ll send me. Of course I may come out again; but I don’t think so. One knows a sure thing, Stella, and I never felt so sure about anything as about this—and it’s all the more convincing, because I went in without a thought of it. I expect you will be tremendously surprised, but I know you won’t write trying to dissuade me, and telling me all the good I could do outside by letting out taxis for hire and things like that. You dear! I feel I owe everything to you—including this new thing which is so joyful and so terrifying. For I’m frightened a bit—I’m not just going in because I like it—I don’t know if I do. And yet I’m happy.
“Don’t say a word to anyone, except your father. I must wait till the time is ripe to break the news to my family, and then, I assure you, the excitement will be intense. But I felt I must write and tell you as soon as I knew definitely they’d let me come and try, because you are at the bottom of it all—I don’t mean as a disappointment in love, but as the friend who first showed me the beauty of this faith which makes such demands on us. Stella, I’m glad you brought me to the faith before I’d had time to waste much of myself. It’s lovely to think that I can give Him all my grown-up life. I can never pay you back for what you’ve done, but I can come nearest to it by taking my love for you into this new life. My love for you isn’t going to die, but it’s going to become a part of prayer.
“May I come and see you next Sunday? I thought I would write and tell you about things first, for now you know you won’t feel there are any embarrassments or regrets between us. Dear Stella, I think of you such a lot, and I’m afraid you must still be unhappy. But I know that this thing I am going to do will help you as much as me. Perhaps, too, some day I shall be a Priest—though I haven’t thought about that yet—and then I shall be able to help you more. Oh my dear, it isn’t every man who’s given the power to do so much for the woman he loves. I bless you, my dear, and send you in anticipation one of those free kisses we shall all give one another in Paradise.”
“GERVASE.
P.S. There is a rumour that you are going away, but as I can’t trace its succession back further than Rose, I pronounce it of doubtful validity.
P.P.S. Dear, please burn this—it’s more than a love-letter.
P.P.P.S. I hope I haven’t written like a prig.”
Stella let the letter fall into her lap. She was surprised. Somehow she had never thought of Gervase as a religious; she had never thought of him except as a keen young engineer—attractive, self-willed, eccentric, devout. His spiritual development had been so like hers—and she, as she knew well, had no vocation to the religious life—that she was surprised now to find such an essential difference. But her surprise was glad, for though she brushed aside his words of personal gratitude, she felt the thrill of her share in the adventure, and a conviction that it would be for her help as well as for his happiness. Moreover, this new development took away the twinges of self-reproach which she could not help feeling when she thought of her sacrifice of his content to Peter’s jealousy.
But her chief emotion was a kind of sorrowful envy. She envied Gervase not so much the peace of the cloister—not so much the definiteness of his choice—as his freedom. He was free—he had made the ultimate surrender and was free. She knew that he had now passed beyond her, though she had had a whole youth of spiritual experience and practice and he barely a couple of years. He was beyond her, not because of his vocation, but because of his freedom. His soul had escaped like a bird from the snare, but hers was still struggling and bound.
She would never feel for Peter as Gervase felt for her. Her utmost hope was, not to carry her love for him into a new, purged state, but to forget him—if she aimed at less she was deceiving herself, forgetting the manner of woman she was. She had not Gervase’s transmuting ecstasy—nor could she picture herself giving Peter “free kisses” in a Paradise where flesh and blood had no inheritance. Her loves would always be earthly—she would meet her friends in Paradise, but not her lovers.
Well, there was no time for reflection, either happy or sorrowful—she must start off for Ashford, or her father would be kept waiting. Once again, after many times, she experience the relief of practical action. Her disposition was eminently practical, and the practical things of love and life and religion—kisses and meals and sacraments—were to her the realities of those states. A lover who did not kiss and caress you, a life which was based on plain living and high thinking, a religion without good outward forms for its inward graces, were all things which Stella’s soul would never grasp.
So she went out to the little “tenant’s fixture” garage, filled the Singer’s tank and cranked her up, and drove off comforted a little in her encounter with life’s surprises. The day was damp and mild. There was a moist sweetness in the air, and the scent of ploughed and rain-soaked earth. Already the spring sowings had begun, and the slow teams moved solemnly to and fro over the January fields. Surely, thought Stella, ploughing was the most unhurried toil on earth. The plough came to the furrow’s end, and halted there, while men and horses seemed equally deep-sunk in meditation. Whole minutes later the whip would crack, and the team turn slowly for the backward furrow. She wouldn’t like to do a slow thing like that—and yet her heart would ache terribly when it was all gone, and she would see the great steam ploughs tearing over the mile-long fields of the West ... she would then think sorrowfully of those small, old Sussex fields—the oldest in the world—with their slow ploughing; she would crave all the more for the inheritance which Peter might have given her among them....
She was beginning to feel bad again—and it was a relief to find that the car dragged a little on the steering, pulling towards the hedge, even though she knew that it meant a punctured tyre. The Singer always punctured her tyres like a lady—she never indulged in vulgar bursts, with a bang like a shot-gun and a skid across the road. Stella berthed her beside the ditch, and began to jack her up.
Well, it was a nuisance, seeing that her father would be kept waiting. But she ought to be able to do the thing in ten minutes ... she wished she was wearing her old suit, though. She would make a horrible mess of herself, changing wheels on a dirty day.... The car was jacked up, and Stella was laying out her tools on the running board when she heard a horse’s hoofs in the lane.
It seemed at first merely a malignant coincidence that the rider should be Peter; yet, after all, the coincidence was not so great when she reflected that she was now on the lane between Conster and Starvecrow. She had heard that Peter had lately taken to riding a white horse—it was all part of the picture he was anxious to paint of himself as Squire. He would emphasize his Squirehood, since to it he had sacrificed himself as freeman and lover.
She had never seen him looking so much the Squire of tradition as he looked today. He wore a broadcloth coat, corduroy breeches, brown boots and leggings and a bowler hat. Of late he had rather increased in girth, and looked full his forty years. Unaccountably this fact stirred up Stella’s heart into a raging pity—Peter middle-aged and getting stout, Peter pathetically over-acting his part of country gentleman—it stirred all the love and pity of her heart more deeply than any figure of romance and youth. She hoped he would not stop, but considering her position she knew she was hoping too much.
He hitched the white horse to the nearest gate and dismounted. They had not been alone together since the summer, though they had met fairly often in company, and now she was conscious of a profound embarrassment and restraint in them both.
“Have you punctured?” he asked heavily.
“No, but the tyre has,” said Stella.
The reply was not like herself, it was part of the new attitude of defence—a poor defence, since she despised herself for being on guard, and was therefore weaker.
“You must let me help you change the wheel.”
“I can do it myself, quite easily. Don’t bother, Peter—you know I’m used to these things.”
“Yes, but it’s dirty work for a woman. You’ll spoil your clothes.”
She could not insist on refusing. She went to the other side of the car, where her spare wheel was fastened, and bent desperately over the straps. She wondered how the next few minutes would pass—in heaviness and pertness as they had begun, or in technical talk of tyres and nuts and jacks, or in the limp politeness of the knight errant and distressed lady.
The next moment Peter made a variation she had not expected.
“Stella, is it true that you’re going away?”
“I—I don’t know. It isn’t settled.... Who told you?”
“Rose told me—but it can’t be true.”
“Why not?”
“Your father surely would never go away at his time of life—and Rose spoke of the Colonies. He’d never go right away and start afresh like that.”
“Father’s heard of a very good billet near Montreal. We haven’t settled anything yet, but we both feel we’d like a change.”
“Why?”
“Well, why shouldn’t we? We’ve been here more than twenty years, and as for Father being old, he’s not too old to want to see a bit more of the world.”
Peter said nothing. He was taking off the wheel. When he had laid it against the bank he turned once more to Stella.
“It’s queer how I always manage to hear gossip about you. But it seems that this time I’m right, while last time I was wrong.”
“Everyone gets talked about in a little place like this.”
She tried to speak lightly, but she was distressed by the way he looked at her. Those pale blue eyes ... Alard eyes, Saxon eyes ... the eyes of the Old People looking at her out of the Old Country, and saying “Don’t go away....”
The next minute his lips repeated what his eyes had said:
“Don’t go away.”
She trembled, and stepped back from him on the road.
“I must go.”
“Indeed you mustn’t—I can’t bear it any longer if you do.”
“That’s why I must go.”
“No—no——”
He came towards her, and she stepped back further still.
“Don’t go, Stella. I can’t live here without you.”
“But, Peter, you must. What good am I doing you here?”
“You’re here. I know that you’re only a few miles away. I can think of you as near me. If you went right away....”
“It would be much better for both of us.”
“No, it wouldn’t. Stella, it will break me if you go. My only comfort during the last six hellish months has been that at least you’re not so very far from me in space, that I can see you, meet you, talk to you now and then....”
“But, Peter, that’s what I can’t bear. That’s why I’m going away.”
Her voice was small and thin with agitation. This was worse, a hundred times worse, than anything she had dreaded five minutes ago. She prayed incoherently for strength and sense.
“If that’s what you feel, you’ve got to stay,” Peter was saying. “Stella, you’ve shown me—Stella, you still care.... Oh, I’ll own up, I’ll own that I’ve been a fool, and a blackguard to you. But if you still care, I can be almost happy. We’ve still something left. Only you’ll have to stay.”
“You mustn’t talk like this.”
“Why not—if you still care? Oh, Stella, say it’s true—say you still care ... a little.”
She could not deny her love, even though she was more afraid of his terrible happiness than she had been before of his despair. To deny it would be a profaning of something holier than truth. All she could say was—
“If I love you, it’s all the more necessary for me to go away.”
“It’s not. If you love me, I can be to you at least what you are to me. But if you go away, you’ll be as wretched as I shall be without you.”
“No ... if I go away, we can forget.”
“Forget!—What?—each other?”
“Yes.”
The word was almost inaudible. She prayed with all her strength that Peter would not come to her across the road and take her in his arms. His words she could fight, but not his arms....
“Stella—you’re not telling me that you’re going away to forget me?”
“I must, Peter. And you’ll forget me, too. Then we’ll be able to live instead of just—loving.”
“But my love for you is my life—all the life I’ve got.”
“No—you’ve got Vera, and soon you’ll have your child. When I’ve gone you can go back to them.”
“I can’t—you don’t know what you’re talking about. If you think I can ever feel again for Vera what I felt when I was fool enough——”
“Oh, don’t....”
“But I will. Why should you delude yourself, and think I’m just being unfaithful to my wife? It’s to you I’ve been unfaithful. I was unfaithful to you with Vera—and now I’ve repented and come back.”
They faced each other, two yards apart in the little muddy lane. Behind Peter the three-wheeled car stood forlornly surrounded by tools, while his horse munched the long soaking tufts under the hedge. Behind Stella the hedge rose abruptly in a soaring crown. Looking up suddenly, she saw the delicate twigs shining against a sheet of pale blue sky in a faint sunlight. For some reason they linked themselves with her mind’s effort and her heart’s desire. Here was beauty which did not burn.... She suddenly found herself calm.
“Peter, dear, there’s no good talking like that. Let’s be sensible. Rightly or wrongly you’ve married someone else, and you’ve got to stand by it and so have I. If I stay on here we will only just be miserable—always hankering after each other, and striving for little bits of each other which can’t satisfy. Neither of us will be able to settle down and live an ordinary life, and after all that’s what we’re here for—not for adventures and big passions, but just to live ordinary lives and be happy in an ordinary way.”
“Oh, damn you!” cried Peter.
It was like the old times when he used to rail against her “sense,” against the way she always insisted that their love should be no star or cloud, but a tree, well rooted in the earth. It made it more difficult for her to go on, but she persevered.
“You’ve tried the other thing, Peter—you’ve tried sacrificing ordinary things like love and marriage to things like family pride and the love of a place. You’ve found it hasn’t worked, so don’t do the whole thing over again by sacrificing your home and family to a love which can never be satisfied.”
“But it can be,” said Peter—“at least it could if you were human.”
Stella, a little to his annoyance, didn’t pretend not to know what he meant.
“No, it couldn’t be—not satisfied. We could only satisfy a part of it—the desire part—the part which wants home and children would always have to go unsatisfied, and that’s as strong as the rest, though it makes less fuss.”
“And how much satisfaction shall we get through never seeing each other again?”
“We shall get it—elsewhere. You will at least be free to go back to Vera—and you did love her once, you can’t deny it—you did love her once. And I——”
“—Will be free to marry another man.”
“I don’t say that, Peter—though also I don’t say that I won’t. But I shall be free to live the life of a normal human being again, which I can’t now. I shan’t be bringing unrest and misery wherever I go—to myself and to you. Oh, Peter, I know we can save ourselves if we stop now, stop in time. We were both quite happy last time I was away—I was a fool ever to come back. I must go away now before it’s too late.”
“You’re utterly wrong. When you first went away I could be happy with Vera—I couldn’t now. All that’s over and done with for ever, I tell you. I can never go back to her, whether you go or stay. It’s nothing to do with your coming back—it’s her fault—and mine. We aren’t suited, and nothing can ever bring us together again now we’ve found it out.”
“Not even the child?...”
“No—not even that. Besides, how do I know.... Stella, all the things I’ve sacrificed you to have failed me, except Starvecrow.”
“You’ve still got Starvecrow.”
“Yes, but I.... Oh, Stella, don’t leave me alone, not even with Starvecrow. The place wants you, and when you’re gone I’m afraid.... Vera doesn’t belong there; it’s your place. Oh, Stella, don’t say you can live without me, any more than I can live without you.”
She longed to give him the answer of her heart—that she could never, never live without him, go without the dear privilege of seeing him, of speaking to him, of sacrificing to him all other thoughts and loves. But she forced herself to give him the answer of her head, for she knew that it would still be true when her heart had ceased to choke her with its beating.
“Peter, I don’t feel as if I could live without you, but I know I can—and I know you can live without me, if I go away. What you’ve said only shows me more clearly that I must go. I could never stop here now you know I love you.”
“And why not?—it’s your damned religion, I suppose—teaching you that it’s wrong to love—that all that sort of thing’s disgusting, unspiritual—you’ve got your head stuffed with all the muck a lot of celibate priests put into it, who think everything’s degrading.”
She felt the tears come into her eyes.
“Don’t, my dear. Do you really believe—you who’ve known me—that I think love is degrading?—or that my religion teaches me to think so? Why, it’s because all that is so lovely, so heavenly and so good, that it mustn’t be spoilt—by secrecy and lies, by being torn and divided. Oh, Peter, you know I love love....”
“So much that you can apparently shower it on anyone as long as you get the first victim out of the way.”
They both turned suddenly, as the jar of wheels sounded up the hill. It would be agony to have the discussion broken off here, but Stella knew that she mustn’t refuse any opportunity of ending it. No longer afraid of Peter’s arms, she crossed swiftly to the dismantled car.
“Please don’t wait. I can manage perfectly now. Please go, Peter—please go.”
“I’ll go only if you promise to see me again before you leave.”
“Of course I will—I’ll see you again; but you must go now.”
The wagon of Barline, heavy with crimson roots, was lurching and skidding down the hill towards them. Peter went to his standing horse, and rode him off into the field. Stella turned to the car, and, crouched in its shelter, allowed herself the luxury of tears.
She dried her eyes, came up from behind the car, and lost herself in the sheer labour of putting on the wheel. She was late, she must hurry; she strove, she sweated, and at last was once more in her seat, the damaged wheel strapped in its place, all the litter of tools in the dickie. She switched on the engine, pressed the self-starter pedal, slid the gear lever into place, and the little car ran forward. Then she realised what a relief it was to find herself in motion—some weight seemed to lift from her mind, and her numb thoughts began to move, to run to and fro. She was alive again.
But it hurt to be alive. Perhaps one was happier dead. For the thoughts that ran to and fro were in conflict, they formed themselves into two charging armies, meeting with horrible impact, terror and wounds. Her mind was a battle-field, divided against itself, and as usual the movement of the car seemed to make her thoughts more independent, more free of her control. They moved to the throb and mutter of the engine, as to some barbaric battle-music, some monotonous drum. She herself seemed to grow more and more detached from them. She was no longer herself—she was two selves—the self that loved Peter and the self that loved God. She was Stella Mount at prayer in Vinehall church—Stella Mount curled up on Peter’s knees ... long ago, at Starvecrow—Stella Mount receiving her soul again in absolution ... Stella Mount loving, loving, with a heart full of fiery sweetness.... Well, aren’t they a part of the same thing—love of man and love of God? Yes, they are—but today there is schism in the body.
During the last few months love had given her nothing but pain, for she had seemed to be swallowed up in it, away from the true richness of life. She had lost that calm, cheerful glow in which all things, even the dullest and most indifferent, had seemed interesting and worth while. Love had extinguished it. The difference she saw between religion and love was that religion shone through all things with a warm, soft light, making them all friendly and sweet, whereas love was like a fierce beam concentrated on one spot, leaving the rest of life in darkness, shining only on one object, and that so blindingly that it could not be borne.
She felt a sudden spasm of revolt against the choice forced upon her. Why should she have to choose between heaven and earth, which she knew in her heart were two parts of one completeness? Why should God want her to give up for His sake the loveliest thing that He had made?... Why should He want her to burn?
Now had come the time, she supposed, when she would have to pay for the faith which till then had been all joy, which in its warmth and definiteness had taught her almost too well how to love. It had made her more receptive, more warm, more eager, and had deprived her of those weapons of self-interest and pride and resentment which might have armed her now. Perhaps it was because they knew religion makes such good lovers that masters of the spiritual life have urged that the temptations of love are the only ones from which it is allowable to run away. It was her duty to run away from Peter now, because the only weapons with which she could fight him were more unworthy than surrender. With a grimmer, vaguer belief she might have escaped more easily—she might have seen evil in love, she might have distrusted happiness and shunned the flesh. But then she would not have been Stella Mount—she owed her very personality to her faith—she owed it all the intense joy she had had in human things. Should she stumble at the price?
If only the price were not Peter—Peter whom she loved, whom the love of God had taught her to love more than her heart could ever have compassed alone. Why must he be sacrificed? After all, she was offering him up to her own satisfaction—to her anxiety to keep hold of heavenly things. Why should he be butchered to give her soul a holiday? She almost hated herself—hated herself for her odious sense, for her cold-blooded practicalness. She proposed to go away not only so as to be out of temptation—let her be honest—but so that she could forget him and live the life of a normal happy woman ... which of course meant some other man.... No wonder he was disgusted with her—poor, honest, simple, unsatisfied Peter. She was proposing to desert him, sure of interior comforts he had never known, and secretly sure that the detestable adaptability of her nature would not allow her to mourn him long once he was far away. Oh, Peter—Peter!... “I will give you back the years that the locust hath eaten—I have it in my power. I can do it—I can give you back the locust’s years. I can do it still....”
She could do it still. She could tell her father that she did not want to go away after all—and he would be glad ... poor Father! He was only going for her sake. He would be glad to stay on among the places and the people that he loved. And she ... she could be a good, trusty friend to Peter, someone he could turn to in his loneliness, who would understand and help him with his plans for Alard and Starvecrow.... What nonsense she was talking. Silly hypocrite! Both sides of her, the Stella who loved Peter and the Stella who loved God, saw the futility of such an idea. She could never be any man’s friend—least of all Peter’s. If she stayed, it would be to love Peter, to be all that it was still possible for her to be to him, all that Vera was and the more that she was not.
But could she? Had she the power to love Peter with a love unspoilt by regret? Would she be able to bear the thought of her treachery to the Lord whose happy child she had been so long?—to His Mother and hers—to all His friends and hers, the saints—to all the great company of two worlds whom she would betray? For her the struggle contained no moral issue. It was simply a conflict between love and love. And all the while she knew in the depth of her heart that love cannot really be divided, and that her love of God held and sustained her love of Peter, as the cloud holds the rain-drop, and the shore the grain of sand.
The first houses of Ashford slid past, and she saw the many roofs of the railway-works. Traffic dislocated the strivings of her mind, and in time her thoughts once more became numb. They lay like the dead on the battle-field, the dead who would rise again.
Gervase came to see Stella, according to promise, the following Sunday. He found her looking tired and heavy-headed, and able only mechanically to sustain her interest in his plans. Also he still found her unapproachable—she was not cold or contrary, but reserved, feeding on herself.
He guessed the source of her trouble, but shrank from probing it—keeping the conversation to his own affairs with an egotism he would normally have been ashamed of. What he noticed most was the extinction of joy in her—she had always seemed to him so fundamentally happy, and it was her profound and so natural happiness which had first attracted him towards her religion. But now the lamp was out. He was not afraid for her—it did not strike him that she could possibly fail or drop under her burden; but his heart ached for her, alone in the Dark Night—that very Dark Night he himself had come through alone.... Now he stood, also alone, in a strange dawn which had somehow changed the world, as the fields are changed in the whiteness of a new day.
It was not till he got up to go that he dared try to come closer. They had been talking about the difficulties of the life he had chosen.
“I’m afraid Christianity’s a hard faith, my dear,” he said as he took her hand—“the closer you get to the Gospel the harder it is. You’ve no idea what a shock the Gospels gave me when I read them again last year, not having looked at them since I was a kid. I was expecting something rather meek-and-mild, with a gentle, womanly Saviour, and all sorts of kind and good-natured sentiments. Instead of which I find that the Kingdom of Heaven is for the violent, while the Lion of Judah roars in the Temple courts ... He built His Church upon a Rock, and sometimes we hit that Rock mighty hard.”
“But I do hope you’ll be happy, Gervase.”
“I’m sure of that, though whether it will be in a way that will be easily recognised as happiness I’m not so sure.”
“When are you going?”
“It’s not quite settled yet. I leave off at Gillingham’s on the twenty-fifth, and I expect I’ll go to Thunders early in February. I’ll come and see you again before then. Goodbye, my dear.”
He kissed her hand before letting it go.
He had said nothing to her about his sister Jenny, though her marriage was so close as to seem almost more critical than his own departure. He felt the unfairness of sharing with Stella so difficult a secret, also he realised that the smaller the circle to which it was confined the smaller the catastrophe when it was either accidentally discovered or deliberately revealed.
About a week before the day actually fixed for the wedding, the former seemed more likely. Jenny met Gervase on his return from Ashford with a pale, disconcerted face.
“Father guesses something’s up,” she said briefly.
“What?—How?—Has anyone told him?”
“No—he doesn’t really know anything, thank heaven—at least anything vital. But he’s heard I was at tea at Fourhouses twice last week. One of the Dengates called for some eggs, I remember, and she must have told Rose when Rose was messing about in the village. He’s being heavily sarcastic, and asking me if I wouldn’t like Mrs. Appleby asked in to tea, so that I won’t have to walk so far to gratify my democratic tastes.”
“But Peter’s had tea with them, too—you told me it was he who introduced you.”
“Yes, but that only makes it worse. Peter’s been at me as well—says he’d never have taken me there if he’d thought I hadn’t a better sense of my position. He was very solemn about it, poor old Peter.”
“But of course they don’t suspect any reason.”
“No, but I’m afraid they will. I’m not likely to have gone there without some motive—twice, too—and, you see, I’ve been so secret about it, never mentioned it at home, as I should have done if I’d had tea at Glasseye or Monkings or anywhere like that. They must think I’ve some reason for keeping quiet.... I hope they won’t question me, for I’m a bad liar.”
“You’ll be married in ten days—I don’t suppose they’ll get really suspicious before that.”
However, a certain amount of reflection made him uneasy, and after dinner he drove over to Fourhouses, to discuss the matter with Ben Godfrey himself.
When he came back, he went straight up to Jenny’s room—she had gone to bed early, so as to give her family less time for asking questions.
“Well, my dear,” he said when she let him in, “I’ve talked it over with Ben, and we both think that you’ll have to get married at once.”
“At once!—But can we?”
“Yes—the law allows you to get married the day after tomorrow. It’ll cost thirty pounds, but Fourhouses can rise to that, and it’s much better to get the thing over before it’s found out. Not that anyone could stop you, but it would be a maddening business if they tried, and anyhow I think the parents will take it easier if it’s too late to do anything.”
“I think you’re quite right—absolutely right. But——”
“But what?”
“Oh, nothing—only it seems such a jump, now I’m standing right on the edge.”
“You’re not afraid, Jenny?”
“No—only in the way that everyone’s afraid of a big thing. But you’re absolutely right. Now there’s a chance of us being found out, we must act at once. I don’t want to have to tell any lies about Ben. I suppose he’ll go up to town tomorrow.”
“Yes, and you and I will follow him the day after. I must see about a day off. I’m not quite clear as to what one does exactly to get a special license, but he’ll go to the Court of Faculties and they’ll show him how. He’s going to wire me at Gillingham’s—lucky I’m still there.”
“I don’t envy you, Gervase, having to break the news to Father and Mother.”
“No, I don’t think it’ll be much fun. But really it will be better than if you wrote—I can let them down more gently, and they won’t feel quite so outraged. As for the row—there’ll be one about my own little plan in a short time, so I may as well get used to them.”
Jenny said nothing. She had known of Gervase’s “little plan” only for the last week, and she had for it all the dread and dislike which the active Englishwoman instinctively feels for the contemplative and supernatural—reinforced now by the happy lover’s desire to see all the world in love. The thought of her brother, with all his eager experimental joy in life, all his profound yet untried capacity for love, taking vows of poverty and celibacy, filled her with grief and indignation—she felt that he was being driven by the backwash of his disappointment over Stella Mount, and blamed “those Priests,” who she felt had unduly influenced him at a critical time. However, after her first passionate protest, she had made no effort to oppose him, feeling that she owed him at least silence for all that he had done to help her in her own adventure, and trusting to time and recovery to show him his folly. She was a little reassured by the knowledge that he could not take his final vows for many years to come.
He was aware of this one constraint between them, and coming over to her as she lay in bed, he gave her a kiss. For some unfathomable reason it stung her, and turning over on her side she burst into tears.
“Jenny, Jenny darling—don’t cry. Oh, why ... Jenny, if you’ve any doubts, tell me before it’s too late, and I’ll help you out—I promise. Anything rather than....”
“Oh, don’t, Gervase. It isn’t that. Can’t you understand? It’s—oh, I suppose all women feel like this—not big enough ... afraid....”
The wedding had always been planned to take place in London, so it was merely the time that was being altered. Both Gervase and Jenny had seen, and Ben Godfrey had been brought reluctantly to see, that to be married at home would double the risks; so a room had been taken and a bag of Godfrey’s clothes deposited in a Paddington parish, where the Vicar was liberal in his interpretation of the laws of residence, and an ordinary licence procured. The change of plans necessitated a special licence, and Jenny had to wait till Gervase came home the next evening to know if all was in order. However, after the shock of its inception, the new scheme worked smoothly. Jenny came down early the next morning and breakfasted with Gervase, then drove off in Henry Ford, leaving a message with Wills that she had gone to London for the day, and her brother was driving her as far as Ashford.
Everything was so quiet and matter-of-fact as to seem to her almost normal—she could not quite realise that she had left her old life behind her at Conster, even more completely than most brides leaving their father’s house; that ahead of her was not only all the difference between single and married, but all the difference between Alard and Godfrey, Conster and Fourhouses. She was not only leaving her home, but her class, her customs, her acquaintance. It was not till she was standing beside Godfrey in a strange, dark church, before a strange clergyman, that she realised the full strangeness of it all. For a moment her head swam with terror—she found herself full of a desperate longing to wake up in her bed at Conster and find it was a dream—she thought of the catastrophe of Mary’s marriage, and she knew that she was taking far bigger risks than Mary.... And through all this turmoil she could hear herself saying quite calmly—“I, Janet Christine, take thee, Benjamin, to be my wedded husband.” Some mechanical part of her was going on with the business, while her emotions cowered and swooned. Now she was signing her name in the register—Janet Christine Godfrey—now she was shaking hands with the clergyman and answering his inane remarks with inanities of her own. It was too late to draw back—she had plunged—Jenny Alard was dead.
They had lunch at a restaurant in Praed Street, and afterwards Gervase went with them to Paddington Station and saw them off to Cornwall. They were not going to be away long, partly on account of Godfrey’s spring sowings, and partly because Jenny felt that she could not leave her brother any length of time to stand the racket. She would still have liked to suppress his share in the business, but Gervase was firm—“It’s treating them better,” he said, “and, besides, it will help them a lot to have a scapegoat on the premises.”
Jenny felt almost sentimental in parting from the little brother, who had helped her so much in the path she had chosen, and who had taken for himself so rough and ridiculous a road. She kissed him in the carriage doorway, made him promise to write to her, and then did her best to put him out of her head for the first happy hours of the honeymoon.
Circumstances made this fairly easy. By the time they were at Mullion, watching the low lamps of the stars hanging over the violet mists that veiled Poldhu, even Gervase seemed very far away, and the household and life of Conster Manor almost as if they had never been. Nothing was real but herself and Ben, alone together in the midst of life, each most completely the other’s desire and possession. When she looked into his eyes, full of their new joy and trouble, the husband’s eyes which held also the tenderness of the father and the simplicity of the child, there was no longer any past or future, but only the present—“I love.”
The next day, however, recalled her rather abruptly to thoughts of her scapegoat. She received a telegram—
“Father kicked me out address Church Cottage Vinehall don’t worry Gervase.”
Jenny was conscience-stricken, though she knew that Gervase would not be much hurt by his exile. But she was anxious to hear what had happened, and waited restlessly for a letter. None came, but the next morning another telegram.
“Father had stroke please come home Gervase.”
So Jenny Godfrey packed up her things and came home after two days’ honeymoon. Happiness is supposed to make time short, but those two days had seemed like twenty years.
Gervase reproached himself for having done his part of the business badly, though he never felt quite sure how exactly he had blundered. He had reached Conster two hours before dinner, and trusted that this phenomenon might prepare his father for some surprise. But, disappointingly, Sir John did not notice his return—he had grown lately to think less and less about his youngest son, who was seldom at home and whom he looked upon as an outsider. Gervase had deliberately alienated himself from Alard, and Sir John could never, in spite of Peter’s efforts, be brought properly to consider him as an heir. His goings out and his comings in were of little consequence to the head of the house. So when at six o’clock Gervase came into the study, his father was quite unimpressed.
“May I speak to you for a minute, Sir?”
“Well, well—what is it?”
Sir John dipped Country Life the fraction of an inch to imply a temporary hearing.
“It’s about Jenny, Sir.”
“Well, what about her?”
“She’s—I’ve been with her in town today. I’ve just come back. She asked me to tell you about her and young Godfrey.”
“What’s that? Speak up, Sir, can’t you? I can’t hear when you mumble. Come and stand where I can see you.”
Gervase came and stood on the hearthrug. He was beginning to feel nervous. Uncomfortable memories of childhood rushed up confusedly from the back of his mind, and gave him sore feelings of helplessness and inferiority.
“It’s about Jenny and young Godfrey, Sir.”
“Godfrey! Who’s Godfrey?”
“Benjamin Godfrey of Fourhouses—the man who bought your Snailham land.”
“Well, what about him?”
“It’s about him and Jenny, Sir.”
“Well, what about ’em? What the devil’s he got to do with Jenny?”
“Don’t you remember she went to tea at Fourhouses last week?”
“She hasn’t been there again, has she?”
Gervase considered that the subject had been sufficiently led up to—anyhow he could stand no more of the preliminaries.
“Well, yes, Sir—at least she’s having tea with him now—at least not tea.... I mean, they were married this morning.”
Sir John dropped Country Life.
“Married this morning,” he repeated in a lame, normal voice.
“Yes, Sir, at St. Ethelburga’s, Paddington. They’ve been in love with each other for some time, but as they didn’t expect you’d quite see things as they did, they thought they’d better wait to tell you till after the ceremony.”
“And where—where are they now?”
“At Mullion, Sir—in Cornwall.”
Sir John said nothing. His face turned grey, and he trembled. Gervase was distressed.
“Don’t take it so dreadfully to heart, Father. I’m sure it’s really for the best. He’s a decent chap, and very well-to-do—he’ll be able to give her everything she’s been accustomed to”—remembering an old tag.
“Get out!” said Sir John suddenly.
“I’m frightfully sorry if you think we’ve treated you badly, Sir. But really we tried to do it in the way we thought would hurt you least.”
“Get out!” repeated his father—“get out of here. This is your doing, with your socialism, with your contempt for your own family, with your.... Get out of the room, or I’ll....”
His shaking hand groped round for a missile, and Gervase moved hastily to the door, too late, however, to escape a bound volume of Punch, which preceded him into the hall.
Wills was standing outside the dining-room door with a tray, and Gervase found it very difficult to look dignified. Such an attitude was even more difficult to keep up during the alarms that followed. He retreated to his bedroom, taking Punch with him, partly as a solace, partly in a feeble hope of persuading Wills that to have a book thrown at your head is a normal way of borrowing it. He had not been alone a quarter of an hour before he was summoned by Speller, his mother’s maid. There followed an interview which began in reproaches, passed on to an enquiry into Jenny’s luggage—had she bought brushes and sponges in London, since she had taken nothing away?—and ended cloudily in hysterics and lavender water. Gervase went back to his room, which ten minutes later was entered by the sobbing Doris, who informed him he had “killed Mother,” who apparently required a post-mortem interview. Once again he went down to the boudoir with its rose-coloured lights and heavy scents of restoratives, and to the jerky accompaniment of Doris’s weeping told his story over again. He had to tell it a fourth time to Peter, who had been summoned from Starvecrow, and found that it was hardening into set phrases, and sounded rather like the patter of a guide recounting some historic elopement from a great house.
“They’ve been in love for some time, but as they didn’t expect you’d quite see things as they did——”
“My God!” said Peter.
He was perhaps the most scandalised of all the Alards, and had about him a solemn air of wounding which was more distressing to Gervase than his father’s wrath.
“I introduced him to her,” he said heavily—“I introduced him. I never thought ... how could I think ... that she held herself so cheap—all of us so cheap.”
“You really needn’t treat the matter as if Jenny had married the rag-and-bone man——” began Gervase.
“I know Godfrey’s position quite well.”
“He farms his own land, and comes of good old stock. He’s well off, and will be able to give her everything she’s been accustomed to——”
“He won’t. She’s been accustomed to the society of gentlepeople, and he’ll never be able to give her that. She’s gone to live on a farm, where she’ll have her meals in the kitchen with the farm-men. I tell you I know the Godfreys, and they’re nothing more than a respectable, good sort of farming people who’ve done well out of the war. At least, I won’t call them even that now,” he added fiercely—“I won’t call a man respectable who worms himself into intimacy with my sister on the strength of my having introduced him.”
“However, it’s some comfort to think they’ve gone to the Poldhu hotel at Mullion,” said Lady Alard; “the Blakelocks were there once, you know, Doris, and the Reggie Mulcasters. She won’t notice the difference quite so terribly since he’s taken her there.”
“Yes, she will,” said Peter—“she’ll notice the difference between the kind of man she’s been used to meeting here and a working farmer, who wasn’t even an officer during the war. If she doesn’t—I’ll think worse of her even than I do now. And as for you——” turning suddenly on Gervase—“I don’t trust myself to tell you what I think of you. I expect you’re pleased that we’ve suffered this disgrace—that a lady of our house has married into the peasantry. You think it’s democratic and all that. You’re glad—don’t say you’re not.”
“Yes, I am glad, because Jenny’s happy. You, none of you, seem to think of that. You don’t seem to think that ‘the kind of man she’s been meeting here’ hasn’t been the slightest use to her—that all he’s done has been to trouble her and trifle with her and then go off and marry money—that now at last she’s met a man who’s treated her honourably——”
“Honourably! He’s treated her like the adventurer he is. Oh, it’s a fine thing of him to marry into our family, even if she hasn’t got a penny—his ancestors were our serfs—they ran at our people’s stirrups, and our men had the droit du seigneur of their women——”
“And pulled out the teeth of your wife’s forefathers,” said Gervase, losing his temper. “If you’re going back five hundred years, I don’t think your own marriage will bear the test.”
He knew that if he stayed he would quarrel with them all, and he did not want to do that, for he was really sorry for them, wounded in their most sensitive feelings of family pride. He walked out of the room, and made for the attic stairs, seeking the rest and dignity of solitude. But it was not to be. The door of his father’s dressing-room opened as he passed, and Sir John came out on the landing, already dressed for dinner.
“You understand that after what has happened I cannot keep you here.”
He was quite calm now, and rather terrifying.
“I—oh, no—I mean yes, of course,” stammered Gervase.
“You have work at Ashford, so you can go and lodge near it. Or you can go to your Ritualist friends at Vinehall. I refuse to have you here after your treachery. You are a traitor, Sir—to your own family.”
“When—when would you like me to go?”
“You can stay till tomorrow morning.”
“Thanks—I’ll leave tonight.”
So the day’s catastrophe ended in Gervase driving off through the darkness in Henry Ford, his suit-case and a few parcels of books behind him. He had decided to go to Luce—the Priest would take him in till he was able to go to Thunders Abbey.
“Well, anyhow, I’m spared that other row,” he thought to himself; “or, rather, I’ve got through two rows in one. Father won’t mind what I do with myself after this.”
He felt rather forlorn as the lorry’s lights swept up the Vinehall road. During the last few months he had been stripped of so many things—his devotion to Stella, his comradeship with Jenny—he knew that he could never be to her what he had been before she married—and now his family and his home. And all he had to look forward to was a further, more complete stripping, even of the clothes he wore, so that in all the world he would own nothing.
Any lack of cordiality in Luce’s welcome was made up by his quite matter-of-fact acceptance of this sudden descent upon him at a late hour of a young man and all his worldly goods, including a Ford lorry. The latter was given the inn stable as a refuge, while Gervase was told he could have the spare bedroom as long as he liked if he would clear out the apples. This done and some porridge eaten, he went to bed, utterly worn out, and feeling less like Gervase Alard than he had ever felt in his life.
The next day he went off to work as usual, sending a telegram to Jenny on his way. When he came back he found a message had arrived from Conster—he must go home at once; his father had had a stroke.
“I’ve a ghastly feeling it was brought on by this row,” he said to Luce, as he filled up the lorry’s tank for the new journey.
“It must have been,” was all the reassurance he got.
Gervase felt wretched enough. The message, which had been left by Dr. Mount, gave no details, and as the cottage was empty when he called, there had been no verbal additions or explanations. He thought of calling at the doctor’s on his way to Leasan—he had meant to go there anyhow this evening and tell them about Jenny’s marriage—but he decided it was best to lose no time, and drove straight to Conster.
Here he received his first respite. The stroke was not a severe one, and Dr. Mount was practically certain Sir John would get over it. However, he seemed to think the other members of the family ought to be sent for, and Doris had telegraphed to Mary but not to Jenny, as she didn’t think Jenny deserved it after what she had done. She did not think Gervase deserved it, either, but evidently Dr. Mount had taken it upon himself to decide, and left a message without consulting her.
He was not allowed to go near his father that night, and spent the hours intermittently sleeping and waking in his little cold bedroom, now empty of everything that was really his. The next morning he went out and sent a telegram to Jenny. But by the time she arrived her presence was useless. Sir John had recovered consciousness and would see none of his erring children. Mary, Gervase and Jenny waited together in the drawing-room in hopes that the edict would be revoked. But, as Doris came down to tell them at intervals, it was no use whatever. He refused to let them come near him—indeed, the mere mention of their names seemed to irritate him dangerously. Towards evening Dr. Mount advised them to go away.
“I’m afraid there’s no hope, at present anyhow—and it’s best not to worry him. There’s often a very great irritability in these cases. He may become calmer as his condition improves.”
So Jenny, scared and tired, was taken away by her husband to the shelter of Fourhouses, and Gervase prepared to go back to Vinehall. They were both rather guiltily conscious that they did not pity those who had been denied the presence so much as those who were bound to it—Doris, who as unofficial nurse and substitute scapegoat, was already beginning to show signs of wear and tear—and Peter, worn with a growing sense of responsibility and the uncertain future brought a step nearer ... no doubt the younger ones had made an easy escape.
Only Mary looked a bit wistful.
“It’s so long since I’ve seen him,” she said as she stood on the steps, waiting for the car which was to take her back to Hastings.
“Cheer up, my dear—he’ll change his mind when he gets better,” said Gervase.
Mary shook her head. She had altered strikingly since he had seen her last. She seemed all clothes—faultless, beautiful clothes, which seemed mysteriously a part of herself so that it was difficult to imagine her without them. Her real self had shrunk, faded, become something like a whisper or a ghost—she was less Mary Pembroke than a suit of lovely grey velvet and fur which had somehow come alive and taken the simulacrum of a woman to show off its beauty.
“Where are you going?” he asked her, moved with a sudden anxious pity.
“Back to Hastings. I’ve found a very comfortable small hotel, and I think I’ll stay there till I know more how things are going with Father. I expect I shall run over and see Jenny now and then.”
“I’m glad you’re going to do that,” he cried warmly—“it’ll mean a lot to her to have one of the family with her—especially when I’m gone.”
“You?—where are you going?”
He found himself quite unable to tell her of what he was looking forward to.
“Oh, my work at Ashford comes to an end in a week, and I’ll have to pack off somewhere else.”
He kissed her before she went away, and found an unexpected warmth in her lips. After all, the real Mary had always lived very far beneath the surface, and as years went by and the surface had become more and more ravaged she had retreated deeper and deeper down. But he was glad to think that at the bottom, and perhaps by queer, perverse means, she had somehow managed to keep herself alive.
Jenny’s sudden return had the disadvantage of bringing her back into the midst of her family while the scandal of her marriage was still hot. As her father refused to see her, Ben had suggested taking her away again, but Jenny did not like to leave while Sir John was still in any danger, and by the time all danger was past, her husband’s affairs had once more fast bound him to the farm—besides, the various members of her family had adjusted themselves to her defection, and settled down either into hostility or championship, according to their own status in the tribe.
It was characteristic of the house of Alard that even its revolted members camped round it in its evil hour, held to it by human feeling after all other links were broken. No one would leave the neighbourhood while Sir John continued ill and shaken. Mary stayed at Hastings, and Gervase stayed at Vinehall, even after his apprenticeship to Gillingham’s had finally come to an end, and the men had given him a farewell oyster supper at the White Lion, with a presentation wrist-watch to add to the little stock of possessions he would have to give up in a few weeks.
However, by the beginning of February, Sir John had so far recovered as to make any waiting unnecessary. He still refused to see his disloyal son and rebellious daughters. His illness seemed to have hardened his obstinacy, and to have brought about certain irritable conditions which sometimes approached violence and made it impossible to attempt any persuasion.
He came downstairs and took up his indoor life as usual, though out of doors he no longer rode about on his grey horse. The entire overseership of the estate devolved on Peter, with the additional burden that his responsibility was without authority—his father insisted on retaining the headship and on revising or overthrowing his decisions. Nothing could be done without reference to him, and his illness seemed to have made him queerly perverse. He insisted that an offer from a firm of timber-merchants for the whole of Little Sowden Wood should be refused, though Peter explained to him that at present the wood actually cost more in its upkeep than was realised by the underwood sales in the local market.
“Why should I have one of the finest woods on my estate smashed up by a firm of war-profiteers? Confound you, Sir! Many’s the fox that hounds have put up in Sowden, and the place was thick when Conster started building.”
“But we’re in desperate need of ready money, Father. We can’t afford to start repairs at Glasseye, and this is the third year we’ve put off. There’s Monkings, too,—the place is falling to pieces, and Luck says he’ll quit if he has to wait any longer.”
“Quit?—Let him. He needn’t threaten me. Tenants aren’t so scarce.”
“Good tenants are. We aren’t likely to get a man who farms the land as well as Luck. He got the Penny field to carry seven bushel to the acre last year. He’s clockwork with the rent, too—you know the trouble we have over rent.”
“But I won’t have Sowden cut down to keep him. Timber! I thought we were done with that shame when the war ended, and we’d lost Eleven Pounder and Little Horn.”
“But I can’t see anything more shameful in selling timber than in selling land, and you sold that Snailham piece last year to——”
Peter tried to retrieve his blunder, but his mind was not for quick manœuvres and all he could do was to flush and turn guiltily silent. His father’s anger blazed at once.
“Yes—we sold land last year, and a good business we made of it, didn’t we! The bounder thought he’d bought my daughter into the bargain. He thought he’d got the pull of us because we were glad to sell. I tell you, I’ll sell no more of my land, if it puts such ideas into the heads of the rascals that buy it, if it makes all the beastly tenants and small-holders within thirty miles think they can come and slap me on the back and make love to my daughters and treat me as one of themselves. I’ll not sell another foot as long as I live. When I die, Sir, you may not get a penny, but you’ll get the biggest estate in East Sussex.”
Peter groaned.
Gervase did not think it advisable to go near his family when the time came for him to leave Vinehall for Thunders Abbey. He would have liked to see his mother, but knew too well that the interview would end only in eau de Cologne and burnt feathers. Since he was exiled, it was best to accept his exile as a working principle and not go near the house. He knew that later on he would be given opportunities to see his parents, and by then time might have made them respectively less hostile and less hysterical.
So he wrote his mother a very affectionate letter, trying to explain what he was going to do, but not putting any great faith in her understanding him. He told her that he would be able to come and see her later, and sent his love to Doris and Peter and his father. He also wrote a line to Mary. His personal farewells were for Stella and Jenny only.
To Stella he said goodbye the day before he left. He found her making preparations for her own departure. She and her father were leaving for Canada as soon as Mrs. Peter Alard was through her confinement, which she expected in a couple of weeks. The practice had been sold, and the escape into a new life and a new country was no longer a possible resort of desperation but a fixed doom for her unwilling heart.
All she had been able to do during the last weeks had been to let her father act without interference. Her entire conflict had been set in withholding herself from last-moment entreaties to stay, from attempts at persuading him to withdraw from negotiations over the practice, from suggestions that their departure should be put off to the end of the summer. So negative had been her battle that she had never felt the thrill of combat—instead she felt utterly crushed and weary. She felt both dead and afraid ... the only moments in which she seemed to live were the moments in which she encountered Peter, passing him occasionally on the road or meeting him in a neighbour’s house. They were terrible moments of fiery concentrated life—she was glad afterwards to fall back into her stupor. She and he had had no more private conversations—she was able to pursue her negative battle to the extent of avoiding these—but his mere presence seemed to make alive a Stella Mount who was dying, whose death she sometimes thought of as a blessing and sometimes as a curse.
When she saw Gervase, so quiet and sweet-tempered and happy, she wondered if she would possibly be like that when her love for Peter was dead, as his for her was dead. But then his love for her was not dead—that was the whole point; like Enoch, it was translated—it was not, because God had taken it. As she looked into his peaceful eyes, her own filled with tears. She wondered if he had won his battle so quickly because it had been a slighter one than hers, or because he was better armed. Probably because of both. He was younger than she, his passions still slept in his austere, hard-working youth—and would probably awake only to find themselves reborn in his religious life—also, she realised that he might be naturally spiritual, whereas she had never been more than spiritually natural—a distinction. He was a man born to love God as she had been born to love men, and she knew that, in spite of all he said, he would have found his beloved sooner or later without any help of hers.
“Goodbye, dear Gervase,” she said, and pressed his hand.
“Goodbye, Stella”—surprisingly he kissed her, like another girl. She had not thought he would dare kiss her at all, and this warm, light, natural kiss—the kiss of a gentle friend—showed her a self-conquest more complete than any she had imagined—certainly than any she would ever know. She might be strong enough to deny her kisses to Peter, but she would never be able to give him the kiss of a friend.
The next day Gervase drove off to Thunders Abbey, and went by way of Icklesham. It was a windless afternoon; the first scent of primroses hid in the hollows of the lanes, and the light of the sun, raking over the fields, was primrose-coloured on the grass. The browsing sheep and cattle cast long shadows, and the shadows of the leafless trees were clear, a delicate tracery at their roots.
As he drove up and down the steep, wheel-scarred lanes he watched familiar farms and spinneys go by as if it were for the last time. He knew that he would see them all many times after this, but somehow it would not be the same. Gervase Alard would be dead, as Jenny Alard was dead, and he felt as Jenny had felt the night before her wedding—glad and yet afraid. He remembered her words—“Can’t you understand?—It’s because I don’t feel big enough ... afraid.” He, too, felt afraid of his new life, and for the same reason—because he knew he was not big enough. Yet, in spite of her fear, Jenny had gone on, and now she was happy. And he was going on, and perhaps he would be happy, too.
He found her baking little cakes for tea. She tapped on the kitchen window when the lorry rattled into the yard, and he came in and took her in his arms, in spite of her protest that she was all over flour.
“Hullo, Gervase! this is splendid—I haven’t seen you for ages.”
She was wearing a blue gingham overall, and with her face flushed at the fire, and her background of brick, scrubbed wood and painted canisters, she looked more like a farmer’s wife than he could ever have imagined possible. She had grown plump, too, since her marriage, and her eyes had changed—they looked bright, yet half asleep, like a cat’s eyes.
“I’ve come to say goodbye, Jen. I’m off to Thunders.”
“When?—Tomorrow?”
“No—this very evening. I’ll go straight on from here.”
“Gervase!”
She looked sad—she understood him less than ever now.
“Father Lawrence wrote two days ago and said they were able to take me—and I’ve nothing to wait for. Father won’t see me. I’ve written to Mother—I thought it better than farewells in the flesh.”
“And Stella?”
“I’ve said goodbye to her.”
“Gervase, I know—I feel sure you’re only doing this because of her.”
“Well, I can’t show you now that you’re wrong, but I hope time will.”
“I hope it won’t show you that you’re wrong—when it’s too late. My dear——” she went up to him and put her hands on his shoulders—“My dear, you’re so young.”
“Don’t, Jen.”
“But it’s true. Why can’t you wait till you’ve seen more of life—till you’ve lived, in fact?”
“Because I don’t want to give God just the fag-end of myself, the leavings of what you call life. I want to give Him the best I’ve got—all my best years.”
“If Stella had accepted you, you would have married her, and we shouldn’t have heard anything about all this.”
“That’s true. But she refused me, and it was her refusal which showed me the life I was meant for. The fact that I loved Stella, and she would not have me, showed me that God does not want me to marry.”
He seemed to Jenny transparent and rather silly, like a child.
“But you’re only twenty-one,” she persisted gently, as she would with a child. “You’d have been sure to fall in love again and marry someone else.”
“And there’s no good telling you I’m sure I shouldn’t. However, my dear, I’m not going to prison on a life sentence—I can come out tomorrow if I don’t like it; and probably for a year or so the whole community will be trying to turn me out—they’re as much afraid of a mistake as you are.”
“I don’t trust them. They only too seldom get hold of men in your position.”
“My dear, don’t let’s talk any more about me. It’s making us quarrel, and probably this is the last time I shall see you for months. Tell me how you’ve been getting on. Has the County called yet?”
“Not so as you’d notice. As a matter of fact, the Fullers left cards the other day. Agney’s far enough off for it not to matter very much, and I think Mrs. Fuller has a reputation for being broad-minded which she’s had to live up to. But I’m getting to like Ben’s friends—I told you I should. There’s the Boormans of Frays Land and the Hatches of Old Place, and a very nice, well-educated bailiff at Roughter, who collects prints and old furniture. I see a lot of them—they’ve been here and I’ve been to their houses; and as Mrs. Godfrey and the girls keep to their own part of the house, I’ve got my hands full from morning to night, and don’t have much time to think about anything I may have lost.”
“It seems to suit you, anyhow. You look fine.”
“I feel splendid. Of course, I couldn’t do it if it wasn’t for Ben. I don’t pretend I’ve found everything in the life agreeable, after what I’ve been used to. But Ben makes everything worth doing and worth bearing.”
“And that’s how it is with me. Can’t you understand now, Jen?—I’ve got something, too, which makes it all worth doing and worth bearing—though I don’t pretend, any more than you do, that I expect to find everything in my life agreeable.”
“I’ll try to understand, Gervase; but I don’t suppose I’ll succeed—and you really can’t expect it of me.”
“All right, I won’t, just yet.” He picked his cap and gloves off the table—“I really must be going now.”
“Won’t you stay and have some tea? I’ve got over the failure stage in cakes—I really think these will be quite eatable.”
“No, thanks very much, I mustn’t stay. It’ll take Henry quite two hours to get to Brighton.”
She did not seem to hear him—she was listening. He could hear nothing, but a moment later a footstep sounded in the yard.
“There he is,” said Jenny.
She went out into the passage and closed the door behind her.
He was left alone in the big kitchen. The fire and the kettle hummed together to the ticking of the clock, and there was a soft, sweet smell of baking cakes. The last of the sunshine was spilling through the window on to the scrubbed, deal table, and over all the scene hung an impalpable atmosphere of comfort, warmth and peace. Outside in the passage he could hear the murmuring of a man’s and a woman’s voices.... His eyes suddenly filled with tears.
They were gone when Jenny came back into the room with Ben, who had evidently been told the reason for his brother-in-law’s visit, for he shook hands in clumsy silence.
“How do you do?” said Gervase—“and goodbye.”
Ben still said nothing. He neither approved nor understood young Alard’s ways. Religion was for him the ten commandments, Parson’s tithes, and harvest thanksgivings—anything further smacked of Chapel and the piety of small-holders. But he was too fond of Gervase to say openly what was in his heart, and as he was not used to saying anything else, he was driven into an awkward but well-meaning silence.
“I’m glad you’re taking Henry with you,” said Jenny, attempting lightness—“It would have been dreadful if you’d had to leave him behind.”
“Yes—‘The Arab’s Farewell to His Steed’ wouldn’t have been in it. But I’m taking him as my dowry. They’ll find some use for him at Thunders—he’s got at least one cylinder working. If they hadn’t wanted him I’d have given him to Ben—just to encourage him to start machinery on the farm.”
“I’d sooner keep my horses, thank you,” said Ben, relieved at having something to say at last. “Give me a horse-ploughed field, even if it does take twice the labour.”
“But you’ll be getting a tractor soon, won’t you? That’s another idea altogether, and you’ll never find horses to beat that.”
Thus talking of machinery the three of them went to the door, and said goodbye under cover of argument.
“You’ll see me again before long,” cried Gervase, as he drove off.
“Will you be able to write to us?”
“Of course I will—look out for a letter in a day or two.”
With hideous grindings, explosions and plaints, the lorry went off down the drive. As it disappeared between the hedgerows, Jenny felt her heart contract in a pang of helpless pity.
“Oh, Ben ... he’s so young—and he’s never had anything.”
She would have cried, but her husband’s arm slipped round her, drawing her back into the darkening house.
Jenny had been candid with Gervase in her account of herself. She was happy—supremely so—but there was much that would have been difficult were it not for the love which “made everything worth doing and worth bearing.” She had nothing to complain of in Ben himself. He was after marriage the same as he had been before it—gentle, homely, simple and upright, with a streak of instinctive refinement which compensated for any lack of stress on the physical cleanliness which was the god of her former tribe. It is true that he expected more of her than Jim Parish, for instance, would have done. The sight of Jenny rising at half-past six to light the kitchen fire, cooking the breakfast, and doing all the housework with the help of one small girl, did not strike him as the act of wifely devotion and Spartan virtue that it seemed to her and would have seemed to Jim. It was what the women of his experience did invariably, and with a certain naïve thickheadedness he had not expected Jenny, taken from a home of eight o’clock risings, to be different. But in all other ways he was considerate—ways in which the men of her class would most probably not have considered her; and she soon became used to the physical labour of her days. Indeed, after the first surprise at his attitude, she realised that anything else would have brought an atmosphere of unreality into the life which she loved because it was so genuine. Farmers’ wives—even prosperous farmers’ wives—did not lie in bed till eight, or sit idle while the servants worked; and Jenny was now a farmer’s wife—Mrs. Ben Godfrey of Fourhouses—with her place to keep clean, her husband and her husband’s men to feed, her dairy and her poultry to attend to.
But though she loved Ben, and loved working for him, there were other things that were hard, and she was too clear-headed not to acknowledge the difficulties she had chosen. She often longed to be alone with her husband, instead of having to share him with his mother and sisters. According to yeoman custom, his wife had been brought into his home, which was also his family’s home, and she must take what she found there. Jenny realised that she might have been worse off—she was genuinely fond of Mrs. Godfrey and Lily and Jane, and their separate quarters gave her a privacy and a freedom she would not have had on many farms—but she would have been less sensitive to the gulf between her new life and the old if she had been alone with Ben. His women, with their constant absorption in housework—making it not so much a duty to be done and then forgotten as a religion pervading the whole life—with their arbitrary standards of decorum, and their total lack of interest in any mental processes—often begot in her revolt and weariness, especially when her husband was much away. She had not known till then how much she depended on stray discussions of books and politics, on the interchange of abstract and general ideas. Ben himself could give her these stimulations, for the war had enlarged his education, and his love for her made him eager to meet her on the ground she chose. But his work often took him into the fields soon after dawn, and he would not be privately hers again till night, for the meals at Fourhouses were communal and democratic; not only Mrs. Godfrey and her daughters, but the stockman, the cow-man, the carter and the ploughboys sat down to table with the master.
Moreover, after a month or two, she began to feel her estrangement from her people. She did not miss her old acquaintances among the county families, but she felt the silence of her home more than she would ever have imagined possible. No one from Conster—her father or mother or Doris—had come near her or sent her a word. There had been the same silence up at Starvecrow which surprised her more, for she and Vera had always been friends—though of course Vera had her own special preoccupations now. Rose had called, but evidently with a view to replenishing her stores of gossip for Leasan tea-parties, and Jenny had done all she could to discourage another visit. Mary generally came over from Hastings once a week, but hers were only the visits of a fellow-exile.
In her heart, the estrangement which Jenny felt the most was between herself and Peter. She had not expected such treatment from him. She had expected anger and disappointment, certainly, a stormy interview, perhaps, but not this blank. Sometimes she told herself he was anxious about Vera, and that his own troubles had combined with her misbehaviour to keep him away. She forced herself to patience, hoping uncertainly that the fortunate birth of an heir would bring old Peter to a better frame of mind.
Meanwhile, she was reviving her friendship with Mary, or rather was building up a new one, for in old times she had felt a little afraid of her elegant, aloof sister. She was not afraid of Mary now—indeed, from the vantage of her own happy establishment she almost pitied this woman who had left so much behind her in dark places.
Mary liked Ben—but her temperament had set her at a great distance from his homely concreteness. Though she stood by her sister in her adventure, she evidently could not think “what Jenny saw in him,” and she was openly full of plans for his improvement and education.
“Why don’t you lift him up to your level instead of stooping to his? You could easily do it. He’s deeply in love with you, and, in my opinion, very much above his own way of life. Fourhouses is a good estate and he’s got plenty of money to improve it—with a little trouble he could make it into a country house and himself into a small squire.”
“Thanks,” said Jenny—“that’s what I’ve just escaped from—country houses and squires—and I don’t want to start the whole thing over again. Why should Ben try to make himself a squire, when the squires are dying out all over the country, and their estates are being broken up and sold back to the people they used to belong to?”
“Jenny, you talk like a radical!—‘God gave the land to the people’ and all that.”
“My husband’s a vice-president of the Conservative Club. It isn’t for any political reasons that I don’t want to fight my way back into the county. It’s simply that I’m sick of two things—struggle and pretence. Situated as I am, I’ve got neither—if I tried to keep what I gave up when I married Ben, I’d have both.”
“It’s all very well for you to talk like this now—when everything’s new. Even I know what the first months of marriage can be like.... But later on, when things have sobered down, you’ll feel different—you’ll want to see some of your old friends again, and wish you hadn’t shut them out.”
“If you mean the Parishes and the Hursts and the Wades and all that lot, nothing I could ever do would make them my friends again. You see, they’re friends of Father’s, and, considering his attitude towards my marriage—which would be the same whatever I did to ‘raise’ myself—they can never be friends of mine. It isn’t as if I’d moved thirty miles off and had a new sort of ‘county’ to visit me. I’m in the middle of the old crowd, and they can never be friendly with me without offending my people. No, I must be content with Ben’s friends—if I tried to ‘improve’ him we’d lose those, too, and then I’d have nobody.”
“I daresay you’re right, my dear—you sound practical, anyway. And I’ve no right to teach anyone how to arrange their lives.... It’s queer, isn’t it, Jen? I took, generally speaking, no risks when I married. I married a man I loved, a man of my own class, whom my people approved of—and look at me now. You, on the other hand, have taken every imaginable risk—a runaway match, a different class, and the family curse....”
“You’ll have to look at me twelve years hence to compare me with you.”
“I think you’re going to be all right, though—even if you don’t take my advice.”
“I’m sure I shall be all right. You see, I’m doing everything with my eyes open. You didn’t have your eyes open, Mary.”
“I know I didn’t. Very few women do. Most brides are like newborn kittens with their eyes shut.”
“Are you happy now?”
It was the first time she had dared ask the question. Mary hesitated—
“Yes, I suppose I am happy. I have enough to live on, I have my friends—I travel about, and see places and people.”
“Have you ever regretted that you didn’t marry Charles?”
“Regretted! Good Lord, no! The very opposite. I didn’t love him in that way, and we’d both have been wretched. Poor old dear! I’m glad I’d strength enough to spare him that, though I spared him nothing else....”
“Do you ever see him now?”
“Sometimes. He’s married, you know—a very young thing, who doesn’t like me too much. I didn’t expect him to marry, but I believe he’s happy. I hear that Julian is happy, too—he has two little boys and a baby girl. So I haven’t really done either of my men much harm.”
“No—it’s you who’ve suffered the harm. Why haven’t you married again, Mary? I’ve always expected you to.”
Her sister shook her head.
“I can’t—there’s something in me lacking for that. I can’t explain, and it sounds an extraordinary thing to say, but I feel as if I’d left it with Julian. I don’t mean that I still love him or any nonsense like that—I hadn’t loved him for a year before I left him ... but somehow one doesn’t get rid of a husband as easily as the divorce-courts and the newspapers seem to suppose.”
“If you’d married again you’d have forgotten Julian.”
“No, I shouldn’t, and I should have made another man unhappy—because of what’s lacking in me. I know there are lots of women who can go from the church to the divorce court and from the divorce court to the registrar’s, and leave nothing behind them in any of these places. But I’m not like that—I left my love with Julian and my pride with Charles. Sometimes I feel that if only I’d had the strength to stick to Julian a little longer, we’d have weathered things through—I’d have got back what I’d lost, and all this wouldn’t have happened. But it’s waste of time to think of that now.... Don’t worry about me, Jen. I’m happy in my own way—though it may not be yours, or many women’s, for that matter. I’ve just managed to be strong enough not to spoil Charles’s life—not to drag him down—so I’ve got one good memory.... And I’m free—that means more to me than perhaps you can realise—and I enjoy life as a spectator. I’ve suffered enough as an actor on the stage, and now I’m just beginning to feel comfortable in the stalls.”
“Don’t,” said Jenny.
She could not bear any more—this was worse than Gervase. To have spent all the treasure of life on dust and wind was even worse than to give up that treasure unspent. She found the tears running out of her eyes as she put her arms round Mary—softness of furs and sweetness of violets, and in the midst of them a sister who was half doll and half ghost.
Towards the end of March, Peter’s daughter was born. He bore the disappointment better than anyone had expected. But lately it had not seemed to him to matter very much whether the child were a boy or a girl. His horizons were closing in upon him—they had even shut out his own inheritance, with the new powers and freedoms it would bring, and he could not look so far ahead as the prospects of his heir. Even Gervase’s defection had not stirred him long. In his first shock of outrage and disgust he had motored over to Thunders Abbey and tried to persuade his brother to come back with him, but finding him obdurate, his emotions had collapsed into a contempt which was queerly mixed with envy. If Gervase preferred these debased states of life—first in a garage and then in a monastery—to the decencies of his position as an Alard, then let him have what he wanted. It was something to know what one wanted and take it unafraid. Gervase might be a traitor, but he was not a fool.
So Peter heard unmoved Dr. Mount’s announcement that a little girl had been born, and only a trifle less unmoved received the woolly bundle of his little daughter into his arms. He did not, as some men, awake to a new sense of fatherhood at the touch of his first-born. His failure as a husband seemed to affect him as a father. He did not ask himself what he would have felt if the child had been a boy. The only question in his heart was what he would have felt if it had been Stella’s child ... but that was a useless question.
Vera was secretly glad to have a girl. She had always wanted a daughter, and lately, as her mind had detached itself more and more from her husband’s wishes, the want had become anxious. A boy she always pictured as a second Peter—heavy, obstinate, his heart set on things she did not care about—but a girl would be a companion, and her own. There would be, she felt, some chance of her growing up like her mother and sharing her mother’s adventures in intellect and beauty; also, in that new florescence of her race which had accompanied her pregnancy, she felt that her daughter would be truly a daughter of Abraham, whereas her son would be born into a public-school tradition and the heirship of a big estate—a child of the Goyim. So she stretched out her arms gladly when the baby girl was put into them, and as she looked down into the mysterious, ancient little face of the newborn, her heart leapt with joy and pride to see the tokens of her blood already discernible, not so much in its later Hebraic characteristics as in some general oriental quality, older than Abraham.
“There’s nothing of the Goy about her, is there?” she said to her mother, who had come to be with her in her confinement.
“No, indeed, there’s not. She takes after us. It’s curious how they nearly always do in a mixed marriage.”
But, in the midst of her own gratification, Vera was glad to find that her husband was not bitterly disappointed. Poor old Peter! He had been estranged from her, she knew, and had wanted to marry the Mount woman, but she could forgive him in the triumph of her recovery. She had the child, and was rapidly getting well. When she was herself again she would win him back. She knew how ... it never failed.
In her presence Peter made his disappointment seem even less than it really was. The sight of her lying there in loveliness both opulent and exhausted—knowing vaguely what she had suffered and accepted—stirred in him a strange, admiring pity which forbade an unthankful word. He bore no resentment against her now. It was not her fault that she stood between him and Stella. Probably he had treated her badly—she might have suffered nearly as much as he.... And he was glad she had her reward.
But even when looking tenderly down on her, speaking tenderly to her, he could not picture himself going on with their marriage again. When his family and acquaintance tried to cheer him up for the disappointment of having a girl, they always said, “But it’s only the first, Peter...” “The first never really matters....” and all the time he was feeling that there could not be another. It was a preposterous feeling, he knew, for, after Gervase’s defection, it was imperative that he should have an heir; and men are not like women in these things. He had never had Stella—he could never have Stella. Why should he feel this aversion from doing his duty as a husband and an Alard? He did not know—but he felt it, almost to shrinking. He felt that his marriage was at an end—broken and yet binding—for Stella could not take him after divorce any more than she could take him without it. And everyone said “It’s only the first”.... “It’s just as well for the girl to come first—to be the oldest.”...
A few days after the baby’s birth Vera had a letter from Jenny, congratulating her and sending her love to Peter. She did not ask her brother to come over and see her, but Peter guessed what was behind her message. In the loneliness of those first days when the house seemed full of women and affairs from which he was shut out, he had a longing to go over to Fourhouses, and see Jenny and be friends again. But he was held back, partly by a feeling of awkwardness, a sense of the explanations and reproaches his visit would involve, partly by a remaining stiffness against her treachery, and most of all by a dull stirring sense of envy—the same as, though more accountable than, the envy he had felt for Gervase. Here again was someone who knew what she wanted and had got it, whom the family had not bound fast and swallowed up—and the worst of it all was that, unlike Gervase, she had got what Peter wanted, too. In vain he told himself that she could never be happy with Godfrey, could never adapt herself to the life she had chosen, that her plunge would be no more justified than his withdrawal. He dared not go near Fourhouses all the same.
The hopes on which the baby’s birth seemed to have fallen heaviest were Sir John’s. The old man had had none of Peter’s uncertainty or anxiety before the event—he had felt sure the child would be a boy. The news that it was a girl had been a terrible shock, and though it had not, as was feared at first, brought on another seizure, it was soon seen to have increased the nervous unsteadiness of his constitution. He alone, of all the Alards, did not join in the cry of “This is the first.” First or last, it was probably the only grandchild he would live to see, and he expressed his disappointment with the candid selfishness of old age.
“Here have I been waiting for a boy—counting on a boy—and it’s a girl after all. What good’s a girl to us? We’ve got plenty of girls—or those who were once girls”—and he glared at Doris—“all they do is either to disgrace us in the divorce-courts, marry the sweep, or turn into bad-tempered old maids. We’ve got enough girls. It’s a boy we want—with that Gervase gone off to be a monk. I’ve been badly served by my children.”
“But, Father, it wasn’t Peter’s fault,” urged Doris unskilfully.
“Wasn’t it, Ma’am? You do know a lot—more than an unmarried woman ought to know about such things. I believe you even know that the baby wasn’t found under a gooseberry bush.”
“Oh, Father, don’t talk in such a dreadful way—He’s really getting quite awful,” she said as she let Peter out—“I sometimes think there’s something wrong with his brain.”
“There probably is,” said Peter.
Indeed, of late Sir John had grown alarmingly eccentric. His love of rule had passed beyond the administration of his estate, and showed itself in a dozen ways of petty dominion. He seemed resolved to avenge his authority over the three rebellious children on the two who had remained obedient. Not only did he put up a forest of forbidding notices over his estate, to keep out the general public, which had hitherto had free entrance to most of his fields and woods, but he forbade his own children to use certain paths. He would not let Peter come by the field way from Starvecrow, but insisted on his going round by the road. He would stop Doris on the threshold of an afternoon’s calling, and compel her to sit and read to him, by choice books which he calculated to offend her old-maidish susceptibilities. He found Doris better game than Peter, for whereas the son remained silent under his kicks, Doris never failed to give him all the fun he wanted in the way of protests, arguments, laments and tears. But from both he obtained obedience, through their dread of exciting him and bringing on another stroke.
His warfare was less open with his wife. He attacked her indirectly through the servants, who were always giving notice owing to his intimidation. Even Wills had once distantly informed his mistress that since Sir John did not seem to appreciate his services he might soon have to consider the advisability of transferring them elsewhere. Appleby had actually given notice, after a mysterious motor drive, from which Sir John had returned on foot—but had been persuaded by Peter to reconsider it and stay on. The female staff was in a state of perpetual motion. No cook would stand her master’s comments on her performances, no housemaid endure his constant bullying and bell-ringing. He had perversely moved into a top-floor bedroom, so as to be out of reach of his wife and Speller, who disliked stairs. Here he would make tea at five o’clock every morning with water from his hot-water bottle boiled up on a spirit lamp. This procedure filled Lady Alard with a peculiar horror when she discovered it; indeed, from her remarks it would appear that all her husband’s other misdoings were negligible in comparison.
A few days before Easter, Peter came suddenly to Fourhouses. He came early in the afternoon, and gave no explanation either of his coming or of his staying away. Jenny was upstairs, helping her mother-in-law turn out the conjugal bedroom, when she heard the sound of hoofs in the yard. She ran to the window, thinking it was Ben come home unexpectedly from an errand to Wickham Farm, but had no time to be disappointed in the rush of her surprise at seeing Peter.
“There’s Peter—my brother—come at last!” she cried to Mrs. Godfrey, and, tearing off her dusting cap, she ran downstairs, still in her gingham overall. She wanted to open the door to him herself.
He could not have expected her to do this, for he was staring uninterestedly at his boots. Her gingham skirts evidently suggested a servant to him, for he lifted his eyes slowly, then seemed surprised to see her standing all bright and blowzed before him.
“Jenny!”
“Hullo, Peter! So you’ve come to see me at last.”
He mumbled something about having been passing through Icklesham.
“Won’t you come in?—the man’ll take your horse. Hi! Homard—take Mr. Alard’s horse round to the stable.”
“I can’t stop long,” said Peter awkwardly.
“But you must, after all this time—come in.”
She had meant to ask him why he had kept away so long and why he had come now; but when she found herself alone with him in the kitchen, she suddenly changed her mind, and decided to let things be. He probably had no reasonable explanation to offer, and unless she meant to keep the breach unhealed, she had better treat this visit as if there was nothing to explain about it.
“How’s Vera?” she asked.
“She’s getting on splendidly, thanks.”
“And the baby?”
“That’s getting on too.”
“Do tell me about it—is it like her or like you?”
“It’s like her—a regular little Yid.”
“Never mind—she will probably grow up very beautiful.”
Peter mumbled inaudibly.
Jenny looked at him critically. He seemed heavier and stupider than usual. He gave her the impression of a man worn out.
“You don’t look well.... Are you worried? I do hope you aren’t dreadfully disappointed the baby’s a girl.”
“It doesn’t really matter.”
“Of course not. The first one never does. You’re sure to have others ... boys.”
Peter did not answer, and Jenny felt a little annoyed with him. If this was the way he behaved at home she was sorry for Vera. It was curious how nervy these stolid men often were....
“How are Father and Mother?” she asked, to change the subject—“I suppose you go up to Conster every day.”
“Twice most days. They’re not up to much—at least Father isn’t. He’s had some pretty good shocks lately, you know. He was dreadfully upset the baby’s being a girl—and that fool Gervase’s business was a terrible blow for him.”
“It was a blow for me too. I did my best to put him off it, but it was no use. My only comfort is that apparently it’ll be some time before he’s really let in for it. He may come to his senses before then.”
“I don’t think so. He’s as obstinate as the devil.”
“What—have you tried arguing with him?”
“Yes—when I heard what he’d done, I drove over to Thunders Abbey or whatever it’s called, and did my level best to bring him back with me. But it was all no good—you might as well try to argue with a dead owl.”
“Good Lord!—you went over to Thunders, and tried to bring him back! Poor old Peter! But do tell me how he is, and what he’s doing. What sort of place is it?”
“Oh a great big barrack, spoiling the country for miles round. But they’ve got some fine land and absolutely all the latest ideas in farming—motor traction and chemical fertilisation and all that.”
“And was Gervase working on the farm?”
“No, Brother Joseph—that’s what the fool’s called now—Brother Joseph, when I saw him, was scrubbing out the kitchen passage on his hands and knees like a scullery maid. A dignified occupation for an Alard!”
“Poor old Gervase, how he’d hate that! But he’ll be all the more likely to come to his senses and give it up, especially when he’s got over his disappointment about Stella. I feel it’s really that which was at the bottom of it all.”
Peter did not speak for a moment. He leaned back in his wooden armchair, staring at the fire, which was leaping ruddily into the chimney’s cavern.
“Do you mind if I light my pipe?” he asked after a bit.
“Of course not—do. I’m glad you’re going to stay.”
He took matches and his tobacco pouch out of his pocket, and she noticed suddenly that his hands were shaking. For the first time a dreadful suspicion seized her. His heaviness—his nerviness—his queer, lost manner ... was it possible, she wondered, that Peter drank?
“Have you heard when the Mounts are leaving?” she asked him, stifling her thoughts.
“No, I haven’t.”
“Stella was here three days ago, and she said that they’ve at last settled about the practice. She seemed to think they might be free to go at the end of May.”
“Oh.”
“I expect Vera’s glad they didn’t go off in a hurry, and leave her with a new man for the baby. Dr. Mount’s the best maternity doctor for miles round.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that.”
He was falling back into silence, and no remark of hers on any topic seemed able to rouse him out of it, though she tried once or twice to re-animate him on the subject of Gervase. He lounged opposite her in his armchair, puffing at his pipe, and staring at the fire, now and then painfully dragging out a “yes” or a “no.” She was beginning to feel bored with him and to think about her work upstairs. Was this all he had to say to her after three months’ estrangement?—an estrangement which he had never troubled to explain. She had been weak with him—let him off too easily—she ought to have “had things out with him” about her marriage. She had a right to know his reasons for forgiving her just as she had a right to know his reasons for shunning her.... He had treated her inexplicably.
She was working herself up to wrath like this when Peter suddenly spoke of his own accord.
“This place is like what Starvecrow used to be.”
“Used to be?—when?”
“Before Vera and I came to it—when the Greenings had it. Do you remember the kitchen fireplace?—it was just like this.”
“Starvecrow is far grander than Fourhouses now. I’m just a plain farmer’s wife, Peter—I’m never going to pretend to be anything else.”
“And Starvecrow was just a plain farm; but we’ve changed it into a country house.”
“Mary’s been wanting me to do the same for Fourhouses, but I’ve told her I’d be very sorry to. I like it best as it is.”
“So do I.”
“Then are you sorry you’ve altered Starvecrow?”
“Yes.”
“But it’s a lovely place, Peter. You’ve made a perfect little country house out of it. I’m sure you wouldn’t be pleased to have it the ramshackle old thing it used to be.”
“Yes, I should.”
“Well, Vera wouldn’t, anyhow. You and she are in a totally different position from us. I’m not keeping Fourhouses as it is because I don’t think it’s capable of improvement, but because I don’t want to put myself outside my class and ape the county. You’re just the opposite—you’ve got appearances to keep up; it would never do if you lived in the funny hole Starvecrow used to be in the Greenings’ time.”
“I loved it then—it was just like this—the kitchen fire ... and the fire in the office—it used to hum just like this—as if there was a kettle on it. The place I’ve got now isn’t Starvecrow.”
“What is it, then?”
“I don’t know—but it isn’t Starvecrow. I’ve spoilt Starvecrow. I’ve changed it, I’ve spoilt it—Vera’s people have spoilt it with their damned money. It isn’t Starvecrow. Do you remember how the orchard used to come right up to the side wall? They’ve cut it down and changed it into a garden. The orchard’s beyond the garden—then it doesn’t look so much like a farm. A country house doesn’t have an orchard just outside the drawing-room windows....”
He had left his chair, and was pacing up and down the room. His manner seemed stranger than ever, and Jenny felt a little frightened.
“I’m glad you don’t want me to change Fourhouses,” she said soothingly—“I must tell Mary what you’ve said.”
“But I do want you to change it,” he cried—“I can’t bear to see it as it is—what Starvecrow used to be.”
“Don’t be silly, Peter. Starvecrow is much better now than it ever used to be.”
He turned on her almost angrily—
“Goodbye.”
She felt glad he was going, and still more glad to hear her husband’s voice calling her from the yard.
“There’s Ben. Must you really be going, Peter?”
“Yes—I must.”
He walked out of the room, and she followed him—both meeting Ben on the doorstep. Young Godfrey was surprised to see his elder brother-in-law—he had made up his mind that Peter would never come to Fourhouses. He was still more surprised at his abstracted greeting.
“Hullo, Godfrey. Glad to see you—that’s a fine mare. Jenny, will you tell them to bring my horse round?”
“Yes.... Carter! Mr. Alard’s horse.... Peter can’t stay any longer, Ben. I told him you’d be sorry.”
“I’m sure I’m very sorry, Sir”—he blushed at his slip into deference, but was quite unable to say “Peter”—“Is Mrs. Alard doing well?” he asked clumsily.
“Very well, thank you.”
“I hope you’ll come and see us again soon,” said Jenny—“I’d like to show you the house.”
“Yes, I’ll come,” he returned absently, and went to meet his horse, which was being led to him across the yard.
The sun was still high as Peter rode back through the crosscountry lanes to Starvecrow. The days were lingering now, and the fields were thickening for May. In the hay-fields the young crops were already marking their difference from the pastures with a rust of sorrel and a gilding of buttercups, and the hedges were losing their traceried outline in smothers of vetch and convolvulus.
Peter mechanically noted the progress of the winter sowings on Scragoak, Stonelink, and other farms he passed. These were all dependencies of Alard, and their welfare was bound up with Conster. Pleasant, homely places, their sprawling picturesqueness made up for any want of repair to all but the eye of his father’s agent. Peter saw the needs of most of them—rebuilding, rethatching, redraining—and his mind, mechanically and from force of habit, deplored the impossibility of taking action. The position seemed quite hopeless, for he could do nothing now, and things would be even worse at his father’s death, when the weight of death-duties and the pressure of mortgage holders would probably choke out the little life there was left in the Alard estates. But even this ultimate foreboding was only mechanical—his real emotions, his most vital pains, were all centred in himself.
He had spoken truly when he told Jenny that he could not bear the sight of Fourhouses. He could not even bear the thought of it. When he thought of that quiet, ancient house, with its bricked floors and wide, sunny spaces, with its humming kitchen fire and salt-riddled beam-work—above all when he thought of it as the home of loving hearts and the peace which follows daring—he felt unendurably the contrast of what he had made of Starvecrow. It was what Starvecrow used to be—it was what Starvecrow might have been ... for even if he had renounced the place he loved for the woman he loved, Starvecrow would have still gone on being the same, either as the home of another agent, or—if his father had really fulfilled his threat of selling it—the home of some honest farmer like Ben Godfrey, a man who would not only live in it but possess it, and give it back the yeoman dignity it had lost.
Starvycrow—Starvycrow.
What was it now? What had he made it? It was a small country house, perfectly furnished and appointed, with a set of model buildings attached. It was the home of a burnt-out love, of the husks of marriage, of a husband and wife whose hearts were foes and whose souls were strangers, of lost illusions, of dead hopes, and wasted sacrifices. That was what it was now. That was what he had made it.
He remembered words which long ago he had spoken to Stella.... “Places never change—they are always the same. Human beings may change, but places never do.” Those words were untrue—places can change, do change—Starvecrow had changed, he had changed it. While Stella, the woman, had not changed. She was still the same—the dear, the lovely ... and the unchanged, unchanging Stella might have been his instead of this changed Starvecrow. He had sacrificed the substance of life to a dream, a shadow, which without the substance must go up in smoke. He had sold his birth-right for a morsel of bread—or rather he had given away his bread for the sake of an inheritance in the clouds, which he could never hold.
His old hopes and his old fears had died together. Neither the fact that his newborn child was a girl, nor the final defection of Gervase the heir-apparent could make him hold his breath for Alard. These things had not killed his dreams, as once he had thought, but had merely shown that they were dead. The thought of his father’s death, which could not now be far off, and his own succession to the property, with all the freedom and power it would bring, no longer stirred his flagging ambition. When he became Sir Peter he could probably save the House of Alard in spite of death-duties and mortgagees. Without restrictions, master of his own economies, he could put new life into the failing estate—or at least he could nurse and shelter it through its difficult times till the days came when the government must do something to set the Squires on their legs again.... But the thought had no power to move him—indeed Alard hardly seemed worth saving. It was a monster to which he had sacrificed his uttermost human need. Gervase had been a wise man, after all. And Jenny ... Jenny had done what Peter might have done. He and Stella might now have been together in some wide farmhouse, happy, alive and free. This child might have been her child.... Oh, how could he have been so blind? He had not known how much he really loved her—he had thought she was just like other women he had loved, and that he could forget her. She would go away, and she would manage at last to forget him; but he who stayed behind would never be able to forget her. He would live on and on, live on her memory—the memory of her touch and voice, her narrow shining eyes, her laughter and her kisses—live on and on until even memory grew feeble, and his heart starved, and died.
Riding over the farms between Leasan and Vinehall it suddenly struck him how easily he might turn aside and go to see Stella. She had promised that she would see him again before she went away. Should he go now and ask her to redeem that promise? Should he go and plead with her as he had never pleaded before? She could still save him—she could still be to him what she might have been. In one mad moment he saw himself and Stella seeking love’s refuge at the other end of the country, in some far, kindly farm in Westmoreland or Cornwall. Vera would divorce him—she would be only too glad to get her freedom—and by the time he became Sir Peter Alard he would have lived the scandal down. Stella still loved him—she was awake, alive, and passionate—she had none of the scruples and conventions, reserves and frigidities which keep most women moral—she had only her religion to stand between them, and Peter did not think much of that. A collection of dreams, traditions and prohibitions could not stand before his pleading—before the pleading of her own heart. He had not really pleaded with her yet....
For a moment he reined in his horse, hesitating at the mouth of the little lane which twists through the hollows of Goatham and Doucegrove towards Vinehall. But the next minute he went on again, driven by a question. What had he to offer Stella in exchange for all that he proposed to take from her?—What had he to give her in exchange for her father, her home, her good name, her peace of mind? The answer was quite plain—he had nothing but himself. And was he worth the sacrifice? Again a plain answer—No. He was worn, tired, disillusioned, shop-soiled, no fit mate for the vivid woman whom some hidden source of romance seemed to keep eternally young. Even suppose he could, by storming and entreaty, bend her to his desire, he would merely be bringing her to where he stood today. A few years hence she might stand as he stood now—looking back on all she had lost.... He would not risk bringing her to that. Three years ago he had sacrificed her to his desires—he had made her suffer.... It would be a poor atonement to sacrifice her again—to another set of desires. The least he could do for her was to let her follow her own way of escape—to let her go ... though still he did not know how he was to live without her.
When he reached home he went upstairs to see Vera. Her mother and Rose were with her, and they were having tea.
“Hullo!” said his wife—“Where have you been all day?”
“I lunched over at Becket’s House—Fuller asked me to stay. And in the afternoon I went to see Jenny.”
He had not meant to tell them, but now he suddenly found he had done so. Vera lifted her eyebrows.
“Oh. So you’ve forgiven her at last. I think you might have told me before you went there. I want to thank her for writing to me, and you could have saved me the fag of a letter. She’ll think it odd my not sending any message.”
“I’m sorry, but I never thought of going till I found myself over there.”
“And how is Jenny?” asked Rose.
“She seemed very well.”
“And happy?”
“Yes—and happy.”
“Is she still living like the wife of a working-man, with only one maid?”
“No, not like the wife of a working-man, who doesn’t keep even one maid, but like the wife of a well-to-do farmer, which she is.”
“You needn’t bite my head off, Peter,” said Rose.
“Your tea’s in the drawing-room,” said Vera—“I asked Weller to put it there ready for you when you came in. Nurse thinks it would be too much of a crowd if you had it up here. Besides, I know you’d rather be alone.”
Peter rose from his seat at the bedside.
“All right—I’ll go downstairs.”
“I didn’t mean now, you old silly,” said Vera, pulling at his coat. “Hang it all, I haven’t seen you the whole day.”
Peter looked down at her hopelessly—at her large, swimming brown eyes, at her face which seemed mysteriously to have coarsened without losing any of its beauty, at the raven-black braids of her hair that showed under her lace nightcap, and last of all at her mouth—full, crimson, satisfied, devouring.... He became suddenly afraid—of her, with this additional need of him, this additional hold on him, which her motherhood had brought—and of himself, because he knew now that he hated her, quite crudely and physically hated her.
“I’m afraid I can’t stay—I’ve got rather a headache ... and I’m going out directly to pot rabbits.”
“That’s an odd cure for a headache,” said Vera. She looked hurt and angry, and he felt a brute to have upset her at such a time. But he could not help it—he had to go, and moved towards the door.
“Aren’t you going to take any notice of your little daughter?” purred Mrs. Asher—“Baby dear, I don’t think your daddy’s very proud of you. He hasn’t been near you since breakfast.”
Speechlessly Peter went to the cradle and gazed down on the little wizened face. His heart felt hard; not one pang of fatherhood went through it. “You little sheeny—you little Yid”—he said to the baby in his heart.
“Isn’t she a darling?” his mother-in-law breathed into his neck—“isn’t she a love? Do you know, Vera thinks now that Miriam would do better than Rachel—it goes better with Alard.”
Peter did not think that either went particularly well with Alard, but he said nothing. Wasn’t there a Jewish name which meant “The glory is departed from my house”?
He kissed the baby and went out, thankful to have escaped kissing the mother.
Some truth-loving providence had insisted on afflicting him with the headache he had claimed as an excuse for not sitting with Vera. His head ached abominably as he went into the drawing-room where his tea was laid. The firelight ruddied the white walls, the silver and the furniture, where comfort and cretonne were skilfully blended with oak and antiquity. His thoughts flew back to the evening when he and Vera had first come into this room on their return from their honeymoon. He had thought it beautiful then—though even then he had realised it was not the right room for Starvecrow. It used to be one of the kitchens, and in the old days when he had first known it, had had a bricked floor and a big range, like the kitchen at Fourhouses. Tonight he hated it—it was part of the processes which had changed Starvecrow out of recognition. He rang the bell impatiently. He would have his tea carried into the office. That was the room which had altered least.
Even here there were changes, but they were of his own choice and making—he had planned them long before his marriage. The furniture of Greening’s day—the pitch-pine desk and cane-seated chairs—had been impossible; he had always meant to get a good Queen Anne bureau like this one, and some gate-backed chairs like these. There was nothing un-farmlike in this plainly furnished office, with its walls adorned with scale-maps and plans of fields and woods, and notices of auctions and agricultural shows.
Nevertheless today he found himself wishing he had it as it used to be. He would like to see it as it used to be—as Stella used to see it, when she came in fresh and glowing on a winter’s afternoon, to sit beside the fire ... he could almost feel her cold cheek under his lips....
Then for one moment he saw it as it used to be. For an instant of strangeness and terror he saw the old scratched desk, with Greening’s files and account-books upon it, saw Greening’s book-shelves, with their obsolete agricultural treatises—saw the horse-hair armchair and the two other chairs with the cane seats, and the picture-advertisement of Thorley’s cake on the wall.... He stood stock still, trembling—and then suddenly the room was itself again, and it didn’t even seem as if it had altered.... But he felt dreadfully queer. He hurried to the door and went out through the passage into the little grass space at the back. God! he must be ill. What a fright he’d had! Suppose the hallucination had continued a moment longer, should he have seen Stella come into the room, unbuttoning her fur collar, her face all fresh with the wind?...
He went round to the front of the house, and fetched his hat and overcoat and gun. He’d go out after the rabbits, as he’d said. There were too many of them, and he’d promised Elias ... anyhow he couldn’t stand the house. He whistled for Breezy, and the spaniel ran out to him, bounding and whimpering with delight. The sky was turning faintly green at the rims. The dusk was near.
He passed quickly through the yard. From the open doorway of the cowhouse came cheerful sounds of milking, and he could see his cows standing in shafts of mote-filled sunlight. The cowhouse had been enlarged and modernised—Starvecrow could almost now be called a model farm. But he knew that the place wanted to be what it was in the old days—before his wife’s money had been spent on it. It was not only he who was dissatisfied with the changes—Starvecrow itself did not like them. He knew that tonight as he walked through the barns.... Starvecrow had never been meant for a well-appointed country house, or a model farm. It ought to have been, like Fourhouses, the home of happy lovers. It was meant to be a home.... It was not a home now—just a place where an unhappy man and woman lived, desiring, fleeing, mistrusting, failing each other. He could have made it a home—brought Stella to it somehow, some day, at last. Perhaps—seeing his father’s condition, that day would not have been far off now.... But like everything else, Starvecrow had been sacrificed to Alard. He had sacrificed it—he had betrayed the faithful place. He saw now that he had betrayed not only himself, not only Stella, but also Starvecrow.
Starvycrow—Starvycrow.
Peter walked quickly, almost running, from the reproach of Starvycrow.
At about seven o’clock that evening a message came up from Conster, and as Peter was still out, it was brought to Vera. It was marked “immediate,” so she opened it.
“Who brought this, Weller?”
“The gardener’s boy, Ma’am.”
“Tell him Mr. Alard is out at present, but I’ll send him over as soon as he comes home——Sir John’s had another stroke,” she told her mother.
“Oh, my dear! How dreadful—I wish you hadn’t opened the letter. Shocks are so bad for you.”
“It wasn’t a shock at all, thanks. I’ve been expecting it for weeks. Besides, one really can’t want the poor old man to live much longer. He was getting a perfect nuisance to himself and everybody, and if he’d lived on might have done some real damage to the estate. Now Peter may just be able to save it, in spite of the death-duties.”
“But, my dear, he isn’t dead yet!” cried Mrs. Asher, a little shocked. She belonged to a generation to which the death of anybody however old, ill, unloved or unlovely, could never be anything but a calamity.
“He’s not likely to survive a second stroke,” said Vera calmly. “I’m sorry for the poor old thing, but really it’s time he went. And I want Peter to come into the estate before he’s quite worn out and embittered. It’s high time he was his own master—it’ll pull him together again—he’s been all to pieces lately.”
“And it’ll quite settle the Stella Mount business,” she added secretly to herself.
The next hour passed, and Weller came up to ask if she should bring in the dinner.
“What can have happened to Peter!” exclaimed Vera.
“I daresay he met the messenger on his way back, and went straight to Conster.”
“Then it was very inconsiderate of him not to send me word. Yes, Weller, bring the dinner up here. You’ll have it with me, won’t you, Mother, as Peter isn’t in?”
They were eating their fruit when Weller came in with another “Urgent.” It was from Doris, and ran—
“Hasn’t Peter come back yet? Do send him over at once whenever he does. Father is dying. Dr. Mount does not expect him to last the night. We have wired to Jenny and Mary and even Gervase. Do send Peter along. He ought to be here.”
“How exactly like Doris to write as if we were deliberately keeping Peter away! I don’t know where he is. Doris might realise that I’m the last person who’d know.”
Her hands were trembling, and she whimpered a little as she crushed up the note and flung it across the room into the fireplace.
“Don’t be upset, Vera darling. Nothing could possibly have happened to him—we should have heard. He’s probably accepted a sudden invitation to dinner, the same as he did to lunch.”
“I know nothing’s happened to him—I’m not afraid of that. I know where he is....”
“Then if you know ...”
“He’s with Stella Mount,” and Vera hid her face in the pillow, sobbing hysterically.
Mrs. Asher tried to soothe her, tried to make her turn over and talk coherently, but with that emotional abandonment which lay so close to her mental sophistication, she remained with her face obstinately buried, and sobbed on. Her mother had heard about Stella Mount, chiefly from Rose, but had never given the idea much credit. She did not credit it now. But to pacify Vera she sent over a carefully worded message to Dr. Mount’s cottage, asking that if Mr. Peter Alard was there he should be told at once that he was wanted over at Conster.
The boy came back with the reply that Mr. Alard was not at Vinehall, and had not been there that day. Everyone but the maid was out—Dr. Mount at Conster Manor and Miss Mount in church.
“That proves nothing,” said Vera—“he needn’t have met her at the house.”
“But if she’s in church——”
“How do we know she’s in church? She only left word with the maid that she’s gone there——” and Vera’s sobs broke out again until the nurse begged her to calm herself for the sake of the child. Which she promptly did, for she was a good mother.
At Conster all the family was by now assembled, with the exception of Peter and Gervase. Ben Godfrey had brought Jenny over from Fourhouses, and Mary had motored from Hastings; Rose was there too, with a daughter’s privileges. They were all sitting in the dining-room over a late and chilly meal. They had been upstairs to the sick-room, where the prodigals had entered unforbidden, for Sir John knew neither sheep nor goat. His vexed mind had withdrawn itself to the inmost keep of the assaulted citadel, in preparation for its final surrender of the fortress it had held with such difficulty of late.
“There is no good saying that I expect him to recover this time,” Dr. Mount had said. “I will not say it is impossible—doctors are shy of using that word—but I don’t expect it, and, in view of his former condition which would be tremendously aggravated by this attack, I don’t think anyone can hope it.”
“Will it be long?” asked Doris, in a harsh, exhausted voice.
“I don’t think it will be longer than forty-eight hours.”
Doris burst into tears. Her grief was, the family thought, excessive. All her life, and especially for the last three months, her father had victimised her, browbeaten her, frustrated her, humiliated her—she had been the scapegoat of the revolted sons and daughters—and yet at his death she had tears and a grief which none of the more fortunate could share.
“I found him—it was I who found him”—she sobbed out her story for the dozenth time. “I came into the study with his hot milk—Wills has refused to bring it ever since poor Father threw it in his face—and I saw him sitting there, and he looked funny, somehow. I knew something was wrong—he was all twisted up and breathing dreadfully.... And I said ‘Father, is anything the matter?—aren’t you feeling well?’ And he just managed to gasp ‘Get out.’ Those were the last words he uttered.”
Sir John had not been put to bed in his attic-bedroom, the scene of his ignoble tea-making, but in his old room downstairs, leading out of Lady Alard’s. She and the nurse were with him now while the others were at supper. She had a conviction that her husband knew her, as he made inarticulate sounds of wrath when she came near. But as he did the same for the nurse, the rest of the family were not convinced.
“When is Peter coming?” groaned Doris—“I really call it heartless of him to keep away.”
“But he doesn’t know what’s happened,” soothed Jenny—“he’ll come directly he’s heard.”
“I can’t understand what he’s doing out at this hour. It’s too late for any business, or for shooting—where can he have gone?”
“You’ll be getting an answer to your second message soon,” said Ben Godfrey.
“I daresay Peter thought he’d have his dinner first,” continued Doris—“I expect he thought it didn’t matter and he could come round afterwards.”
“I don’t think that’s in the least likely,” said Mary.
“Then why doesn’t he come?—he can’t be out at this hour.”
“He must be out—or he would have come.”
“It’s not so very late,” said Jenny, “only just after nine.”
“He may have gone out to dinner somewhere,” said Rose.
“Yes, that’s quite possible,” said Jenny—“he may have gone somewhere on business and been asked to stay—or he may have met someone when he was out.”
“I’ve a strong feeling that it mightn’t be a bad plan to ’phone to Stella Mount.”
“But Dr. Mount ’phoned there an hour ago, saying he’d be here all night. She’d have told him then if Peter was there.”
“I think it quite probable that she would not have told him.”
“What exactly do you mean by that, Rose?”
“Mean?—oh, nothing.”
“Then there’s no use talking of such a thing. I’m quite sure that if Peter had been at the Mounts’, Stella would have sent him over directly she heard about Father.”
At that moment Wills came into the room with a note for Doris.
“That must be from Starvecrow,” she said, taking it. “Yes, it’s from Mrs. Asher—‘Peter hasn’t been in yet, and we are beginning to feel anxious. He told us he was going out to shoot rabbits and one of the farm men saw him start out with his gun and Breezy. Of course he may have met someone and gone home with them to dinner. As you have a ’phone, perhaps you could ring up one or two places.”
“We could ring up the Parishes,” said Jenny—“he may have gone there. Or the Hursts—aren’t they on the ’phone? I don’t think the Fullers are.”
“It’s an extraordinary thing to me,” said Rose, “that he should stop out like this without at least sending a message to his wife. He might know how anxious she’d be.”
“Peter isn’t the most thoughtful or practical being on earth. But there’s no good making conjectures. I’m going to ’phone every place I can think of.”
Jenny spoke irritably. Rose never failed to annoy her, and she was growing increasingly anxious about Peter. She had told the others of his visit that afternoon, but she had not told them of his queer, gruff, silent manner. Not that she had seen, or saw now, anything sinister in it, but she could not rid herself of the thought that Peter had been “queer,” and that to queer people queer things may happen.
The telephone yielded no results. Neither the Parishes nor the Hursts were harbouring Peter, nor could she hear of him at the Furnace or Becket’s House, or at the Vinehall solicitor’s, or the garage at Iden, the final resorts of her desperation. Of course he had friends who were not on the telephone, but it was now after ten o’clock, and it was difficult to believe that if he had accepted a casual invitation to dine he would not have come home or sent word.
“Lord! how ghastly it is,” she cried, as she hung up the receiver for the last time—“Father dying and Peter disappeared. What are we to do, Ben?”
“I think we ought to go and have a look for him,” said her husband.
“How?—and who’d go?”
“I’ll get a chap or two from here, and the men at Starvecrow. If he was only out after conies he wouldn’t have gone far—down to the Bridge, most likely. We ought to search the fallows.”
“Yes, do go,” said Doris—“it’s the only thing to be done now. I know something dreadful has happened to him. And perhaps tomorrow he’ll be Sir Peter Alard....”
She had forgotten that Godfrey was the presumptuous boor who had disgraced her name. She saw in him only the man of the family—the only man of the family now.
“I’ll ring for Wills, and he’ll see about lanterns—and perhaps Pollock would go with you. And Beatup and Gregory know the district well—I’ll have them sent for from the farm.”
“Reckon I’d better go up to Starvecrow, John Elias would come with me, and Lambard and Fagge.”
“If you’re going to Starvecrow,” said Jenny, “I’ll go too, and see if I can do anything for poor Vera. I expect she’s dreadfully worried and frightened.”
“Don’t go!” cried Doris—“suppose Father died....”
“I can’t see what good I should be doing here. Vera needs me more than you do.”
“She’s got her mother. And it would be dreadful if Father died while you were out of the house.”
“Not more dreadful than if I was in it. He doesn’t know me, and wouldn’t see me if he did.”
“I think you’re very heartless,” and Doris began to cry—“Father might recover consciousness just before the end and want to forgive you.”
“I don’t think either is the least likely. Come along, Ben.”
Her husband fetched her coat from the hall, and they set out together. Doris sat on in her chair at the head of the table, sobbing weakly.
“I think this is a terrible thing to have happened. Father and Peter going together.... It makes me almost believe there isn’t a God.”
“But we’ve no reason to think Peter’s dead,” said Mary—“a dozen other things may have happened. He may have broken his leg out in the fields and be unable to get home, in which case the men will soon find him. I don’t see why you need take for granted that he’s killed.”
“I think it far more likely that he’s gone off with Stella Mount,” said Rose, relieved of Jenny’s repressing presence.
“Why ever should you think that?” said Mary. “I wasn’t aware that he was in love with her—now.”
“He’s been in love with her for the last year. Poor Vera’s had a dreadful time. I’m sure she thinks Peter’s gone with Stella.”
“Really, Rose, you surprise me—and anyhow, Stella answered her father’s ’phone call a short time ago, so she must be at home.”
“She might just have been going to leave when he rang up.”
“Well, the ’phone’s in the next room if you like to give her a call—and know what to say to her. Personally I should find the enquiry rather delicate.”
“It won’t do any good my ringing up,” sulked Rose—“if they’re gone we can’t stop them. If they’ve not gone then Doris is right, and Peter’s probably killed or something. I don’t know which would be the worst. It’s dreadful to think of him chucking everything over when if he’d only waited another hour he’d have heard about Father’s illness. He’d never have gone if he’d known he was to be Sir Peter so soon.”
“Well, I’d rather he’d gone than was killed,” said Doris—“the other could be stopped and hushed up—but if he’s dead ... there’s nobody left.”
“What about Gervase?” asked Mary.
“He’s no good.”
“Surely he’d come out of his convent or whatever it is, if he knew he had succeeded to the property.”
“I don’t know. Gervase never cared twopence about the property. I don’t think he’d come out for that.”
“They wouldn’t let him out,” said Rose.
“Is he coming here now?” asked Mary.
“I wired to him when I wired to you and Jenny. But I don’t know whether he’ll come or not, and anyhow he can’t be here for some time.”
“What time is it?”
“Nearly twelve.”
The three women shivered. The fire had gone out.
The night wore on, and Sir John was still alive. Nobody thought of going to bed, but after a time Doris, Mary and Rose went upstairs to the greater warmth of their father’s dressing-room. Here through the open door they could see the firelight leaping on the bedroom ceiling, and hear the occasional hushed voices of the nurse and Dr. Mount. Lady Alard sat by the fire, mute and exhausted. For the first time that they could remember she gave her family the impression of being really ill. Speller made tea, cocoa and soup on the gas-ring in the dressing-room. Hot drinks were at once a distraction and a stimulant. The night seemed incredibly long—nobody spoke above whispers, though every now and then Rose would say—“There’s no good whispering—he wouldn’t hear us even if we shouted.”
“I do hope he really is unconscious,” said Doris.
“Dr. Mount says he is.”
“But how can he know? He knows Father can’t speak, but he doesn’t know he can’t hear us.”
“I expect there are signs he can tell by.”
“The last words he ever spoke were said to me. That’ll be something comforting to remember.... But oh, it was dreadful finding him like that! I do hope it hadn’t lasted long ... that he hadn’t been like that for a long time, all alone....”
Doris bowed her head into her hands and sobbed loudly. As she sat there, crouched over the fire, her face with the merciful powder and colour washed off by tears, all haggard and blotched, and the make-up of her eyes running down her cheeks, her hair tumbling on her ears, and revealing the dingy brown roots of its chestnut undulations—she looked by far the most stricken of the party, more even than the sick man, who but for his terrible breathing lay now in ordered calm.
A clock in the house struck three.
“I wonder when we’ll hear about Peter,” whispered Rose.
“I’m surprised we haven’t heard already,” said Mary—“They must have gone all over the Starvecrow land by now.”
“Um....” said Rose, “that seems to point to his not being anywhere about the place.” Then she added—“I wonder if Gervase will come. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if he didn’t.”
“I should. They’d never keep him back when his father’s dying.”
“Well—why isn’t he here? He’s known about it for over six hours.”
“I shouldn’t think there were any trains running now. It’s not so easy as all that to come from Brighton.”
Rose relapsed into silence. After a time she said—
“Religion is a great consolation at a time like this.”
“Do you think we ought to send for Mr. Williams to come and see Father?” choked Doris.
“No—of course not. What good could he do? Poor Sir John’s quite unconscious.”
“But he may be able to hear. How do you know he can’t? Perhaps he would like to hear Mr. Williams say a prayer or a hymn.”
“My dear Doris, I tell you he doesn’t know a thing, so what’s the good of dragging poor Mr. Williams out of his bed at three o’clock in the morning? I had no patience with the people who did that sort of thing to George. Sir John couldn’t understand anything, and if he did he’d be furious, so it doesn’t seem much good either way. When I said religion was a consolation I was thinking of Mary.”
“And why of me?” asked Mary.
“Well, I often think you’d be happier if you had some sort of religion. You seem to me to lead such an aimless life.”
“Of course I’d be happier. Most people are happier when they believe in something. Unfortunately I never was taught anything I could or cared to believe.”
“Mary! How can you say that, when poor George....”
She broke off as the door opened and Jenny suddenly appeared.
“Hullo, Jenny!” cried Doris—“have you come back?—Have they found Peter?”
Jenny did not speak. She shut the door behind her, and stood with her back against it. Her face was white and damp. It was evidently raining, and wet strands of hair were plastered on her cheeks.
“Is Dr. Mount in there?” she asked.
“Yes—but Jenny ... Peter!...”
“I must see Dr. Mount first.”
“Who’s that asking for me?”
The doctor came in from the next room; at the sight of Jenny he shut the communicating door.
“I want to speak to you, Dr. Mount. Will you come with me?”
“Jenny, you really can’t treat us like this,” cried Mary, “you must tell us what’s happened. Is Peter hurt?”
“Yes—he’s downstairs.”
“Is he dead?” cried Doris, springing to her feet.
Again Jenny did not speak. She bowed her head into her hands and wept silently.
A dreadful silence filled the little room. Even Doris was perfectly quiet.
“I’ll come down,” said Dr. Mount.
“So’ll I,” said Doris.
“No,” said Jenny, “you mustn’t see him.”
“Why not?”
“He’s—he’s been dreadfully injured—part of his head....”
She stopped and shuddered. Dr. Mount pushed quietly past her to the door.
“I think I’d better go down alone. Your husband and the men are down there—I can get all the information I want from them.”
Jenny came forward to the fire and flopped into the chair Doris had left. Her clothes were wet and her boots muddy—it must be raining hard.
“I’d better tell you what happened,” she said brokenly—“The men—some from here and some from Starvecrow—found Peter lying on the Tillingham marshes about half a mile below the Mocksteeple. His dog was watching beside him, and he’d been shot through the head.”
“Murdered,” gasped Doris.
“No—I don’t think so for a moment.”
“It was an accident, of course,” said Mary.
“I wish I could think that. But the men seemed to think—my husband too—that it was his own doing.”
“His own doing! Suicide!” cried Doris—“How could they imagine such a thing?”
“From the way he was lying, and the position of the gun, and the nature of the injuries. That’s why I was so anxious for Dr. Mount to see him and give an expert opinion.”
“Is there any chance of his being still alive?”
“Not the slightest. His head is nearly entirely blown away.”
“Oh, Jenny, don’t!—it’s dreadful!”
“Yes it’s dreadful, but I’m afraid it’s true.”
“But whatever could have made him kill himself?” moaned Doris—“He’d nothing on his mind—he was perfectly happy ... it couldn’t have been because the baby was a girl.”
“Peter may have had troubles that we don’t know of,” said Rose.
“He must have,” said Jenny, “though I don’t think for a minute they were of the kind you’ve been suspecting.”
“I don’t see what other kind they could be.”
“It may have been something to do with the estate.”
“He’d never have killed himself for that. If anything had gone wrong there, it was more than ever his duty to keep alive.”
“Well, there’s no good us arguing here about what he did it for—if he really did do it. The question is—who is going to tell Mother?”
“Oh, Jenny....”
They looked at each other in consternation.
But Lady Alard, for all her frailty, belonged to a tougher generation than her children. In times of prosperity she might languish, but in times of adversity her spirit seemed to stiffen in proportion to the attacks upon it. If her cook had given notice she would have taken to her bed, but now when catastrophe trod on catastrophe and the fatal illness of her husband was followed by the death of her first-born son she armed herself with a courage in which her children, careless of kitchen tragedies, seemed to fail when they met the bigger assaults of life. She was less shattered by the news of Peter’s death than was the daughter who broke it to her, and rising up out of her chair, independent of arm or stick, she insisted on going downstairs into the dark, whispering house.
The others followed her, except Doris, who stayed huddled and motionless in her chair in her father’s dressing-room, like a stricken dog at its master’s door. The dining-room was lighted up and seemed full of men. They were gathered round the table on which, with a sense of futility and pathos Jenny caught sight of a pair of stiff legs in muddy boots.
At the sound of footsteps Dr. Mount came out of the room.
“What! Lady Alard!” he exclaimed, quite unprepared for such a visit.
“Yes, I want to see him.”
“You can’t—yet!”
“Are you quite sure he’s dead?”
“Quite sure.”
Dr. Mount looked shaken—his face was grey. But all faces were grey in the light of the hall, where the first livid rays of morning were mixing with the electric lamps that had burned all night.
“How did it happen, Doctor? Does anyone know?”
“Nobody knows. He was found on the Tillingham marshes. His gun may have gone off accidentally.”
“May have....” repeated Jenny.
“Will there have to be an inquest?”
“I’m afraid so. There always is in these cases.”
“Well, Sir John has been spared something.”
Her voice broke for the first time, and she turned back to the stairs. Rose and Mary went with her but Jenny lingered in the hall, where she had the comfort of seeing her husband through the dining-room door. Dr. Mount stopped as he was going back into the room.
“Has anyone told his wife?”
“Yes—one of the men came to Starvecrow at once.... I told her.... They thought it best not to take him there.”
“Of course—quite right. How did she bear it?—Perhaps I ought to go and see her.”
“Her mother’s with her, but I’m sure they’d be glad if you went there.”
“I’ve got the car—I could run round in a few minutes. I must go home too ... one or two things to see to ... I don’t think I’m wanted here just now.”
The doctor seemed terribly shaken by Peter’s death, but that was very natural, considering he had known him from a child. Also, Jenny reflected, being a religious man, the idea of suicide would particularly appall him.
“Doctor—do you—do you think he did it himself?”
“I’m sorely afraid he did.”
“But what can have made him? ... I mean, why should he? I always thought he was so happy—too happy, even. I sometimes thought him self-satisfied and over-fed.”
“We all have our secrets, Jenny, and your brother must have had a heavier one than most of us.”
“But why should you be so sure he did it? Couldn’t his gun have gone off by accident?”
“Of course it could. But the wounds would hardly have been of such a nature if it had. However, the matter will probably be cleared up in the Coroner’s court.”
Jenny shuddered.
“I wonder if he’s had any trouble—anything worse than usual about the land....” Then she remembered Rose’s suspicions of Stella Mount. Her colour deepened as she stood before Stella’s father. Could that possibly be the reason, after all? She had never imagined such a thing, but Peter certainly had been fond of Stella once, and Rose’s gossip was seldom quite baseless. She did not believe for a moment in any intrigue, but Peter might have turned back too late to his early love ... and of course Stella was going away ... it might have been that. Since undoubtedly Peter had had a secret buried under the outward fatness of his life, that secret may just as well have been Stella....
“Your husband tells me he came to see you this afternoon,” the doctor was saying, “what was he like then?”
“He seemed rather queer and silent, but afterwards I put it down to its being his first visit since my marriage. He wouldn’t forgive me for a long time, as you know, so it was only to be expected that he should feel a little awkward. But he said some rather queer things about Starvecrow—said he wished it was more like Fourhouses, said he’d spoilt it with his improvements, and seemed much more upset about it than you’d think natural.”
“Um.”
The doctor was silent a moment, then he said—
“Well, I think I’ll run over to Starvecrow in a minute or two when I’ve finished with poor Peter, then I might as well go home and have an early breakfast, and see if there are any messages for me. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
He moved away from her, and was going into the dining-room when Rose’s frightened voice suddenly shuddered down the stairs.
“Dr. Mount—will you please come up at once. There’s a change in Sir John.”
Sir John Alard died when the cocks were crowing on Starvecrow and Glasseye and Doucegrove, and on other farms of his wide-flung estate too far away for the sound to come to Conster. His wife and daughters and daughter-in-law were with him when he died, but he knew no one. His mind did not come out of its retreat for any farewells, and if it had, would have found a body stiffened, struggling, intractable, and disobedient to the commands of speech and motion it had obeyed mechanically for nearly eighty years. Death came and brought the gift of dignity—a dignity he had never quite achieved in all his lifetime of rule. When his family came in for a last look, after the doctor and the nurse had performed their offices, they saw that the querulous, irascible old man of the last few months was gone, and in his place lay Something he had never been of stillness and marble beauty. When Dr. Mount had invited them in to the death-chamber, the daughters had at first refused, and changed their minds only when they found that Lady Alard was unexpectedly ready to go. Now Jenny at least was glad. It was her first sight of death (for she had not seen George’s body and would never see Peter’s) and she was surprised to find how peaceful and triumphant the body looked when set free from the long tyranny of the soul. It comforted her to know that in its last fatal encounter with terror, pain and woe, humanity was allowed to achieve at least the appearance of victory. Her father lying there looked like one against whom all the forces of evil had done their worst in vain.
Nobody cried except Doris, who cried a great deal. She had not cried for Peter, but when her father’s spirit had slipped out after a sigh, she had burst into a storm of noisy weeping. She was sobbing still, kneeling beside the body of the father who had bullied and humiliated her all her life, the only one of his children who really regretted him.
There was the sound of wheels in the drive below.
“Is that Gervase?” asked Jenny, going to the window.
“No,” said Mary, “it’s Dr. Mount going away.”
“He seems in a great hurry to get off,” said Rose—“he didn’t wait a minute longer than he could possibly help.”
“I don’t wonder,” said Jenny.
“I expect he’s gone home to break it to Stella,” whispered Rose.
“He told me he was going to Starvecrow to see Vera,” said Jenny icily. She hated Rose’s conjectures all the more that she now shared them herself.
“It will be dreadful for some people at the inquest,” continued her sister-in-law.
“Dreadful! how dreadful?—You don’t mean Stella’s to blame, do you?”
“Oh, of course, I don’t mean she’s really done anything wicked—but she let poor Peter go on loving her when she knew it was wrong.”
“How could she have stopped him?—supposing it’s true that he did love her.”
“Any girl can stop a man loving her,” said Rose mysteriously.
“Oh, can she?—it’s obvious you’ve never had to try.”
Jenny was surprised at her own vindictiveness, but she felt all nerves after such a night. Rose was plunged into silence, uncertain whether she had been complimented or insulted, and the next minute there was another sound of wheels in the drive.
“That must be Gervase.”
A taxi had stopped outside the door, and out of it climbed, not Gervase but Brother Joseph of the Order of Sacred Pity, with close-cropped hair, a rough, grey cassock and the thickest boots man ever saw. As she watched him from the window, Jenny felt a lump rise in her throat.
She was going down to meet him when suddenly Doris started up from the bedside.
“Let me go first.”
She brushed past her sister and ran downstairs before anyone could stop her. Jenny hurried after her, for she felt that Doris in her present condition was not a reassuring object to meet the home-comer. But she was too late. Doris flung open the door almost at the same instant as the bell rang.
“Welcome!” she cried hysterically—“Welcome—Sir Gervase Alard!”
If Gervase was taken aback at his sister’s appearance, he did not show it by more than a sudden blink.
“My dear Doris,” he said, and taking both her hands he kissed her poor cheek where rouge and tears were mingled—“I met Dr. Mount—and he’s told me,” he said.
“About Peter?”
“Yes.”
He came into the hall and stood there a quaint, incongruous figure in his cloak and cassock.
“Hullo, Wills,” as the butler came forward.
“How do you do, Mr. Gervase—I mean Sir Ger—or rather I should say——”
He remembered that his young master was now Brother Something-or-other, having crowned an un-squirelike existence, much deplored in the servants’ hall, by entering a Home for Carthlicks. He compromised with—
“Can I have your luggage, sir?”
“Here it is,” said Gervase, holding out on one finger a small bundle tied up in a spotted handkerchief, and Wills who was going to have added “and your keys, sir,” retired in confusion.
“Where’s Peter?” asked Brother Joseph.
“In there,” Jenny pointed into the dining-room where Peter still lay, now no longer pathetic and futile in booted and muddy death, but dignified as his father upstairs under his white sheet.
Young Alard went in, and standing at the head of the table, crossed himself and said the first prayer that had been said yet for Peter. His sisters watched him from the doorway. Doris seemed calmer, her tears came more quietly.
“How’s Mother?” he asked as he came out.
“She’s been wonderful,” said Jenny, “but I think she’s breaking a bit now.”
“And Vera?”
Vera had not been wonderful. It is difficult to be wonderful when your husband has killed himself because he loved another woman and you did not die in childbirth to let him marry her.
“It’s dreadful,” moaned Jenny. Then suddenly she wondered if Gervase knew the worst. There was a look of bright peace in his eyes which seemed to show that he was facing sorrow without humiliation or fear.
“Did Dr. Mount tell you that—tell you exactly how Peter died?”
“He told me he had been killed accidentally out shooting. He gave me no details—he couldn’t wait more than a minute.”
“Oh, my dear, it was much worse than that....”
She saw that once again she would have to “break it” to somebody. It was easier telling Gervase than it had been to tell the others, for he did not cry out or protest, but when she had finished she saw that his eyes had lost their bright peace.
Doris was sobbing again, uncontrollably.
“The two of them gone—first Peter and then Father. To think that Peter should have gone first.... Thank God Father didn’t know! He didn’t know anybody, Gervase—the last person he recognised was me. That will always be a comfort to me, though it was so dreadful.... I went into the library, and found him all huddled there, alone ... and I said ‘Are you ill, Father?’—and he said ‘Get out’—and now, Gervase, you’re the head of the family—you’re Sir Gervase Alard.”
“We’ll talk that over later. At present I must go and see Mother.”
“But you’re not going to back out of it—you’re not going to leave us in the lurch.”
“I hope I shan’t leave anybody in the lurch,” he replied rather irritably, “but there are lots of more important things than that to settle now. Where is Mother, Jenny?”
“She’s upstairs in Father’s dressing-room.”
She noticed that he looked very white and tired, and realised that he must have been travelling for the greater part of the night.
“Are you hungry, dear? Won’t you eat something before you go up?”
“No thank you—I don’t want anything to eat. But might I have a cup of tea?”
“Speller’s making that upstairs, so come along.”
They were halfway up, and had drawn a little ahead of Doris, when he bent to her and whispered—
“Does Stella know?”
“Yes—Dr. Mount was on his way home when you met him.”
“Oh, I’m glad.”
So he, too, perhaps thought Stella might be the reason....
The little dressing-room was full of people. Ben Godfrey was there, the son-in-law and the man of the house till Gervase came. Mr. Williams was there too, summoned by Rose at a seasonable hour. He was sitting beside Lady Alard, who had now begun to look old and broken, and was trying to comfort her with a picture of her husband and son in some nebulous Paradisaical state exclusive to Anglican theology. He looked up rather protestingly at the sight of Gervase, whose habit suggested rival consolations and a less good-natured eschatology. But young Alard had not come to his mother as a religious, but as her son. He went up to her, and apparently oblivious of everyone else, knelt down beside her and hid his face in her lap. “Oh, Mummy—it’s too terrible—comfort me.”
His sisters were surprised, Ben Godfrey was embarrassed, Rose and Mr. Williams tactfully looked another way. But Lady Alard’s face lit up with almost a look of happiness. She put her arms round him, hugging his dark cropped head against her bosom, and for the first time seemed comforted.
The Mounts’ little servant had gone to bed by the time Stella came home from church, so she did not hear till the next morning of the message from Starvecrow. Her father had rung her up earlier in the evening to say that he would probably not be home that night; and she was not to sit up for him. So she carefully bolted both the doors, looked to see if the kitchen fire was raked out, pulled down a blind or two, and went upstairs.
She was not sorry to be alone, for her mind was still wandering in the dark church she had left ... coal black, without one glimmer of light, except the candle which had shown for a moment behind the altar and then flickered out in the draughts of the sanctuary. Spring by spring the drama of the Passion searched the deep places of her heart. The office of Tenebrae seemed to stand mysteriously apart from the other offices and rites of the church, being less a showing forth of the outward events of man’s redemption than of the thoughts of the Redeemer’s heart.... “He came, a man, to a deep heart, that is to a secret heart, exposing His manhood to human view.” Throughout those sad nocturnes she seemed to have been looking down into that Deep Heart, watching its agony in its betrayal and its forsaking, watching it brood on the scriptures its anguish had fulfilled.... “From the lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet” ... watching it comfort itself with the human songs of God’s human lovers, psalms of steadfastness and praise—then in the Responds breaking once more into its woe—a sorrowful dialogue with itself—“Judas, that wicked trader, sold his Lord with a kiss”—“It had been good for that man if he had not been born” ... “O my choicest vine, I have planted thee. How art thou turned to bitterness” ... “Are ye come out against a thief with swords and staves for to take me?” ... “I have delivered my beloved into the hand of the wicked, and my inheritance is become unto me as a lion in the wood”—“My pleasant portion is desolate, and being desolate it crieth after me.”
Through psalm and lesson, antiphon and response, the Deep Heart went down into the final darkness. It was swallowed up, all but its last, inmost point of light—and that too was hidden for a time ... “keeping His divinity hidden within, concealing the form of God.” In the darkness His family knelt and prayed Him to behold them; then for a few brief moments came the showing of the light, the light which had not been extinguished but hidden, and now for a few moments gleamed again.
It was all to the credit of Stella’s imagination that she could make a spiritual adventure out of Tenebrae as sung in Vinehall church. The choir of eight small boys and three hoarse young men was rather a hindrance than an aid to devotion, nor was there anything particularly inspiring in the congregation itself, sitting on and on through the long-drawn nocturnes in unflagging patience, for the final reward of seeing the lights go out. Even this was an uncertain rite, for old Mr. Bream, the sacristan, occasionally dozed at the end of a psalm with the result that he once had three candles over at the Benedictus; and another time he had let the Christ candle go out in the draught at the back of the Altar and was unable to show it at the end, though his hoarse entreaties for a match were audible at the bottom of the church. But Stella loved the feeling of this His family sitting down and watching Him there in stolid wonder. She loved their broad backs, the shoulders of man and girl touching over a book, the children sleeping against their mothers, to be roused for the final thrill of darkness. She was conscious also of an indefinable atmosphere of sympathy, as of the poor sharing the sorrows of the Poor, and drawn terribly close to this suffering human Heart, whose sorrows they could perhaps understand better than the well-educated and well-to-do. She felt herself more at ease in such surroundings than in others of more sophisticated devotion, and on leaving the church was indignant with an unknown lady who breathed into her ear that she’d seen it better done at St. John Lateran.
Up in her bedroom, taking the pins out of her hair, her mind still lingered over the office. Perhaps Gervase was singing it now, far away at Thunders Abbey.... She must write to Gervase soon, and tell him how much happier she had been of late. During the last few weeks a kind of tranquillity had come, she had lost that sense of being in the wrong with Peter, of having failed him by going away. She saw that she was right, and that she had hated herself for that very reason of being in the right when poor Peter whom she loved was in the wrong. But her being in the right would probably be more help to him at the last than if she had put herself in the wrong for his dear sake.
“Judas the wicked trader
Sold his Lord with a kiss.
It had been good for that man
If he had not been born.”
She too might have sold her Lord with a kiss. She wondered how often kisses were given as His price—kisses which should have been His joy given as the token of His betrayal. She might have given such a token if He had not preserved her, delivered her from the snare of Peter’s arms ... oh, that Peter’s arms should be a snare ... but such he himself had made them. She had not seen him for a long time now—a whole fortnight at least; and in less than another fortnight she would be gone.... He was keeping away from her, and would probably keep away until the end. Then once more he would see Vera, his wife, holding their child in her arms ... and surely then he would go back. Probably in a few days too he would be Sir Peter Alard, Squire of Conster, head of the house ... then he would be thankful that he had not entangled himself with Stella Mount—he would be grateful to her, perhaps....
“For I have delivered my beloved into the hand of the wicked,
And my inheritance is become unto me as a lion in the wood
My pleasant portion is desolate—
And, being desolate,—it crieth after me.”
How the words would ring in her head!—breaking up her thoughts. She felt very tired and sleepy—and she would have to be up early the next morning. “My inheritance is as a lion in the wood.”... Those words had made her think of Starvecrow. She had always thought of Starvecrow as her inheritance, the inheritance of which Peter had robbed her.... Starvycrow ... oh, if only Peter had been true they might now be waiting to enter their inheritance together. Sir John Alard could not have kept them out of it for more than a few years. But Peter had cut her off, and Starvecrow was strange to her—she dared not go near it ... strange and fierce—a lion in the wood.
She was sorry for Sir John Alard, lying at the point of death. She viewed his share in her tragedy with the utmost tolerance. He had belonged to the old order, the toppling, changing order, and it was not he who had failed the spirit of life, but Peter, who belonged to the new but had stood by the old. Poor Peter who had inherited only the things which are shaken, when he was the heir of the kingdom which cannot be moved....
Only her sudden waking showed her that she had been asleep. She started up and looked at the time. This was Good Friday morning, and it was now half-past six. She jumped out of bed, hurried on her clothes, tumbled up her hair, and was rather sleepily saying her prayers when she heard the sound of her father’s car at the door. He was back, then—all was over—Peter was now Sir Peter Alard, and would not think of her again. Tears of mingled pity and relief filled her closed eyes till the end of her bedside office—
“May the souls of the faithful, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.”
She rose from her knees and ran downstairs to meet her father. He was standing in the hall, pulling off his furry driving gloves.
“Hullo, darling”—kissing his cold face—“Come in to the surgery, and I’ll light the fire and get you some tea.”
“Were you going to church?”
“Yes, but I shall have to be late, that’s all.”
“I have something to tell you, my dear.”
His grave face sent a sudden chill into her heart.
“Father!—what is it?—has anything happened to——”
“Sir John Alard is dead——”
She knew that was not what he had to tell her.
“And Peter doesn’t inherit Conster.”
She stared at him—she could not understand. Was Peter illegitimate? Her heart sickened at the monstrous irony of such a thought.... But it was impossible. She was conceiving the preposterous in self-defence—in frantic hope that Peter was not ... dead.
“Is he dead?” she asked her father.
He bowed his head silently.
She could not speak. She was kneeling on the floor in front of the unlighted fire. In one hand she held some sticks, and for a time she could not move, but knelt there, holding out the unkindled sticks towards the back hearth.
“I felt I must come home and tell you before the rumour reached you. He was found on the Tillingham marshes, with his gun....”
“How?—an accident?” she mumbled vaguely.
“I don’t know, my dear—I’m afraid not.”
“You mean....”
“I mean that from the way they tell me he was lying and from the nature of the wounds, I feel nearly sure that it was his own act. I am telling you this, poor darling, because you would be sure to hear it some time, and I would rather you heard it from me.”...
“Will there be an inquest?” she heard herself asking calmly.
“Yes, there’s sure to be an inquest. But of course I don’t know what the findings will be, or if the Coroner will want to question you.”
“I don’t mind if he does—I can answer.”
She did not quite know what she was saying. She went over and stood by the window, looking out. A mist was rising from the garden, giving her an eastward vista of fields in a far-off sunshine. The air was full of an austere sense of spring, ice-cold, and pierced with the rods of the blossomed fruit-trees, standing erect against the frigid sky.
Her father came and put his arm around her.
“Perhaps you would like to be alone, my dear—and I must go and see poor Mrs. Peter. I came here first, because I wanted to tell you ... but now I must go to Starvecrow.”
(Starvycrow ... being desolate it crieth after me.)
He stooped and kissed her averted face.
“My darling ... I’m so sorry.”
She felt a lump rise in her throat as if it would choke her—it broke into a great sob.
“Cry, dearest—it will do you good.”
She gently pushed him from her—but when he was gone, she did not cry.
The little shrill bell of Vinehall church, the last of a large family of pre-Reformation bells, was still smiting the cold air, but Stella could not pray any more than she could weep. Neither could she remain indoors. She put on her furs and went out. She wished she had the car—to rush herself out of the parish, out of the county, over the reedy Kentish border, up the steep white roads of the weald, away and away to Staplehurst and Marden, to the country of the hops and the orchards.... But even so she knew she could not escape. What she wanted to leave behind was not Vinehall or Leasan or Conster or even Starvecrow, but herself. Herself and her own thoughts made up the burden she found too heavy to bear.
She walked aimlessly down Vinehall Street, and out beyond the village. The roads were black with dew, and the grass and primrose-tufts of the hedgerow were tangled and wet. There was nowhere for her to sit down and rest, though she felt extraordinarily tired at the end of two furlongs. She turned off into a field path, running beside the stacks of a waking farm, and finally entering a little wood.
It was a typical Sussex spinney. The oaks were scattered among an underwood of hazel, beech and ash; the ground was thick with dead leaves, sodden together into a soft, sweetsmelling mass out of which here and there rose the trails of the creeping ivy, with the starry beds of wood-anemones; while round the moss-grown stumps the primrose plants were set, with the first, occasional violets. A faint budding of green was on the branches of the underwood, so backward yet as to appear scarcely more than a mist, but on the oaks above, the first leaves were already uncurling in bunches of rose and brown. Then at the bend of the path she saw a wild cherry tree standing white like Aaron’s rod against the sky. The whiteness and the beauty smote her through, and sinking down upon one of the stumps, she burst into a flood of tears.
She cried because her pain had at last reached the soft emotions of her heart. Hitherto it had been set in the hard places, in self-reproach, in horror, in a sense of betrayal, both of her and by her.... But now she thought of Peter, shut out from all the soft beauty of the spring, cut off from life and love, never more to smell the primroses, or hear the cry of the plovers on the marsh, never more to watch over the lands he loved, or see the chimney-smoke of his hearth go up from Starvecrow.... She had robbed Peter of all this—she did not think of him as cut off by his own act but by hers. It was she who had killed him—her righteousness. So that she might be right, she had made him eternally wrong—her Peter. She had been the wicked trader, selling her lover for gain. It had been well for her if she had not been born.
The softer emotions had passed, and with them her tears. She clenched her hands upon her lap, and hated herself. She saw herself as a cold, calculating being. She had said “I will get over it,” and she had said “Peter will get over it.” No doubt she was right about herself—she would have got over it—people like her always did; but about Peter she had been hopelessly wrong. He had deeper feelings than she, and at the same time was without her “consolations.” Her “consolations”!—how thankful she had been that she had not forfeited them, that she had not given them in exchange for poor Peter. At first they had not seemed to weigh much against his loss, but later on she had been glad and grateful; and while she had been finding comfort in these things, building up her life again out of them, Peter had been going more and more hungry, more and more forlorn, till at last he had died rather than live on in starvation.
She hated herself, but there was something worse than just self-hatred in the misery of that hour. If she had betrayed Peter it was that she, too, had been betrayed. She had been given the preposterous task of saving her soul at the expense of his. If she had not fled from the temptation of his presence—if she had given way to his entreaties and promised not to leave him without the only comfort he had left, Peter would still be alive. She would have done what she knew to be wrong, but Peter would not be dead in his sins. Why should her right have been his wrong? Why should his dear soul have been sacrificed for hers? He had died by his own hand—unfaithful to his wife and child in all but the actual deed. Why should she be forced to bear the guilt of that?
The pillars of her universe seemed to crumble. Either heaven had betrayed her or there was no heaven. She almost preferred to believe the latter. Better ascribe the preposterous happenings of the night to chance than to a providence which was either malignant or careless of souls. Perhaps God was like nature, recklessly casting away the imperfect that the fittest might survive. Poor Peter’s starved, undeveloped soul had been sacrificed to her own better-nourished organism, just as in the kingdom of nature the weakest go to the wall.... She looked round her at the budding wood. How many of these leaves would come to perfection? How many of these buds would serve only as nourishment to more powerful existences, which in their turn would fall a prey to others. She would rather not believe in God at all than believe in a Kingdom of Heaven ruled by the same remorseless laws as the bloody Kingdom of Nature....
But she could not find the easy relief of doubt, though something in her heart was saying “I will doubt His being rather than His love.” After all, what was there to prove the assertion that God is love?—surely it was the most monstrous, ultramontane, obscurantist dogma that had ever been formulated. The Real Presence, the Virgin Birth, the physical Resurrection were nothing to it. It was entirely outside human knowledge—it ran directly contrary to human experience ... and yet it was preached by those who looked upon the creeds as fetters of the intellect and the whole ecclesiastical philosophy as absurd. Fools and blind!—straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel! She laughed out loud in the wood.
Her laughter brought her to her senses—yes, she knew she would always be sensible. She would either have to be sensible or go mad. It is the sensible people who fill the asylums, for they cannot rest in the halfway house of eccentricity. To Stella it was a dreadful thing to have laughed out loud in a wood. She was terrified, and jumped up at once to go home. By the watch on her wrist it was half-past eight; her father would be home from Starvecrow and wanting his breakfast. Breakfast, dinner and tea ... people like herself could never forget breakfast, dinner and tea.
“Well, my dear, did you go to church?”
“No, I went for a walk instead.”
Her tone was perfectly calm, if a little flat. She was really being splendid, poor little girl.
“Gervase is back—I forget whether I told you. I met him on my way home early this morning.”
“Oh—how does he look?”
“Very well—though changed, of course, with his hair cut so short. I’m glad he’s there. He’ll take Lady Alard out of herself.”
“How is Lady Alard?”
“She’s much better than I could have thought possible.”
“And Mrs. Peter?”
“She’s different, of course ... Jewish temperament, you know. But I left her calmer. I think she’ll try and keep calm for the sake of the child—she adores that.”
The doctor had had rather a rough time at Starvecrow, but he would not tell Stella about it. Vera was in no doubt as to the cause of her husband’s death, and as soon as Stella was out of hearing, Dr. Mount was going to telephone to a Rye practitioner to take charge of the case. Mrs. Peter was nearly well, and really he could not go near her again after what she had said....
“When is the inquest going to be?” asked Stella abruptly.
“Tomorrow afternoon, my dear. Godfrey was at Conster, and he says he’s seen the Coroner.”
“And shall I have to go?”
“I fear so. But no doubt you’ll get an official intimation. You aren’t afraid, are you, sweetheart?”
“No, I’m not afraid.”
“Will you drive me out this morning? I must go over to Benenden, and take Pipsden on the way back.”
“Yes, I should like to drive you.”
So the day passed. In the morning she drove her father on his rounds, in the afternoon she dispensed in the Surgery, and in the evening there was church again. Church was black.... “And they laid him there, sealing the stone and setting a watch.... Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in the place of darkness, and in the deep—free among the dead, like unto those who are wounded and lie in the grave, who are out of remembrance.... And they laid him there, sealing a stone and setting a watch.”
The great three-days drama was over. For the last time the Tenebrae hearse had stood a triangle of sinister light in the glooms of the sanctuary. Tomorrow’s services would be the services of Easter, in a church stuffed with primroses and gay with daisy chains. What a mockery it all would be! How she wished the black hangings could stay up and the extinguished lamp before the unveiled tabernacle proclaim an everlasting emptiness. She shuddered at the thought of her Easter duties. It would be mere hypocrisy to perform them—she who wished that she had mortal sin to confess so that Peter need not have died in mortal sin.
She thought of Gervase, so near her now at Conster, and yet spiritually so very far away, in peaceful enjoyment of a Kingdom from which she had been cast out. She had half expected to see him in church that evening, but he had not been there, and she had felt an added pang of loneliness. The sight of him, a few words from him, might have comforted her. She thought of Gervase as he used to be in the old days when he first learned the faith from her. She almost laughed—she saw another mockery there. She had taught him, she had brought him to the fold—he himself had said that but for her he would not have been where he was now—and now he was comforted and she was tormented.
Then as she thought of him, it struck her that perhaps he might have written—that there might be a letter waiting for her at home. Surely Gervase, who must guess what she was suffering, would take some notice of her, try to do something for her. Obsessed by the thought, she hurried home from church—and found nothing.
Though the expectation had not lasted half an hour, she was bitterly disappointed. It was callous of him to ignore her like this—he must know her position, he must guess her anguish. She felt deserted by everyone, obscure and forsaken. It is true that her father was near her and loved her and shared her sorrow, but he did not know the full depths of it—he was satisfied that she had done right, and thought that she, too, was satisfied. She could not thrust her burden of doubt upon his simple soul. She was becoming rapidly convinced that only Gervase could share her burden with her, and if he stood away ... could she bear it alone?
That night she scarcely slept at all. Her mind went round and round on its treadmill, its sterile walk of questions and regrets. In the small hours she must have dozed a little, for she dreamed she had gone to a Mass for Peter’s soul, and Gervase was the Priest. The server had just carried the Book to the north end of the Altar, and she stood waiting to hear the grail—“The righteous shall be held in everlasting remembrance: he shall not be afraid of any evil tidings.” But instead a terrible voice rang out: “I have delivered my beloved into the hand of the wicked, and my heritage is become unto me as a lion in the wood.”... Trembling and panting, she awoke to the realisation that no Mass could be said for Peter, no office read; that he was not one of “the Faithful Departed”—that good company of many prayers....
She lay motionless, her face buried in the pillow, without struggles or tears. She was aware, without sight of the dawn breaking round her, of the cold white light which filled the room, of the grey sky lying like a weight upon the trees. She heard the wind come up and rustle round the house, and the cocks begin to crow, some near, some far away—Padgeham answering Dixter, and Wildings echoing Brickwall. The new day had come—Holy Saturday, the day of peace, the last and greatest of the Sabbaths, the seventh day on which God rested from the six days’ labour of His new creation.
She was roused by a clock striking eight, and again her abominable sense asserted itself. She had never lain in bed so long in her life—she must get up quickly, and give her father his breakfast before he started on his rounds.
With as it were leaden weights in her head and limbs, she rose, dressed and went down. As she was going down the stairs a kind of hope revived. Perhaps this morning there would be a letter from Gervase....
Yes, there was. It was lying in the letter box with a lot of others. She eagerly tore it open and read—
“Stella, dear—this is just to tell you how I feel for you and am praying for you.—Gervase.”
That was all.
A sick and silly feeling of disappointment seized her. She knew now that for some unaccountable reason she had been banking her hopes on that letter. She had been expecting Gervase to resolve her doubts, to reconcile her conflicts. But instead he seemed ridiculously to think she could do all that for herself. Her heart warmed against him—perhaps he shrank from coming to grips with the problem. His faith recoiled from the raw disillusion which he must know she was feeling. He would keep away from her rather than be mixed up in her dust.... Well, he should not. His aloofness should not save him. She would go over to Conster and see him, since he would not come to her. With a growing resentment she told herself it was the least he could do for her. She had given him his faith—he might at least make an effort to save hers.
“Father,” she said when they were at breakfast—“do you mind driving yourself out this morning? I’m going to Conster to see Gervase.”
“Certainly, my dear. I’m glad you’re going to see him—I thought perhaps he might be coming here.”
“So did I—but he’s asked me to go there instead.”
Something in her detached and dispassionate said—“that lie was quite well told.”
As soon as her father had gone, she set out for Conster. She went by the road, for the field way ran near Starvecrow, and she had not the courage to go by Starvecrow.
She did not get to Conster till nearly eleven, and as she walked up the drive she asked herself what she would do if Gervase was out. She would have to wait, that was all. She must see him—he was the only person on earth who could help her.
However, he was not out. Wills let her in very solemnly. He did not attach any importance to the gossip in the servants’ hall—but ... she looked ill enough, anyway, poor creature.
“Yes, Miss, Sir Gervase is in. I will tell him you’re here.”
Stella started a little—Sir Gervase! She had asked for Mr. Gervase. She had forgotten. In her absorption in the main stream of the tragedy she had ignored its side issues, but now she began to realise the tempests that must be raging in Gervase’s life. Would he have to leave his community, she wondered—after all, he could easily come out, and great responsibilities awaited him. The next minute she gave another start—as she caught her first sight of Brother Joseph.
He seemed very far away from her as he shut the door behind him. Between them lay all the chairs and tables, rugs and plants of the huge, overcrowded drawing-room. For the first time she became aware of a portrait of Peter on the wall—a portrait of him as a child, with masses of curly hair and wide-open, pale blue eyes. She stared at it silently as Gervase came towards her across the room.
“Stella, my dear.”
He took both her hands in his firm, kind clasp, and looked into her eyes. His own seemed larger than usual, for his hair was cut very close, almost shorn. That, and his rough grey cassock buttoned collarless to his chin, altered his appearance completely. Except for his touch and voice, he seemed almost a stranger.
“Gervase....” she sank into a chair—“Help me, Gervase.”
“Of course I will. Did you get my note?”
“Yes—but, oh, Gervase....”
She could say no more. Her breath seemed gone. She held her handkerchief to her mouth, and trembled.
“I should have written more—but I’ve had such a time, Stella, with my family and the lawyers. Perhaps you can understand what a business it all is when I tell you that I’ve no intention of coming out of the Order, which means I’ve got to make up my mind what to do with this place. I’ve been at it hard all yesterday afternoon and this morning with my father’s London solicitors, but I’ve managed to keep the family quiet till after the funeral, by which time I shall have the details settled. Otherwise I should have come to see you.... But I knew you were safe.”
“Gervase, I’m not safe.”
“My dear——”
He held out his hand and she took it.
“I’m not safe, Gervase. You think I’m stronger than I am. And you don’t know what’s happened.”
“I know all about Peter.”
“Yes, but you don’t know the details. You don’t know that Peter killed himself because I insisted, in spite of all his entreaties, on going away. He told me that my presence was the only comfort he had left, but I wouldn’t stay, because if I stayed I knew that I should be tempted, and I was afraid.... I thought it was my duty to run away from temptation. So I ran. I never thought that perhaps Peter couldn’t live without me—that I was saving my soul at the expense of his. I wish now that I’d stayed—even if it had meant everything.... I’d far rather sin through loving too much than through loving too little.”
“So would I. But have you loved too little?”
“Yes—because I thought of myself first. I thought only of saving my own soul ... and I thought I could forget Peter if only I didn’t ever see him again, and I thought he could forget me. But he couldn’t—and I can’t.”
“In other words, you did right and behaved very sensibly, but the results were not what you expected.”
“Gervase—if you tell me again that I’ve been ‘right’ and ‘sensible,’ I—oh, I’ll get up and go, because you’re being just like everyone else. Father says I’ve been ‘right’ and ‘sensible’—and I know Father Luce would say it—and the Coroner will say it this afternoon. And it’ll be true—true—true! I have been right and sensible, and my right has put Peter in the wrong, and my sense has driven him mad.”
“And what would your ‘wrong’ have done for Peter?”
“He’d still be alive.”
“With your guilt upon him as well as his own. Stella, my dear, listen to me. When I talk about your being ‘right’ I don’t mean what most people would mean by right. If it’s any comfort to you, I think that most people who have intelligence and are not merely conventional would think you had done wrong. You loved Peter and yet refused to have him, with the result that his life is over and yours is emptied. I know, and you know, that you did this because of an allegiance you owed beyond Peter. But most people wouldn’t see that. They’d think you had refused him because you were afraid, because you dared not risk all for love. They’d never see that all the daring, all the risk, lay in your refusing him. Now be candid—isn’t part of your unhappiness due to your feeling that it would have been braver and more splendid to have done what Peter wanted, and let everything else go hang?”
“Yes,” said Stella faintly.
“Well, I’ll tell you what I think would have happened—if you’d stayed—stayed under the only conditions that would have satisfied Peter. Vera would have, of course, found out—she has found out already a great deal more than has happened; she’s not the sort of woman who endures these things; she would have divorced Peter, and he would have married you. Nowadays these scandals are very easily lived down, and you’d have been Lady Alard. After a time the past would have been wiped out—for the neighbourhood and for you. You would probably have become extremely respectable and a little censorious. You would have gone to Leasan church on Sundays at eleven. You would have forgotten that you ever weren’t respectable—and you would have forgotten that you ever used to live close to heaven and earth in the Sacraments, that you ever were your Father’s child.... In other words, Stella, you would be in Hell.”
Stella did not speak. She stared at him almost uncomprehendingly.
“I know what you think, my dear—you think you would have undergone agonies of regret, and you tell yourself you should have borne them for Peter’s sake. But I don’t think that. I think you would have been perfectly happy. Remember, you would have been living on a natural level, and though we’re made so that the supernatural in us may regret the natural, I doubt if the natural in us so easily regrets the supernatural. Your tragedy would have been that you would have regretted nothing. You would have been perfectly happy, contented, comfortable, respectable, and damned.”
“But Peter—he——”
“Would probably have been the same. He isn’t likely to have turned to good things after seeing how lightly they weighed with you. But the point is that you haven’t the charge of Peter’s soul—only the charge of your own—‘Man cannot deliver his brother from death or enter into agreement with God for him.’ It cost very much more to redeem their souls than you could ever pay.”
“But, Gervase, isn’t Peter’s soul lost through what he did—through what I drove him to——”
“My dear, how do we know what Peter did? What do we really know about his death? Can’t you take comfort in the thought that perfect knowledge belongs only to Perfect Love? As for your own share—your refusal to love your love for him unto the death, your refusal to make it the occasion for treachery to a greater love—that refusal may now be standing between Peter’s soul and judgment. You did your best for him by acting so—far better than if you had put him in the wrong by making his love for you—probably the best thing in his life—an occasion for sin. He takes your love out of the world unspoilt by sin. Your love is with him now, pleading for him, striving for him, because it is part of a much greater Love, which holds him infinitely dearer than even you can hold him. Stella, don’t you believe this?”
She was crying now, but he heard her whisper “Yes.”
“Then don’t go regretting the past, and thinking you would have saved a man by betraying God.”
“I’ll try not....”
“And suppose as the result of your refusing to stay, Peter had turned back to Vera, and been happy in his wife and child again, you wouldn’t have regretted your action or thought you’d done wrong. Well, the rightness of your choice isn’t any less because it didn’t turn out the way you hoped.”
“I know—I know—but ... I was so cold and calculating—one reason I wanted to go away was that though I couldn’t have Peter I didn’t want to go without love ... for ever....”
“I scarcely call that ‘cold and calculating.’ I hope you will love again, Stella, and not waste your life over has-beens and might-have-beens. It’s merely putting Peter further in the wrong if you spoil your life for his sake.”
“You think I ought to get married?”
“I certainly do. I think you ought to have married years ago, and Peter was to blame for holding that up and damming your life out of its proper course. He kept you from marrying the right man—for Peter wasn’t the right man for you, Stella, though probably you loved him more than ever you will love the right man when he comes. But I hope he will come soon, my dear, and find you—for you’ll never be really happy till he does.”
“I know, Gervase, I know—oh, do help me to be sensible again, for I feel that after what’s happened, I couldn’t ever.”
“My dear, you don’t really want help from me.”
“I do. Oh, Gervase ... I wish I weren’t going to Canada—I don’t feel now as if I could possibly go away from you. You’re the only person that can help me.”
“You know I’m not the only one.”
“You are. You’re the only one that understands ... and we’ve always been such friends.... I feel I don’t want to go away from you—even if you’re still at Thunders....”
She spoke at random, urged by some helpless importunity of her heart. He coloured, but answered her quite steadily.
“I shall never leave Thunders, my dear. It’s too late for that now. I shall always be there to help you if you want me. But I don’t think you really want me—I think you will be able to go through this alone.”
“Alone....”
A few tears slid over her lashes. It seemed as if already she had gone through too much alone.
“Yes, for you want to go through it the best way—the way Love Himself went through it—alone. Think of Him, Stella—in the garden, on the cross, in the grave—alone. ‘I am he that treadeth the wine-press-alone.’”
“But, Gervase, I can’t—I’m not strong enough. Oh ... oh, my dear, don’t misunderstand me—but you say you owe your faith to me ... can’t the faith I gave you help me now that I’ve lost mine?”
“You haven’t lost it—it’s only hidden for a time behind the Altar ... you must go and look for it there. If you look for it in me you may never find it.”
She rose slowly to her feet.
“I see,” she said, as a blind man might say it.
He, too, rose, and held out his hand to her.
“You’ll know where I am—where I’ll always be—my life given to help you, Stella, your brother, your priest. I will be helping you with my thoughts, my prayers, my offices—with my Masses some day, because, but for you I should never say them. In that way I shall pay back all you’ve given me. But to the human ‘me’ you’ve given nothing, so don’t ask anything back. If I gave you anything in that way I might also take—take what I must not, Stella. So goodbye.”
She put her hand into his outstretched one.
“Goodbye, Gervase.”
“Goodbye.”
She wondered if he would give her another of those free kisses which had shown her so much when first he went away. But he did not. They walked silently to the door, and in the silence both of that moment and her long walk home she saw that he had paid his debt to her in the only possible way—by refusing to part with anything that she had given him.
That afternoon the Coroner’s inquest was held on Peter Alard, and twelve good men and true brought in a verdict of “accidental death.” The Coroner directed them with the conscientiousness of his kind—he pointed out that, according to medical opinion, the dead man’s wounds must almost certainly have been self-inflicted; but on the other hand they had rather conflicting evidence as to how the body was lying when found, and the doctor could not speak positively without this. He would point out to the witnesses the desirability of leaving the body untouched until either a doctor or the police had been summoned. No doubt they had thought they were doing right in carrying him to his father’s house, but such action had made it difficult to speak positively on a highly important point. As to the motives for suicide—they had heard Miss Mount’s evidence, which he thought had been very creditably given—indeed, he considered Miss Mount’s conduct to have been throughout irreproachable, and whatever the findings of the jury she must not blame herself for having acted as any right-minded young lady would have done under the circumstances. Feeling herself attracted by the deceased, a married man, and realising that he was also attracted by her, she had very properly decided to leave the neighbourhood, and but for her father’s professional engagements would have done so at once. The meeting at which she had made this decision known to Mr. Alard had taken place two months ago, and it was for the Jury to decide whether it was likely to have driven him to take his life so long after the event. The deceased’s sister, Mrs. Benjamin Godfrey, had told them of a conversation she had had with him on the afternoon of his death. He seemed then to have been preoccupied about his farm of Starvecrow, and other evidence had shown that the estate was much encumbered, like most big properties at the present time, though the position was no more serious than it had been a year ago. The Jury must decide if any of these considerations offered sufficient motive for self-destruction, if the deceased’s manner on the day of his death had been that of a man on the verge of such desperate conduct, and if the medical evidence pointed conclusively to a self-inflicted death. There were alternatives—he enlarged on the nature of gun accidents, dismissed the possibilities of murder—but the evidence for these hung on the thread of mere conjecture, and was not borne out by medical opinion.
The verdict was a surprise to the family. The loophole left by the Coroner had been so small that no one had expected even a local Jury to squeeze through it. But these men had all known Peter, many of them had done business with him, all had liked him. No one of them would have him buried with a slur upon his memory—no one of them would have his widow’s mourning weighted with dishonour, or his child grow up to an inheritance of even temporary insanity—and incidentally they all liked Miss Stella Mount, and had no intention she should bear the burden of his death if they could help it. So they brought in their verdict, and stuck to it, in spite of some rather searching questions by the Coroner. They wouldn’t even bring in an open verdict—they would do the thing properly for the kindly Squire who had for so long stood to them for all that was best in the falling aristocracy of the land.
Peter was buried with his father in Leasan churchyard, in the great vault of the Alards, where all of them lay who had not been buried at Winchelsea. He and Sir John mingled their dust with Sir William the land-grabber, whose appetite for farms lay at the bottom of all the later difficulties of the estate, with Gervase the Non-Juror, with Giles who met his casual loves at the Mocksteeple—with all the great company of Squires who had lived at Conster, lorded Leasan, built and farmed and played politics for nearly five hundred years. Perhaps as they stood round the grave in the late April sunshine, some of the family wondered if these were the last Alards for whom the vault would be opened.
Everyone went back to Conster after the funeral. Sir John’s will had already been read by the solicitors. It presented no difficulties—the whole estate went to Peter Alard and his heirs; in the event of his dying without male issue, to Gervase. The will had been made shortly after the death of George.
Gervase knew that now the time had come when he must face his family. They were all there at tea, except Vera—who was still unable to leave her room—and he could tell by a certain furtive expectancy in some and uneasiness in others that a crisis was impending. Doris was the head of the expectant group, Jenny of the uneasy ones. Doris had never looked more unlike the hysterical, dishevelled woman who had wept for Sir John. In her new black frock, and her hat with the plumes that swept down to her shoulders—powdered, rouged, salved, pencilled and henna’d into elegance if not into beauty, she seemed to have gathered up in herself all the pomp and circumstance of the Alards. There was not much of it to be seen in Lady Alard’s weary preoccupation with the burnt scones, in Rose’s glancing survey of the other women’s clothes, in Mary’s rather colourless smartness, in Jenny’s restlessness or her husband’s awkwardness—he had carried his first top-hat into the drawing-room, and put it, with his gloves inside it, on the floor between his large feet—and there was certainly nothing of it in the present holder of the title, sitting with his arms folded and thrust up the sleeves of his habit, his shoulders hunched as with a sense of battles to come.
Gervase considered that the sooner the row was over the better; so, as no one seemed inclined to begin it, he decided to start it himself.
“Mother, dear, do you think you could lend me five shillings?—At least I’d better say give it to me, for I don’t suppose there’s the slightest chance of your ever seeing it again.”
“Yes, dear—but why ... I don’t understand.”
“Well, I’ve only got eighteenpence left from the money Father Peter gave me to come here, and the third class fare to Brighton is six and six.”
“Gervase,” shrieked Doris—“you’re not going back to that place!”
“My dear, what else did you expect?”
“But you won’t stay there—you won’t go on being a monk—you won’t refuse to be Sir Gervase Alard!”
“I haven’t even begun to be a monk, and, according to the solicitors, I’ll have to go on being Sir Gervase Alard to the end of my days—but I’m going to stay there.”
“But what’s to become of us? Gervase, you can’t be Squire and not live here.”
“Let me explain myself. I’m not thinking of being Squire. I forfeit all my rights absolutely, except the title, which I’m told I can’t get rid of. But I shall sell the estate.”
The silence that fell was almost terrifying. Doris sank back in her chair as if fainting, Lady Alard covered her face, Rose sat with her mouth open, Jenny and Godfrey stared at each other.
Lady Alard was the first to speak.
“You mean that you’re going to turn us out—your mother and sisters—not even leave us a roof over our heads? And what becomes of the furniture?”
“I shall of course consult your wishes about the house. If you want to go on living here, the house and grounds are yours.”
“But Gervase,” cried Doris hoarsely—“what good will the house be to us without the land? Do you think we’re going to live on here and see all the estate pieced out and flung to small-holders and contractors?—I’d rather go and live in a slum.”
“If Gervase doesn’t mean to live here, I’m by no means sure that I care to stay on,” said Lady Alard. “The morning-room chimney smokes abominably, and the bedrooms are extremely inconvenient—also, with my illness, I really think I ought to live in a town. We might move into Hastings.”
“But Gervase doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” cried Doris—“he can’t desert us and fling away his responsibilities like this. Sell the estate! Oh, God—poor Father!” and she burst into tears.
Rose sprang to her feet with an indignant look at Gervase, and put her arm round Doris’s heaving shoulders, but her sister-in-law ungratefully pushed her away.
“I’m dreadfully sorry,” said Gervase, “but I really don’t think I’m letting anyone down. I’ve gone into things pretty thoroughly during the last few days, and really it would have been extremely difficult for us to carry on.”
“Difficult—but not impossible.”
“Not impossible. But possible only in the way we’ve been doing for the last ten years, and, honestly, do you think that’s good enough?”
“It’s better than throwing everything overboard, anyhow.”
“I don’t think it is. By ‘throwing everything overboard,’ as you call it, we can at least save the land.”
“How?”
“For the last ten years we’ve been doing hardly anything for the land. We’ve been unable to introduce up-to-date methods; we can’t even keep our farms in decent repair. If we hung on now, still further crippled by death-duties, the land would simply go to pot. By selling, we can save it, because it will pass into the hands of men who will be able to afford it what it needs. Possibly one or two of the tenants will buy their farms. Anyhow, there won’t any longer be a great, big, unwieldy, poverty-stricken estate, paying more in taxes than it actually brings in profits and deteriorating every year for lack of money spent on it.”
“But I’m perfectly sure that if you pulled yourself together you could save the estate without cutting it in pieces. A conservative government is sure to improve matters for us and reduce taxation. I know Peter could have saved us.”
“I’m not Peter.”
“But you could save us if you wanted to. You’ve only to put yourself at the head of things, and get a really good bailiff, and perhaps sell an outlying farm or two to bring in a little ready money.... But you won’t. That’s what you mean. You don’t want to come out of your monastery and face the world again. You could save us. But you won’t.”
“You’re quite right—I won’t.”
The discussion had somehow become a dialogue between Gervase and Doris. Why Doris should appoint herself as Alard’s spokesman no one exactly knew, but none of the rest made any effort to join in. Lady Alard was too deeply preoccupied with the house and its impending changes to worry about the land, Rose was angry with Doris for having repulsed her, so would give her no support, Mary was indifferent, Godfrey diffident, and Jenny, though revolting deeply from her brother’s choice, was too loyal to him to take anyone else’s part.
“I won’t because I can’t,” continued Gervase; “I can’t leave the Abbey, even if I knew that by doing so I could save Conster. I went there long before I’d the slightest notion I should ever succeed to this place, but even if I’d known I should have gone just the same. The only other thing I could do now would be to appoint a trustee to administer the estate for me, but in that way I should only be adding to the difficulties all round. By selling the place I’m doing the best possible thing for the land and for everyone else. The land will run a chance of being developed to its fullest value, instead of being neglected and allowed to deteriorate, and I’ll be making a fairly decent provision for Mother and all the rest of you—you’ll be far better off than if we’d stuck to the old arrangement; you’ll have ready money for about the first time in your lives. Mother and Doris and Mary can live on here if they like, or they can go and live in Hastings or in town. I think the sale ought to realise enough to make everyone fairly comfortable—anyhow, much more comfortable than they are in the present state of things.”
“But, Gervase,” sobbed Doris—“you don’t seem to think of the family.”
“What else am I thinking of? I’m just telling you that you and Mary and Mother——”
“But we’re not the family. I mean the whole thing—the house of Alard. What’s to become of it if you go and sell the estate, and shut yourself up in an Abbey, instead of coming here and looking after the place, and marrying and having children to succeed you? Don’t you realise that if you don’t marry, the whole thing comes to an end?”
“I’m afraid it will have to come to an end, Doris. I can’t save it that way.”
Doris sprang to her feet. She looked wild.
“But you must save it—you must. Oh, Gervase, you don’t understand. I’ve given up my life to it—to the family. I’ve given up everything. I could have married—but I wouldn’t—because he wasn’t the sort of man for our family—he wasn’t well-connected and he wasn’t rich—it would have been a comedown for an Alard, so I wouldn’t have him—though I loved him. I loved him ... but I wouldn’t have him, because I thought of the family first and myself afterwards. And now you come along, undoing all my work—making my sacrifice worthless. You don’t care twopence about the family, so you’re going to let it be sold up and die out. We’re going to lose our house, our land, our position, our very name.... I gave up my happiness for Alard, and you go and make my sacrifice useless. Gervase, for God’s sake save us. You can—if only you’ll come away from those monks and be Squire here. I’m sure God can’t wish you to desert us. Gervase, I beg you, I pray you to save the family—I pray you on my knees....”
And suiting the action to the word, she went down on her knees before him.
The others sat rooted to their chairs—partly at the sight of Doris’s frenzy, partly of her humiliation, partly to hear the multitudinous lovers she had always hinted at reduced in a moment of devastating candour to one only. Gervase had sprung to his feet. He trembled and had turned very white. Then for a moment he, too, seemed to turn to stone.
“I pray you,” repeated Doris hoarsely—“I pray you on my knees....”
Her brother recovered himself and, taking both her hands, pulled her to her feet.
“Don’t, Doris....”
“Then, will you?”
“My dear, is the family worth saving?”
“What d’you mean?”
“Listen, Doris. You’ve just told me that you’ve given up your life’s love and happiness to the family. Peter ... I know ... gave up his. Mary gave up part of hers, but saved a little. Jenny alone has refused to give up anything, and is happy. Is our family worth such sacrifices?”
Her head drooped unexpectedly to his shoulder, and she collapsed in weeping.
“No,” he continued—“it isn’t worth it. The family’s taken enough. For five hundred years it has sat on the land, and at first it did good—it cared for the poor, it worked its farms to the best advantage, and the estate prospered. But it’s outlived those days—it’s only an encumbrance now, it’s holding back the land from proper development, it’s keeping the yeoman and small land-owner out of their rights, it can’t afford to care for the poor. It can barely keep its hold on the land by dint of raising mortgages and marrying for money. It can only be kept up by continual sacrifices—of the land, of the tenants, of its own children. It’s like a wicked old dying god, that can only be kept alive by sacrifices—human sacrifices. And I tell you, it shan’t be any more.”
There was another pause, noisy with Doris’s weeping. The other members of the family began to feel that they ought to take their share in the argument. They none of them felt for Alard what Doris so surprisingly felt, but after all they could not sit round and watch Gervase turn the world upside down without some protest.
“You know I want to be reasonable,” said Jenny in rather an uncertain voice, “and I don’t want to push you into a way you don’t want to go. But from your own point of view, don’t you think that all this that’s happened just shows—that—that this religious life isn’t, after all, the right life for you—the life you were meant for?”
“I always said it was very silly of Gervase to become a monk,” said Lady Alard. “He could do quite a lot of good in the parish if he lived at home. Mr. Williams said he was looking for someone to manage the Boy Scouts.”
“Yes, that was what poor George was always saying,” said Rose—“‘Charity begins at home.’”
“Oh, don’t think I haven’t prayed over this,” cried Gervase—“that I haven’t tried hard to see if, after all, my duty didn’t lie in taking my place here and trying to save the property. But I’m quite sure that isn’t my duty now. As I’ve tried to show Doris, Conster simply isn’t worth saving. It’s lost its power for good—it can only do harm, to the district and to us. It had much better come to an end.”
“But even if you feel like that about the estate,” said Mary—“there’s the family apart from the land. It’s rather dreadful to think that a fine old family like ours should be deliberately allowed to die out—the name become quite extinct. And it’s not only for the family’s sake, but for yours. You’re a young man—scarcely more than a boy. I think it’s dreadful that you should already have made up your mind to live without marriage and die without children.”
“So do I!” cried Jenny, fierce at last.
“I’ve gone into all that,” said Gervase with a touch of weariness, “and you know how I’ve decided.”
“But these new circumstances hadn’t arisen.”
“I shouldn’t have decided differently if they had.”
“I’m not sure,” said Mary—“that even that other plan you spoke of wouldn’t be best—better than selling everything, I mean. Couldn’t you administer the estate through a bailiff or trustee?”
“If my father and Peter couldn’t make it pay, what would be the result of an absentee landlord?—the place wouldn’t stand it. We’d bust. No, in fairness to the land it ought to go back to the small landlords—that’s its only chance of recovery. I’m not doing this only for our own sakes, but for the sake of the land and the people it ought to belong to.”
“I think you’re a traitor,” said Rose—“a traitor to your house.”
“I wish I was dead,” cried Doris. “First Father—then everything else.... I’ve nothing to live for now.”
“Why, you’ve got me,” said Lady Alard—“You’ll come with me, Doris. I think I shall go to Worthing—it’s more bracing than the coast here. Gervase, do you think the dining-room sideboard would fit into a smaller house?”
“Oh, Father,” sobbed Doris—“Oh, Father—oh, Peter.... What would you have done if you had known how it was going to end?”
THE END
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