[Cover Illustration]
THE HOUSE OF BALTAZAR
_=BY THE SAME AUTHOR=_
IDOLS
JAFFERY
VIVIETTE
SEPTIMUS
DERELICTS
THE USURPER
STELLA MARIS
WHERE LOVE IS
THE ROUGH ROAD
THE RED PLANET
THE WHITE DOVE
FAR-AWAY STORIES
SIMON THE JESTER
A STUDY IN SHADOWS
A CHRISTMAS MYSTERY
THE WONDERFUL YEAR
THE FORTUNATE YOUTH
THE BELOVÈD VAGABOND
AT THE GATE OF SAMARIA
THE GLORY OF CLEMENTINA
THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE
THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE
THE JOYOUS ADVENTURES OF ARISTIDE PUJOL
THE
HOUSE OF BALTAZAR
BY
WILLIAM J. LOCKE
AUTHOR OF “THE ROUGH ROAD,” “THE RED PLANET,”
“THE WONDERFUL YEAR,” “THE BELOVÈD VAGABOND,” ETC.
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
TORONTO: THE RYERSON PRESS
MCMXX
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE COMPANY
————
COPYRIGHT, 1920
BY JOHN LANE COMPANY
T H E • PLIMPTON • PRESS
NORWOOD • MASS • U•S•A
THE HOUSE OF BALTAZAR
THE HOUSE OF BALTAZAR
CHAPTER I
THE early story of Baltazar is not the easiest one to tell. It is
episodic. It obeys not the Unities of Time, Place and Action. The only
unity to be found in it is the oneness of character in that absurd and
accomplished man. The fact of his being lustily alive at the present
moment does not matter. To get him in perspective, one must regard him
as belonging to the past. Now the past is a relative conception. Save to
the academic student of History, Charlemagne is as remote as Sesostris.
To the world emerging from the stupor of the great war, Mons is as
distant as Balaclava. Time is really reckoned by the heart-throbs of
individuals or nations. Yester-year is infinitely far away. . . .
To get back to Baltazar and his story. In the first place it may be said
that he was a man of fits and starts; a description which does not imply
irresponsible mobility of purpose and spasmodic achievement. The phrase
must be taken in the literal significance of the two terms. A man of
fits—of mental, moral and emotional paroxysms; of starts—of swift
courses of action which these paroxysms irresistibly determined. Which
same causes of action, in each case, he doggedly and ruthlessly pursued.
One, an intimate teacher of Baltazar, one who, possessed of the
knowledge of the scholar and the wisdom of the man of the world, might
be qualified to judge, called him a Fool of Genius. Now the genius is
steadfast; the fool erratic. In this apparent irreconcilability of
attributes lies the difficulty of presenting the story of Baltazar.
But for the war, the story would scarcely be worth the telling, however
interesting might be his sheer personality and his calculated
waywardness. It would have led no whither, save to a stage or two
further on his journey to the grave. But there is scarcely a human being
alive with whose apparently predestined lot the war has not played the
very devil. It knocked Baltazar’s world to bits—as soon as the
realization of it burst on his astonished senses; yet it seemed to bring
finality or continuity into his hitherto disconnected life.
It was during the war that his name was mentioned and his character
discussed for the first time for many years, by two persons not without
interest in his fate.
* * * * *
Marcelle Baring, a professional nurse of long standing, arrived late one
night at Churton Towers, to take up the duties of sister in charge. The
place was the country seat of a great family who, like many others, had
given it over to the Government as a convalescent home for officers; a
place of stately lawns and terraces and fountains; of picture-hung
galleries guarded by grim emptinesses in armour; of noble halls
heterogeneously furnished—for generosity seldom goes so far as to leave
the edges of a priceless marquetry table at the mercy of a
feather-headed subaltern’s forgotten cigarette; of tapestried rooms,
once filled with the treasures of centuries, now empty save for the rows
of little standard War Office bedsteads and the little deal regulation
tables at their heads.
Somewhat confused by the vastness of her new home, and by the contrast
of its gracious splendour with the utilitarian ugliness and mathematical
uniformity of the General Hospital which she had just left, Marcelle
Baring went downstairs the next morning to begin her new duties. Once in
the wards she felt at home; for a ward of sick men is the same all the
world over. The Matron went round with her, performing introductions;
but that first morning she only caught a third of the names. It would
take a few days to learn them, to learn also the history of the cases.
Besides, they were convalescents, dressings were few, and her work was
more administrative than personal. Her first impression was that of a
high spirited crowd of almost indistinguishable young men, some to all
intents and purposes sound of wind and limb, who in a short time would
be sent back to the tempest of shell whence they were driven; others
maimed and crippled, armless, legless, with drooping wrists, with
unserving ankles. In the daytime nearly all were out of the wards; most
in the open air playing tennis or lounging about the terraces, or
playing billiards in the open-sided pavilion that looked over the
Japanese garden. It was no easy matter to keep track of them all.
It was only on the second day that the name of a young officer who had
lost his foot caught her eye: “Mr. G. Baltazar.” He was very young,
fair, blue-eyed, with a little blond moustache. His tunic, laid ready
with the rest of his clothes, bore the white and purple ribbon of the
Military Cross. The stump had practically healed, but it still needed
attention.
“It’s rotten luck, isn’t it, Sister?” he said while she was tending him.
“I thought I had got through all right—the show at Ypres early in June.
I all but saw it out, but a bit of high explosive got me and here I am.
Anyhow, they say they’re going to wangle me an artificial foot, so that
I’ll never know the difference. One of those pukka things, you know,
that’ll pick up pins with the toes. I hope it’ll come soon, for I’m fed
up with crutches. I always feel as if I ought to hold out my hat for
pennies.”
“Poor chap!” said Marcelle, absently.
“That’s kind of you, but it’s just what I’m hating. I don’t want to go
through life as a ‘poor chap.’” He paused, then ran on: “I wonder how
you dear people can look at the beastly thing. Whenever I cock my leg
down and try to have a sight of it, it nearly makes me sick. I like to
be neat and tidy and not repulsive to my fellow-creatures, but that
crimpled-crumpled end of me is just slovenly and disgusting.”
Marcelle Baring scarcely heeded his debonair talk. His name had awakened
far-off memories. She worked in silence, pinned the bandage and,
smiling, with a “You’ll do all right, Mr. Baltazar,” left him.
The shock came the next afternoon. As she passed through the great
entrance hall, fitted up as a lounge with the heterogeneous furniture,
she came across him, the solitary occupant, sitting at a table, busy
with pencil and writing pad and a thick volume propped up in front of
him. Her eye caught arresting symbols on the paper, then the
page-heading of the book: “Rigid Dynamics.”
She paused. He looked up with a laugh.
“Hello, Sister!”
She said, with a catch in her breath, “You’re a mathematician?”
He laughed. “More or less. If they kick me out of the Army, I must go
back to Cambridge and begin again where I left off.”
“You must have left off rather high, if you’re reading Rigid.”
He started, for no one in this wide world but a mathematical student
could have used the phrase.
“What the—what do you know about Rigid?”
“I was at Newnham, in my young days,” she replied, “and I read
mathematics. And, oddly enough, my private tutor was”—she hesitated for
a second—“someone of your name.”
He pushed his chair away from the table.
“That must have been my father.”
“John Baltazar.”
“Yes, John Baltazar. One of the greatest mathematical geniuses Cambridge
has produced. Good Lord! did you know my father?”
“He and I were great friends.”
She looked him through and through with curiously burning eyes; of which
the boy was unconscious, for he said:
“Fancy your reading with my father! It’s a funny old world.” Then
suddenly he reflected and glanced at her critically. “But how could you?
He disappeared nearly twenty years ago.”
“I’m thirty-eight,” she said.
“Lord! you don’t look it—nothing like it,” he cried boyishly.
Nor did she. She carried a graceful air of youth, from the wave of brown
hair that escaped from beneath her Sister’s cap to the supple and
delicately curved figure. And her face, if you peered not too closely,
was young, very pure in feature, still with a bloom on the complexion in
spite of confinement in hospital wards. Her voice, too, was soft and
youthful. Perhaps her eyes were a little weary—they had seen many
terrible things.
At the young man’s tribute she flushed slightly and smiled. But the
smile died away when he added:
“What was he like? I’ve often wondered, and there has been no one to
tell me—no one I could have listened to. The dons of his generation are
too shy to refer to him and I’m too shy to ask ’em. Do you know, I’ve
never seen a picture of him even.”
“He was not unlike you,” she replied, looking not at him, but wistfully
down the years. “Of heavier build. He was a man of tremendous
vitality—and swift brain. The most marvellous teacher I have ever met.
He seemed to hold your intellect in his hands like a physical thing,
sweep it clear of cobwebs and compel it to assimilate whatever he chose.
A born teacher and a wonderful man.”
“But was he human? I know his work, though I haven’t read enough to
tackle it yet—most of it’s away and beyond Part II of the Tripos even.
I went up with an Open Mathematical Scholarship just before the war, and
only did my first year’s reading. I’m beginning this”—he tapped his
Treatise on Rigid Dynamics—“on my own. What I mean is,” he went on,
after a pause, “my father has been always an abstraction to me. I
shouldn’t have worried about him if he had just been a nonentity—it
wasn’t playing the game to vanish as he did into space and leave my
mother to fend for herself.”
“But I heard,” said the Sister, “that your mother had her own private
fortune.”
“I wasn’t alluding to that side of it,” he admitted. “But he did vanish,
didn’t he? Well, as I say, if he had been just a nobody, I shouldn’t
have been particularly interested; but he wasn’t. He was the most
brilliant man of his generation at Cambridge. For instance, he took up
Chinese as a sort of relaxation. They say his is the only really
scientific handbook on the study of the language. You see, Sister”—he
swerved impatiently on his chair and brought his hand down on the table,
whereat she drew a swift inward breath, for the gesture of the son was
that of the father—“I’ve always wanted to know whether I’m the son of
an inhuman intellect or of a man of flesh and blood. Was he human?
That’s what I want to know.”
“He was human all right,” she replied quietly. “Too human. Of course he
was essentially the scholar—or savant—whatever you like to call it.
His work was always to him an intellectual orgy. But he loved the world
too. He was a fascinating companion. He seemed to want to get everything
possible out of life.”
“Why didn’t he get it?”
“He was a man,” she said, “of sensitive honour.”
Captain Baltazar threw away the flaming match wherewith he was about to
light a cigarette.
“That licks me,” said he.
“How?”
“His bolting. Did you know my father very well?”
“I’ve told you we were great friends.”
“Did you know my mother?”
Her eyelids flickered for a moment; but she replied steadily:
“No. I was only a student and your father was my private tutor. But I
heard—from other people—a great deal about your mother. I believe she
died many years ago, didn’t she?”
“Yes. When I was five. I barely remember her. I was brought up by my
uncle and aunt—her people. They scarcely knew my father and haven’t a
good word to say about him. It was only when I grew up and developed a
sort of taste for mathematics, that I realized what a swell he was. And
I can’t help being fascinated by the mystery of it. There he was, as far
as I can gather, full of money, his own (which he walked off with) and
of mother’s, beginning to enjoy at thirty a world-wide reputation—and
suddenly he disappears off the face of the earth. It wasn’t a question
of suicide. For the man who buys a ticket for the next world doesn’t go
to peculiar trouble to take all his worldly estate with him. It isn’t
reasonable, is it?”
“Your father was too much in love with life to go out of it
voluntarily,” said Sister Baring.
“Then what the blazes did he do, and why did he do it?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Is he alive or dead?”
“How should I know, Mr. Baltazar?”
“He never wrote to you—after——?”
“Why should he have written to me?” she interrupted.
The rebuke in her voice and eyes sent the young man into confused
apologies.
“Naturally not. You must forgive me, Sister; but, as I’ve told you, I’ve
never met a pal of that mysterious father of mine before. I want to get
all the information I can.”
She drew a chair and sat by him. The great hall was very still and, in
contrast with the vivid sunshine perceived through the eastern windows,
very dark. Through the open door came the scents of the summer gardens.
The air was a little heavy. She felt her cap hot around her temples, and
lassitude enfeebling her limbs. The strain of the war years began to
tell. She had regarded this appointment as a rest from the intolerable
toil of the General Hospital in a large town which she had just quitted.
Before then she had served in France. And before that—for many
years—she had followed the selfless career of the nurse. Now, suddenly,
her splendid nerve showed signs of giving. If she had not sat down, her
legs would have crumpled up beneath her. So she thought. . . .
She looked at the young man, so eager, so proven, so like his father in
gesture and glance, yet in speech and outlook—she was yet to get to
that—but she knew the revolutionary influences of the war, the real
war, on those who have faced its terrors and become saturated with its
abiding philosophies—so different from the fervid creature, John
Baltazar, of the late nineties, who had never dreamed of the possibility
of this world convulsion. He had much the same frank charm of manner,
the direct simplicity of utterance; but the mouth was weaker; the eyes
were blue, the eyes of a shrewish blonde—not the compelling, laughing,
steel-grey eyes with a queer sparkle in the iris of John Baltazar. All
in the young face that was not John Baltazar’s was the mother’s. She
hated the mother dead, as she had loathed her living. Only once had she
seen her, a blonde shrew-mouse of a woman. Just a passing by on the
Newnham road, when a companion had pointed her out as Mrs. Baltazar. The
little bitter mouth had bitten into her memory: the hard little blue
eyes had haunted her for eighteen years. The mouth and eyes were there,
before her, now. The rest, all that was noble in the boy, was John
Baltazar.
“Who has told you the little you do know about him?” she asked.
“My uncle. My mother’s brother. I don’t think I have any relations
living on my father’s side. At any rate, I’ve not heard of them. We’re
of old Huguenot stock—Revocation of Edict of Nantes refugees—God knows
what we were before. Long ago I happened upon a copy somewhere of the
_Annuaire Militaire de l’Armée Française_—and I found a Baltazar in the
list. I had an idea of writing him; but I didn’t, of course. Now I
suppose the poor devil’s killed. Anyhow, that’s nothing to do with your
question. My uncle—Sir Richard Woodcott—they knighted him for
manufacturing easily broken hardware round about Birmingham, or for
going to chapel, or something—you know the type——”
Again she rebuked him: “I thought you said your uncle brought you up.”
“On my mother’s fortune—he was my guardian and trustee. But he never
let me forget that I was the son of John Baltazar. There was no question
of affection from either of them—himself or his wife. Anything I did
wrong—it was my scoundrel of a father coming out in me. After passing
through a childish phase of looking on him as a kind of devil who had
blasted my young life, I began to have a sneaking regard for him. You
see, don’t you? If he was the antithesis of Uncle Richard, he must be
somebody I could sympathize with, perhaps rather somebody who could
sympathize with me. They drew me into the arms of his memory, so to
speak. Odd, isn’t it?”
“What specifically did they accuse him of?”
“Oh, everything,” he replied, with a careless laugh. “Every depravity
under the sun. Colossal egotism and heartlessness the mildest. And of
course he drank——”
A sudden red spot flamed in the Sister’s cheek and her tired eyes
flashed. “That’s a lie! And so is the other. How dare they?”
“Oh, a pacifist Knight who is making his fortune out of the war will
dare anything. Then, of course, there’s what they say about any man who
runs away from his wife——”
“To be explicit——?” She leaned an elbow on the table, a cheek on hand,
and looked at him steadily.
“Well——” he paused, somewhat embarrassed. “Immorality—you know—other
women.”
“That’s not true either. At least, not in that sense. There was another
woman. Yes. But only one. And God knows that there could be nothing
purer and cleaner and sweeter on this earth than that which was between
them.”
“I’m more than ready to believe it,” said John Baltazar’s son. “But—how
do you know?”
“It’s the story of a dear friend of mine,” she replied. “Nothing was
hidden from me. The girl couldn’t help worshipping him. He was a man to
be worshipped. I don’t want to speak evil of your mother—there may have
been misunderstandings on both sides—but I knew—my friend and I
knew—through acquaintances in Cambridge—never from himself—that his
married life was very unhappy.”
“Look here, Sister,” said young Baltazar, putting up an arresting hand.
“As we seem to be talking pretty intimately about my affairs, I’ll tell
you something I’ve never breathed to a human being. I’ve no childish
memories of being tucked up in bed and kissed to sleep by an angel in
woman’s form, like children in picture books. Now I come to think of it,
I used to envy them. The only vivid thing I remember is being nearly
beaten to death with a belt—it was one of those patent leather things
women used to wear round their waists—and then being stuffed away in
the coal hole.”
“Oh, you poor mite!” Marcelle straightened herself in her chair, and the
tears sprang. “Before you were five! Oh, how damnable! What a childhood
you must have had! How did you manage to come through?”
He laughed. “I suppose I’m tough. As soon as I went to school—they sent
me at eight years old—I was all right. But never mind about me. Go on
with your friend’s story. It’s getting interesting. I quite see now that
my father may have had a hell of a time.”
“If you quite see,” she said, “there’s little more to tell.”
She leaned forward again on her elbow and, staring across the great
hall, through the wide-open doorway to the lawns and trees drenched in
the afternoon sunshine, forgot him and lost herself in the sunshine, the
most wonderful that ever was, of the years ago. Godfrey Baltazar looked
at her keenly yet kindly, and his stern young lips softened into a
smile; and after a bit he stretched out a hand and touched her wrist
very gently.
“Tell me,” he said in a low voice. “It’s good for me, and may be good
for you.”
She came back to the present with a little sigh.
“It’s such a very old story, you see. He was unhappy. His wife’s
ungovernable temper drove him from the house. He had to lead his
intellectual as well as his physical life. He lived most of his time in
college. Went home for week-ends—vainly seeking reconciliation. Then
the girl threw herself into his life. She worshipped him. She seemed to
give him something sweet and beautiful which he had been looking for.
And he fell in love with her. And when she knew it, she was taken up
into the Seventh Heaven and she didn’t care for God or woman—only for
him. It lasted just a month—the end of the summer term. Oh, it was very
innocent, as far as that goes—they only met alone in the open
air—stolen hours in the afternoon. Only one kiss ever passed between
them. And then he said: ‘I am a brute and a fool. This can’t go on.’ She
had given herself to him in spirit and was ready to go on and on
whithersoever he chose, so long as she was with him; but she was too shy
and tongue-bound to say so. And he stamped along the road, and she by
his side, all her heart and soul a-flutter, and he cried: ‘My God, I
never thought it would have come to this! My child, forgive me. If ever
I hurt a hair of your dear head, may God damn me to all eternity!’ And
they walked on in silence and she was frightened—till they came to the
turn of the road—this way to Newnham, that to Cambridge. And he gripped
her two hands and said: ‘If I withered this flower that has blossomed in
my path I should be a damnable villain.’ He turned and walked to
Cambridge. And the girl, not understanding anything save her love for
him, wept bitterly all the way to Newnham. She neither saw him nor heard
of him after that. And a week afterwards he disappeared, leaving no
trace behind. And whether he’s alive or dead she doesn’t know till this
day. And that is the real story of your father.”
He had turned and put both elbows on the intervening table and, head in
hand, listened to her words. When she ended, he said:
“Thank God. And thank you. So that is the word of the enigma.”
“Yes. There is no other.”
“And if he had been less—what shall we say—Quixotic—less scrupulous
on the point of a woman’s honour—you would have followed him to the end
of the world——”
“I?” She started back from the table. “I? What do you mean?”
“Why the friend, Sister? Why the camouflage?” He reached out his hand
and grasped hers. “Confess.”
She returned his pressure, shrugged her shoulders, and said, without
looking at him:
“I suppose it was rather thin. Yes. Of course I would have thrown
everything to the winds for him. It was on my account that he went
away—but, as God hears me, I never sent him.”
A long silence stole on them. There was so much that struggled to be
said, so little that could be said. At last the young man gripped his
crutches and wriggled from his chair. She rose swiftly to aid him.
“Let us have a turn in the sun. It will be good for us.”
So they went out and she helped him, against his will—for he loved his
triumph over difficulties—down the majestic marble stairs, and they
passed the happy tennis courts and the chairs of the cheery invalids
looking on at the game, and on through the Japanese garden with its pond
of great water-lilies and fairy bridge across, and out of the gate into
the little beech wood that screened the house from the home farm. On a
rough seat amid the sun-flecked greenery they sat down.
He said: “I may be a sentimental ass, but you seem to be nearer to me
than anyone I’ve ever met in my life.”
She made a little helpless gesture. He laughed his pleasant laugh, which
robbed his lips of their hardness.
“You supply a long-felt want, you know.”
“That sounds rather nice, but I don’t quite understand, Mr. Baltazar.”
“Oh, Mr. Baltazar be blowed!” he cried. “My name’s Godfrey. For God’s
sake let me hear somebody call me by it! You of all people. Why, you
knew me before I was born.”
He said it unthinking—a boyish epigram. Her sudden flush brought
consciousness of blunder in elemental truth and taste. He sat stiff,
horrified; gasped out:
“Forgive me. I didn’t realize what I was saying.”
She glanced covertly at his young and consternation-stricken face, and
her heart went out to him who, after all, on so small a point of
delicacy found himself so grievously to blame.
“Perhaps, my dear boy,” she said, “it is well that you have touched on
this. You and I are grown up and can speak of things frankly—and
certain things that people don’t usually discuss are often of supreme
importance in their own and other people’s lives. I didn’t know you
before you were born, nor did your father. It’s he that counts. If he
had known, he would never have left your mother to. . . . No, no! He
would have found some other way. He couldn’t have left her. It’s
incredible. I know it. I know all the strength and the beauty and the
wonder of him.”
“My God,” said the young man, “how you must have loved him!”
“Without loving him, any fool could have looked through his transparent
honesty. He was that kind of man.”
“Tell me,” he said, “all the little silly things you can remember about
him.”
He re-explained his eagerness. He had been such a lonely sort of fellow,
with no kith or kin with whom he could be in sympathy: an intellectual
Ishmaelite—if an inexplicable passion for mathematics and a general
sort of craving for the solution of all sorts of problems, human and
divine, could be called intellectual—banned by the material, dogmatic,
money-obsessed Woodcotts; referred back, as he had mentioned, for all
his darling idiosyncrasies to his unmentionable father. Small wonder
that he had built up a sort of cult of the only being who might have
taken for him a sympathetic responsibility. And now—this was the
greatest day of his life. All his dreams had come true. He was not a
sentimental ass, he reasserted. If there was one idiot fallacy that the
modern world was exploding, it was the fallacy of the debt due by
children for the privilege they owed their parents for bringing them
into this damned fool of a world. The only decent attitude of parents
towards their children was one of profound apology. It was up to the
children to accept it according to the measure of its fulfilment. But,
after all, an uncared-for human atom, with intelligence and emotions,
could not go through life without stretching out tentacles for some sort
of sympathy and understanding. He must owe something of Himself—himself
with a capital H—to those who begot and bore him. Mustn’t he? So when
they impressed on his young mind, by way almost of an hereditary curse,
the identity of his spiritual (or, to their way of thinking,
anti-spiritual) outlook with that of his father, he, naturally,
stretched out to his unknown father the aforesaid tentacles: especially
when he learned later what a great man his father was. Yes, really, he
considered it the most miraculous day of his life. He would have given
another foot to have it.
“There’s another thing,” he said. “Once I found in an old book some odds
and ends of his manuscript. I fell to copying his writing, especially
his signature. The idiotic thing a boy would do. I got into the trick of
it, and I suppose I’ve never got out. Look.”
He scrawled a few words with his signature on the pad. She started. It
was like a message from the dead. He laughed and went on with the
parable of his father.
“You see,” he concluded, “it is gorgeous to know, for a certainty at
last, that the Family were vilely wrong, and my own instinct right, all
the time.”
He had spoken with a touch of the vehemence she so well remembered. And
she had let him speak on, for the sake of the memories; also in the hope
that he might forget his demand for a revelation of them. But he
returned to it.
“Another day,” she replied. “These things can’t all be dragged at once
out of the past. We’ll have many opportunities of talking—till your new
foot comes.”
“You will have another talk—many others, won’t you?” he asked eagerly.
“Why should you doubt it?”
“I don’t know. Forgive me for saying it—I don’t want to be rude, but
women are funny sometimes.”
She smiled from the wisdom of her superior age—his frankness had the
disarming quality of a child. “What do you know of women, Godfrey
Baltazar?”
He wrinkled his brow whimsically and rubbed his hair.
“Not much. What man does? Do you know,” he asked with the air of a
pioneer of thought, “you are all damnably perplexing?”
At this she laughed outright. “Isn’t she kind?”
“She—who—oh, yes. How did you guess?”
“The way of Nature varies very little. What about her?”
“She would be all right, if it weren’t for my brother——”
“Your brother? Oh, of course——” She had to reach back into unimportant
memories. “Your mother was a widow when she married—with an only son.”
“That’s it. Seven or eight years older than I am. Name of Doon.
Christened Leopold. We never hit it off. I’ve loathed the beggar all my
life; but he’s a damn fine soldier. Major. D.S.O. Doing splendid work.
But the brute has the whole of himself left and isn’t a dot and carry
one, like me.”
“And the lady?”
“I’ll tell you another time—in one of our many talks. At present it
doesn’t seem to amount to a row of pins compared with my meeting you. My
hat!” he exclaimed after a pause. “It’s a funny little world.”
He thrust his hands into his pockets and stretched out his legs, the end
of the maimed one supported on the crutch. The afternoon peace of the
beech wood enfolded them in their contemplation of the funny little
world. She looked at him, young, strong, full of the delight of physical
and intellectual life, reckoning as of no account the sacrifice to his
country of much that made that physical existence full of precious
meaning; hiding deep in his English soul all the significance of his
familiar contempt for death; a son whom any mother might be proud to
have brought into the world. And tears were very near her eyes when she
thought of what might have been. And all her heart went out to him
suddenly in a great gush of emotion, as though she had found her own
son, and the tears started. She laid rather a timid hand on his
shoulder.
“My dear,” she said, “let us be great friends for the sake of the bond
between us.”
He started at her touch, and plucking both hands from his pockets,
imprisoned hers in them.
“Friends! You’re a dear. The dearest thing in the world. You’re going to
be the only woman I’ve ever loved. Why, you’re crying!”
Her wet eyes glistened. “We’re all hopelessly perplexing, aren’t we?”
“You’re not. Not a little bit.” He kissed her hand and let it go.
“You’re straight and adorable. But what can I call you?”
“Call me?” The question was a little shock. “You can call me by my name,
if you like—when we are alone—Marcelle.”
“Splendid!” he cried. “The long-felt want. I’ve had as many Sisters as
my young life can stand.”
She rose, helped him to rise.
“I hope,” she said, “you will remain the boy that you are for a very
long time.”