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THE CORNHILL MAGAZINE.
JANUARY 1917.
_UNCONQUERED: AN EPISODE OF 1914._
BY MAUD DIVER.
Copyright, 1917, by Mrs. Diver, in the United States of America.
‘The stars are threshed and the souls are threshed from their husks.’
BLAKE.
CHAPTER I.
‘Whom does love concern save the lover and the beloved? Yet its
impact deluges a thousand shores.’
E. M. FORSTER.
Sir Mark Forsyth pushed back his chair, left the dinner-table, and
strolled over to the bay window. He drew out his cigarette-case, but
apparently forgot to open it. He stood there, looking out across the
garden, that merged into rocky spaces of heather and bracken, and
culminated in an abrupt descent to the loch. Low above the darkening
hills the sunset splendour flamed along the horizon, and all the waters
beneath were alight with the transient glory. But the man’s face wore the
abstracted air of one who dwells upon an inner vision. Though the subdued
flow of talk behind him entered his ears, it did not seem to reach his
brain. ‘Bobs,’ his devoted Irish terrier, crept out from under the table
and, joining his master, made sundry infallible bids for attention,
without success.
Presently alluring whiffs of cigarette smoke, intruding on his dreams,
reminded Sir Mark of the unopened case in his hand.
‘I vote for coffee on the terrace, Mother,’ he said, turning his eyes
from the glory without to the dimness of the unlighted dining room. ‘Then
we’ll have the boats out. There’s going to be an afterglow and a half
presently.’
‘I told Grant about the coffee two minutes ago, dear,’ Lady Forsyth
answered, smiling; but her eyes dwelt a little anxiously on the
silhouetted view of her son’s profile, as he set a match to his
cigarette. The straight, outstanding nose and square chin vividly
recalled his dead father. But the imaginative brow was of her bestowing,
and a splash of light on his hair showed the reddish chestnut tint of her
own people: the tint she loved.
‘Come along, children,’ she added, including in that category four out of
her five guests—two girls, unrelated to herself, Ralph Melrose, a Gurkha
subaltern, and Maurice Lenox, an artist friend of Mark’s.
Keith Macnair, professor of philosophy—his rugged face lined with
thought, his dark hair lightly frosted at the temples—was the only
genuine grown-up of her small house-party. A connection of her own, and
devoted to both mother and son, he was so evenly placed between them in
the matter of age that he could play elder brother to Mark or younger
brother to Lady Forsyth as occasion required. And, whenever professional
claims permitted, occasion usually did require his presence, in some
capacity, either at Wynchcombe Friars or Inveraig. Between times, he
lived and lectured and wrote philosophical books in Edinburgh, having
been a Fellow of the University since his graduate days: and never, if he
could help it, did he fail to spend most of the long vacation at Inveraig.
When the party rose from the table he joined Mark in the window: and as
the two girls stood back to let Lady Forsyth pass out, she slipped an
arm round each. Her love of youth and young things seemed to deepen with
her own advancing years. But she had her preferences; and it was the
arm round Sheila Melrose that tightened as they passed through the long
drawing-room to the terrace, where coffee was set upon a low stone table
in full view of the illumined lake and sky.
‘It’s splendid to have you safe back again, child,’ she said, releasing
Monica Videlle and drawing Sheila down to the seat beside her. ‘India’s
monopolised you quite long enough. There’s some mysterious magnetism
about that country. People seem to catch it like a disease. And I was
getting alarmed lest you might succumb to the infection.’
Miss Melrose smiled thoughtfully at the sunset. ‘I’m not sure that I
haven’t succumbed already!’ she said in her low, clear-cut voice. ‘I have
vague tempting dreams of going back with Ralph when his furlough is up;
or with Mona, to help doctor her Indian women. But probably they’ll never
materialise⸺’
‘More than probably, if I have any say in the matter!’
Lady Forsyth spoke lightly, but under the lightness lurked a note of
decision. She had her own private dreams concerning this girl with the
softly shining eyes under level brows, and the softly resolute lips that
never seemed quite to leave off smiling even in repose.
At mention of India Miss Videlle’s thoughtful face came suddenly to life.
‘It would be just lovely for me,’ she said. ‘Too good to be true!’
‘Never mind, Miss Videlle,’ Maurice consoled her almost tenderly. ‘This
ripping evening’s not too good to be true. And _I_ can put you up to some
tips for squaring Lady Forsyth—in strict confidence of course!’
He bent towards her with a slightly theatrical offer of his arm, and
they moved off to a seat near the ivy-covered wall, looking towards the
distant rapids.
Lady Forsyth glanced after them with a passing twinge of concern.
The girl—a fairly recent acquisition of Sheila’s—was shy and clever, with
a streak of dark blood in her veins. She had done brilliantly at Oxford,
and was now qualified to take up the medical work in India on which she
had set her heart. Sheila had acquired her while going through a course
of massage and magnetic healing, for which she showed so distinct a gift
that she had serious thoughts of taking it up in earnest. A vague idea of
going out with Monica had been simmering in her brain for the past week;
but she had not spoken of it till to-night.
‘Wonder what’s come to old Mark,’ mused Ralph pensively, stirring his
coffee. ‘Thought this picnic arrangement was all for his benefit⸺’
‘Rather so!’ Mark’s voice answered him, as he and Macnair strolled round
the corner of the house. ‘Hurry up with the coffee, Mums. I love dabbling
my oars in the sunset. Lenox, old chap, you two might go on ahead and
give the word.’
They went on readily enough; and the rest soon followed them through the
wilder spaces of the garden, down rocky steps to the bay, where sand
and rough grass shelved gently to the water’s edge. Here they found two
boats already afloat, with Maurice and Monica—she was commonly called
Mona—established in one of them.
Lady Forsyth, nothing if not prompt, privately consigned Ralph to that
boat, Mark and Keith to her own. It was a heavenly evening, and she
thanked goodness they were going to have it to themselves: quite a rare
event since Maurice Lenox had discovered that superfluous Miss Alison.
‘Coming to row stroke for us?’ she asked as Mark handed her in.
He shook his head, smiling down at her.
‘That’s to be Keith’s privilege! I’m for the other boat.’ But neither his
smile nor the light pressure of her arm could atone for the refusal.
‘Pointed and purposeless,’ she denounced it mentally; but within a very
few moments his purpose was revealed.
‘Down stream a bit first, Keith,’ he called out, as he pushed off his own
boat and sprang lightly in. ‘I want to run up to the village. Miss Alison
and her friend might like to join us.’
So they rowed down stream at his command: and for Lady Forsyth the
pleasure of the outing was gone; the peace and beauty of the evening
spoilt by fierce resentment against these intrusive strangers who had no
authorised position in the scheme of things. And her natural vexation was
intensified by concern for Sheila: though whether the girl took Mark’s
sudden and strange defection seriously it was impossible to tell. She
wore that smiling, friendly graciousness of hers like a bright veil, that
seemed to baffle attempts at intimacy, while it enhanced her charm. Even
with Lady Forsyth, who loved her as a daughter, she had her reserves,
notably on matters nearest her heart.
‘After all, she knows the real Mark almost as well as I do,’ Mark’s
mother reflected by way of consolation. ‘And she’s wiser than I am, in
many ways, though she is nearly thirty years younger. I’m probably racing
on miles too fast. He’s barely known the girl a fortnight. He _couldn’t_
be so crazy⸺All the same, he’s no business to—it’s distracting!’ she
concluded, her irritation flaming up again at sight of the two figures
that were now approaching the shore, escorted by Mark.
Miss Alison, the taller one, had unquestionably height and grace to
recommend her. Mark, who stood six feet in his socks, could barely give
her a couple of inches; and the languid deliberation of her movements
had, on Lady Forsyth, the same maddening effect as a drawl in speech. Her
own brain and body were too quick, in the original sense of the word, not
to make her a trifle intolerant towards the ‘half-alive’; and, rightly
or wrongly, Miss Alison was apt to produce that impression even on her
admirers, though no doubt they expressed it differently.
Personal prejudice apart, Lady Forsyth preferred the girl’s companion,
Miss O’Neill, in spite of her wrong-headed zeal for the Suffrage and
Home Rule. Had Bel Alison been out in search of a foil, she could have
discovered none better than this big-hearted, fanatical woman of
five-and-thirty, shortish and squarely built, with an upward nose, an
ugly, humorous mouth, and a quantity of rough brown hair in a chronic
state of untidiness. Lady Forsyth gathered that she was an active
philanthropist, and that the incongruous pair shared a flat somewhere in
Earl’s Court. To outward seeming they had certainly nothing beyond the
same address in common.
If Bel’s movements were over-deliberate, Miss O’Neill’s were apt to be
sudden; and she strode into the boat with the decision of one given to
putting her foot down to some purpose.
‘Steady on! You evidently don’t do things by halves!’ Sir Mark
remonstrated, laughing, and consigning her to a cushion in the bows. Bel
had already usurped Maurice’s seat astern, and Mark rowed stroke—this
time without need of invitation. Then they turned about and moved slowly
up the loch, dabbling their oars in the sunset fires and shivering the
purple shadows of the hills.
And if for Helen Forsyth the pleasure of the evening was over, for Mark
it had but just begun. And she knew it. Therein lay the sting. Though
‘the boy’ was now very much a man, she could honestly have said, two
weeks ago, that nothing beyond minor differences and mutual flashes of
temper had marred the deep essential unity of their relation—a unity
the more inestimably precious since he was now all she had left of her
nearest and dearest on earth. Husband, daughter and younger son had all
passed on before her into the Silence, and of her own people one brother
alone remained. At the moment he was Governor of New Zealand, and seemed
disposed to stay on there indefinitely when his term of office expired.
The Empire, he wrote, was a saner, sweeter, more spacious place of abode
than twentieth-century England, which seemed temporarily given over to
the cheap-jack, the specialist, and the party politician. And she—while
loving every foot of her husband’s country and her own—understood
too well the frequent disappointment of those who came, on rare and
hardly earned leave, from the ends of the earth and failed to find,
in picture-palaces and music-halls, in the jargon of Futurists and
demagogues, the England of their dreams.
For this cause, her sole remaining brother had become little more than a
memory and a monthly letter. Yet could she never account herself a lonely
woman, while she had Keith for friend and mentor, Mark for son, and
Sheila for—more than possible—daughter. What business had this unknown
girl to step into their charmed circle and unsettle the very foundation
of things? Never, till to-night, had it seemed possible to Mark’s mother
that she could arrive at dreading the fulfilment of his heart’s desire.
Yet that was what it amounted to. Dread lurked behind her surface
irritation. The touch of second sight in her composition made her vaguely
conscious of danger in the air. Small wonder if she anathematised Maurice
Lenox for his knack of picking up promiscuous strangers, and, in this
case, aggravating his offence by failing to appropriate his own discovery.