"Love wakes men, once a lifetime each
They lift their heavy heads and look.
* * * * *
And some give thanks, and some blaspheme,
And most forget, but either way
That, and the child's unheeded dream
Is all the light of all their day."
The Grants were sitting at breakfast in their small, red-walled
dining-room. Richard, commonly called Dick, at the end of the table,
Mabel at the one side and Mrs. Grant in the seat of honour at the top.
Wherever Mrs. Grant sat was the seat of honour; she was that kind of old
lady. Marvellously handsome still, despite her age, with a commanding
presence and a nature which had sublime contempt for everyone and
everything except herself, she sailed through life exacting service from
all and obedience from her children. Why they obeyed her they could not
have themselves explained; perhaps it was an inheritance from the dead
Mr. Grant, who had worshipped his wife as if she had been some divinity.
In her own way Mrs. Grant had always been gracious and kindly to her
husband, but he had been altogether a nonentity in her life. Before the
children were old enough to see why, they realized that Daddy was only
the man who made the money in their house. Mother spent it, buying the
luxuries with which they were surrounded, the magnificent toys which
they disregarded, as is the way of children, the splendidly expensive
clothes, which were a perfect burden to them. Then, just when Dick was
beginning to understand, Mr. Grant died.
* * * * *
He had sent for his son--Dick was about eighteen then--and spoken to him
just before the end came.
"You will have to look after your mother, Dick," he had said, clutching
at the young, strong hands; "she has always been looked after. She has
never had to rough things in her life. And you won't be any too well
off. Promise me, promise me, you will always give her of your best."
"Of course, I promise, Dad," he had answered.
Further conversation between then had ceased because Mrs. Grant swept
into the room, regal even in the face of death. Dick remembered the
incident afterwards with a little twitch of his lips because it was so
typical of his mother and it was just at this period that he had begun
to criticize her. The sick-room had been in shadowed gloom until her
entry; the lights hurt the fast-failing eyes.
"I cannot sit in the dark," stated Mrs. Grant, as she settled herself,
with a delightful rustle of silk and a wave of perfume, beside the bed.
"You know that, Harry. It always has depressed me, hasn't it?"
"Turn up the lights, Dick," whispered the man, his hand had closed on
one of hers; happiness flooded his heart at her presence.
"But you know they hurt your eyes," Dick expostulated; he was new to
death, yet he could read the signs well enough to know his father was
dying.
"Harry can lie with his eyes shut," answered Mrs. Grant calmly. There
was no disagreeableness in her tone: her selfishness was on too gigantic
a scale for her ever to be disagreeable.
And Dick had turned up the lights and gone fuming from the room,
conscious for the time being of a sense of dislike for his mother's
perfection!
It soon faded though; he had been trained too thoroughly in his youth.
Once he said to Mabel hotly:
"Why does Mother cry for Dad? She did not really love him, and she just
delighted in buying all that expensive and becoming mourning."
And Mabel had surprised him by replying: "Mother does not really love
anyone but herself."
The remark sounded odd from Mabel, who spent her life slaving with
apparent devotion in her mother's service. She was a tall, rather
colourless girl, with big grey eyes and a quaint-shaped mouth that was
always very silent. She moved through the background of their lives
doing things for mother. She had always done that; Dick wondered
sometimes whether the soul within her would ever flame into open
rebellion, but it never did.
By the time Dick had passed his various exams, and was ready to take up
a practice somewhere, Mrs. Grant and Mabel had been practically
everywhere on the Continent.
"Money is running short," Mabel wrote crisply to Dick; "cannot you do
anything in the way of taking a house and settling down, so as to make a
home for Mother and me?"
Dick's ambitions lay in the direction of bachelor's diggings and work in
London. He thrust them aside and bought what was supposed to be a very
good and flourishing practice at Birmingham. Unfortunately Mrs. Grant
took a violent dislike to Birmingham. Their house was gloomy and got on
her nerves; the air, she said, was laden with smoke which irritated her
throat. She developed a cough, quite the most annoying sound that Dick
had ever imagined, and he was not easy to irritate. Mother coughed from
the time she woke till the time she went to sleep--coughed and
remembered old times and wept for Harry, who would at least have taken
care not to expose her to such overwhelming discomfort.
At the end of six months Dick threw up the practice in despair and
placed himself at her disposal. They put in a year in London, but what
Dick earned was quite insufficient to cope with what Mrs. Grant spent
and things went from bad to worse.
Mabel never offered any advice until she was asked but when Dick spoke
to her finally she was quite definite.
"You have got to take Mother in hand," she said. "Father never did. He
spent his life making money for her to spend, but there is no reason why
you should. Get a small practice somewhere in the country where there
are no shops and just tell Mother you are going to settle there for five
years at least."
"She will get another cough," argued Dick.
"You must let her cough, it won't hurt her," answered Mabel.
Undoubtedly Mrs. Grant did not approve of Wrotham to begin with, but it
had its advantages, even for her. She settled very quickly into the role
of Lady Bountiful; the villagers gazing upon her with such unmixed
admiration that she was moved to remark to Mabel that it was really
pleasant doing things for such grateful people. Dick provided her with a
victoria and horse in place of the usual doctor's trap, and she could
drive abroad to visit this or that protege in truly regal style. It
meant that Dick had to pay all his visits, and some of them very far off
and at all sorts of unseasonable hours, on a bicycle, but he never
grudged making sacrifices of that kind for her. No one admired his
mother in the abstract more than Dick did.
Mabel perhaps resented the extra work it entailed on him, for she loved
Dick with the whole force of her self-restrained heart. But, as usual,
she kept silent. The villagers could see that she drove out in
attendance on Mrs. Grant, but to them she was only an uninteresting
shadow that waited on the other's splendour. They often wondered among
themselves how Mrs. Grant could have a daughter as drab and
uninteresting as Miss Grant; they did not realize how, like a vampire,
the older woman lived upon the younger one's vitality. People like Mrs.
Grant exist at the expense of those they come in contact with. You
either have to live for them or away from them.
On this particular morning Dick finished his breakfast before either his
mother or sister, and pushing back his chair, asked, as he had always
asked since the days of his childhood, if he might rise.
"Before I am finished, Dick?" remonstrated Mrs. Grant; "it is not very
polite, dear."
"I know," Dick apologized, "but the truth is I have an early call to pay
this morning. The people of the Manor House have sent for me; Miss
Rutherford the younger is not awfully well, or something."
"Miss Rutherford the younger?" repeated his mother; "I did not know
there was a younger; I have never seen her, have I, Mabel?"
"I don't suppose so," Dick answered for his sister; "she has been away
in London."
"What is the matter with her?" asked Mrs. Grant. "Why do they want you
to see her?"
"I can't know that till I have seen her, can I? Last night she happened
to come into the Rendle cottage just after they had brought that poor
girl home, and the sight must have upset her; anyway she fainted. I
expect that is what Miss Rutherford is worried about."
"It is hardly polite of her not to have brought her niece to call on
me," said Mrs. Grant. "Still, if you are going there, dear, and the girl
doesn't seem well, tell them I shall be only too happy to come and fetch
her for a drive some afternoon. I daresay my carriage is more
comfortable than that ramshackle old trap of theirs."
"You are a dear to think of it," he said, stooping to kiss her good-bye.
"If you can spare Mabel this afternoon, Mother, I thought perhaps she
might come into Sevenoaks with me. I have got to attend a meeting there,
and it will be an outing for her."
"If Mabel would like to go, of course she must," Mrs. Grant agreed. "I
shall be a little lonely, and to-day is the day I am supposed to have my
hair shampooed. Not that it really matters."
"I could not go any way," Mabel put in for herself. "Mr. Jarvis is
coming to tea, Dick; he asked himself last week."
She followed her brother out to the front door.
"The day is going to be full of disagreeables for you," he said, as they
stood waiting for his bicycle to be brought round. "Mother's shampoo, I
know what that involves, and Mr. Jarvis. Nuisance the fellow is; why
can't he see that you dislike him?"
"Oh, I don't exactly," she answered, without meeting his eyes.
She hated him like poison, Dick knew. He wondered rather vaguely why
Mabel had lied to him, generally speaking they were too good friends for
that to be necessary. Then he dismissed the subject, and his thoughts
turned again to the girl he was on his way to see. He had been thinking
a great deal of Joan since he had first seen her. The startled,
child-like face, the wide frightened eyes, had impressed themselves on
his mind the night before. He had lifted her in his arms and carried her
outside; the poise of her thrown-back head against his arm stayed in his
mind, a very warm memory. Poor little girl, it must have been horrible
for her to have come in from the gay placidness of her own life and
thoughts to the stark tragedy of Bridget Rendle's death.
He was very ignorant and very reverent in his thoughts about women. He
could imagine Joan's sweet, well-ordered life, the fragrance of youth
hung about his idea of her. Bridget Rendle had been a girl too, younger
perhaps than the other one; but Bridget had dipped into the waters of
life, and sorrow and sin had closed over her. The two girls were as far
apart as the poles, it seemed almost irreverent to think of them in the
same breath.
Aunt Janet met him in the hall when she heard of his arrival.
"I have not told my niece about sending for you," she said; "it might
only make her nervous. I am very alarmed about her, Dr. Grant. She has
been home now three weeks and she is really not at all like herself.
Then that faint last night. I am afraid of fainting-fits; my mother, I
may as well tell you, died very suddenly from a heart-attack."
"It is not likely to be anything of that sort," he told her.
"Yesterday's tragedy was quite sufficient to upset very strong nerves."
"I hope not," Aunt Janet agreed; "anyway, I shall feel happier once you
have seen her. Will you come this way?"
She led him through the house to a room on the other side of the
drawing-room which had been fitted up as a special sanctum for Joan
since her return from London.
"I am nervous," she admitted to the doctor with her hand on the
door-knob, "she will perhaps be annoyed at my having sent for you." Then
she opened the door and they passed in.
Joan was sitting in the far corner near the open window, a book on her
lap. But she was not pretending to read; Dick could have sworn that she
had been crying as they came in. As she saw her aunt was not alone she
stood up quickly and the book fell unheeded to the floor.
"This is the doctor, dear," Aunt Janet began nervously. "I asked him to
call and see you. You need a tonic, I am sure you do."
"You sent for him," whispered Joan. Dick felt horribly uncomfortable; it
was impossible not to sense the tragedy which hung heavy in the air.
"Why, oh why, have you done that, Aunt Janet?"
"I was afraid," the other began; "last night you----" Rather waveringly
she came to a full stop, staring at Joan.
The girl had drawn herself up to her full height. She faced them as
someone brought suddenly to bay, her hands clenched at her sides, two
flags of colour flaming in her cheeks.
"I was going to have told you," she said, addressing herself solely to
Aunt Janet, "now you have brought him in he must know it too. But I do
not need him to tell me what is the matter with me; I found it out for
myself last night. I am not ashamed, I do not even hold that I have done
anything wrong; I would have told you before only I did not know it was
going to come to this, and for the rest it was like a shut book in my
life that I did not want to have to open or look at again. I am like
Bridget Rendle," she said, head held very high. "I am going to have a
baby. Bridget was afraid and ashamed, but I am neither. I have done
nothing to be ashamed of."
The telling of it sapped at her much boasted courage, and left her
whiter than the white wall-paper; Dick could see that she had some ado
to keep back her tears.
Aunt Janet seemed to have been paralysed; she stayed where she was,
stiff, stricken, and Dick, glancing at her, thought he had never seen
such anguish and terror combined on a human face. He felt himself
completely forgotten in this crisis. The two women stared at each other.
Twice Aunt Janet moistened her lips and tried to speak, but the words
died in her throat. When she succeeded at last her voice was scarce
recognizable.
"You said--like Bridget Rendle," she whispered; "did you mean what you
said?"
"Yes," answered Joan.
The older woman turned towards the door. She walked as if blind, her
hands groping before her. "God!" Dick heard her say under her breath,
"Dear God, what have I done that this should come upon me?"
As she reached the door Joan called to her, her voice sharp with fear.
"Aunt Janet, Aunt Janet, aren't you going to say anything to me?"
"I must hold my tongue," the other answered stiffly, "or I shall curse
that which I have loved." Suddenly the anguish in her flamed to white
beat. "I would rather have known you dead," she said, and passed swiftly
from the room.
Joan took a step forward, and her foot touched on the book she had let
fall. Mechanically she stooped to pick it up, then, because her knees
were in reality giving way under her, she stumbled to the chair and sat
down again. She seemed to have forgotten the man standing by the door,
she just sat there, hands folded in her lap, with her white face and
great brown eyes looking unseeingly at the garden.
Dick moved uneasily. He had not the slightest idea what he ought to do;
he felt horribly like an intruder. And he was intensely sorry for the
girl, even though behind this sorrow lay the shock of a half-formed
ideal which she had shattered in his mind. Finally he submerged the man
in the doctor and moved towards her.
"I am most awfully sorry for you," he said, "will you let me help you if
I can? There may be some mistake, and anyway I could give you something
to help with those fainting-fits."
Joan brought her eyes away from the garden and looked at him. "No," she
said, "there is no mistake and I do not make a habit of fainting.
Yesterday it was different, perhaps I realized definitely and for the
first time what it would all mean. I saw Aunt Janet's face as she spoke
of the dead girl, and ... I do not know why I am telling you all this,"
she broke off, "it cannot be very interesting, but I do not want you to
think that I feel as Bridget Rendle felt."
"No," he agreed, "you are facing it with more courage than she had been
taught to have."
"It is not a question of courage," Joan answered. He was not
understanding her, she realized, and for some stupid reason it hurt that
he should not, but she must not stoop to further explanations. She stood
up, making a stern effort at absolute calmness.
"Good-bye," she said, "I am sorry you should have been troubled to come
and that you should have had to go through this sort of scene."
"Good-bye," was all he could answer.
At the door he turned to look back at her. "If you should need help of
any sort at any time," he said, "will you send for me? I should like to
feel you were going to do that."
"I cannot promise," she answered, "you see, I shall probably be leaving
here quite soon."
And with that he had to be content to leave her.