ACROSS THE YEARS
Across the years you seem to come.
“That is just what I can't do. I cannot afford to wait.”
Arthur Agar drew in his neatly-shod little feet, and leant back in the
deep chair which was always set aside as his in the Stagholme
drawing-room.
Mother and son were alone in the vast, somewhat gloomy apartment. Arthur
had been home six hours, and the subject of their conversation was, of
course, Dora.
Sister Cecilia was absent, only in obedience to a very unmistakable hint
in one of Arthur's recent letters to his mother.
“Only a little while,” pleaded Mrs. Agar. “Of course, dear, it will all
come right. I feel convinced of that. Only you see, dear, girls do not
like to be hurried in such an important step. I am quite sure she cares
for you; only you _must_ give her a little time.”
“But I can't, I can't,” he repeated anxiously. And his face wore that
strangely accentuated look of trouble which almost amounted to
dread--dread of something in life which had not come yet.
“Why not?” inquired Mrs. Agar. “You are both young enough, I am sure.”
“Oh, yes, we are young enough.”
He stirred his tea with an effeminate appreciation of fine Coalport and a
dainty Norwegian spoon.
“Then why should you not wait?”
Arthur was silent; he looked very small and frail, almost childlike, in
his silk-faced evening coat. Spoilt boy was writ large all over his
person. “Arthur,” said Mrs. Agar, “you are keeping something from me.”
He shook his feeble head feebly.
“You are, I know you are. What is it?”
This was the only person in all the world who had stirred the heart of
Anna Agar to something like a lasting affection. Once--years before--she
had loved Seymour Michael with a sudden volcanic passion which had as
suddenly turned to hatred. But under no circumstances could such a love
have endured. Consistency, constancy, singleness of purpose were quite
lacking in this woman's composition. It is rare, but when a woman does
fail in this respect, her failure is more complete, more miserable than
the failure of men, inconstant as they are.
Her affection for Arthur, coupled with that suspicion which always goes
with a cheap cunning, had put her on the right scent.
“Tell me,” she said, “I insist on knowing.”
Still he held his peace, with the obstinate silence of the weak.
“Well, then,” she cried, “don't ask me to help you to win Dora, that is
all!”
There was a pause; in the silence of the great house the wind moaned
softly. It always moaned in the drawing-room, whether in calm or storm,
from some undiscovered draught in the high ventilated ceiling.
“I sometimes think,” said Arthur at length, in an awestruck voice, “that
Jem may not be dead.”
“Not dead! Arthur, how can you be so stupid?”
She was not at all awestruck. Her denser, more sordid nature was proof
against the silence or the humming wind. The greed of gain has power to
kill superstition.
His face puzzled her. Suddenly he cast himself back and hid his face in
his hands.
“Oh!” he muttered, “I can't do it, I can't do it!”
In an instant his mother was standing over him.
“Arthur,” she hissed, “you _know_ something?”
“Yes,” he confessed in a whisper at length.
“Jem is not dead?” she hissed again. Her voice was hoarse.
“He was not killed in the disaster,” admitted Arthur. In his heart he was
still clinging to the other hope subtly held out by Seymour Michael--the
hope that in his simple intrepidity Jem had gone to his death.
“Then where is he--where is he, Arthur? Tell me quickly!”
Mrs. Agar was white and breathless. It was as if she had bartered her
soul, and after payment, had been tricked out of her share of the
bargain. She trembled with a fear which seemed to fill her world and
extend to the other world to come.
“He escaped from that action,” said Arthur, who, now that the truth was
out, grew voluble like a child making a confession, “by being sent on in
front with a few men. They escaped notice, while the larger body was
attacked and massacred.”
“Who told you this?”
“I do not know. I cannot tell you his name.”
“Arthur!” exclaimed Mrs. Agar nervously, “are you going mad? Do you know
what you are saying?”
In reply he gave a little laugh like a sob.
“Oh yes,” he replied, “it is all right. I know what I am saying, though
sometimes I scarcely believe it myself. If it was a hundred years ago one
might believe it easily enough, but now it seems unreal.”
“Then where is Jem? Was he taken prisoner? Those men are savages, aren't
they? They kill--people when they take them prisoners.”
“No, he was not taken prisoner,” said Arthur. Sometimes he lost patience
in a snappy, feminine way with his mother.
“Oh! tell me, tell me, Arthur dear! You are killing me!”
“I will, if you will let me. It appears that Jem had made himself a name
out there for knowing the country and the people, which is useful to the
Government, because Russia and England both want the country, or
something like that; I don't quite understand it.”
“Oh, never mind! Go on!” interrupted Mrs. Agar, with characteristic
impatience.
“And at any rate the men on the other side--the Russians or some one, I
don't know who--were in the habit of watching Jem so as to prevent his
going up into this unexplored country. Well, when the report of his death
was put in the newspapers it was left uncontradicted, so that these men
should think he was dead, and not be on the look-out for him. Do you
understand?”
Mrs. Agar had raised her head, with listening, attentive eyes. It seemed
as if a voice had come to her across the years from the distant past. A
voice telling an old story, which had never been forgotten, but merely
laid aside in the memory among those things that never are forgotten.
Finding Arthur's troubled gaze upon her, she seemed to recollect herself
with a little gesture of her hand to her breast as if breathing were
difficult.
“That does not sound like a thing Jem would do,” she said, with one of
those flashes of shrewd observation which sometimes come to inconsequent
people, and make it difficult for those around them to be sure how much
they see and how much passes unobserved.
“It was not Jem, it was this other man.”
“Which other man?” Mrs. Agar gave a little gasp, as if she had found
something she feared to find.
“The man who told me--he was Jem's superior officer.”
“When did he tell you--where?”
“He came to see me at Cambridge, and brought those things of Jem's,”
replied Arthur. So far from feeling guilty at thus revealing all that he
had promised to keep secret, he was now beginning to experience some
pangs of conscience at the recollection of a concealment which, by a
supreme effort, had been made to extend to four months.
There was a sly gleam in Mrs. Agar's eyes. A close observer knowing her
well could have seen the cunning written on her face, for it was cheap
and obvious.
“Oh!” she said indifferently, “and what sort of man was he?”
Arthur pondered with a deliberation that almost maddened her.
“Oh!” he replied at length, “a small man, dark, with a sunburnt face; a
Jew, I should think. He was rather well dressed--in the military style,
of course.”
“Yes,” muttered Mrs. Agar. “Yes.”
There was a long silence, during which Mrs. Agar reflected, as deeply,
perhaps, as she had ever reflected in her life.
Then she discovered something for herself which had of necessity been
pointed out to her son--a subtle divergence of character.
“But,” she said, “of course Jem may never come back from this expedition.
It _must_ be very dangerous.”
“It is very dangerous.”
Mrs. Agar's sigh of relief was quite audible. It is thus that nature
sometimes betrays human nature.
“Did _he_ say that? Did _he_ think that of it?”
Seymour Michael's opinion still had value in her eyes.
“Yes,” the reply came slowly; “he said that we might almost look upon Jem
as a dead man.”
Mother and son looked at each other and said nothing. Heredity is a
strange thing, and one alternately aggrandised and slighted. Blood is a
very powerful force, but the little lessons taught in childhood's years
bear a wondrous crop of good or evil fruit in later days.
Left alone, Arthur Agar's natural tendency was towards good. Probably
because he was timid, and goodness seems the safer course. There are many
who have not the courage to forsake goodness, even for a moment. But
under the influence of a stronger will--that is to say, under the
influence of four out of every five persons crossing his path--Arthur was
liable to be led in any direction. He would rather have sinned in company
than have cultivated virtue in the solitude usually accorded to that
state.
Somehow, in his mother's presence it did not seem so very wrong to keep
back the truth respecting Jem and to turn it to his own ends. It did not
seem either mean or cowardly to take advantage of a rival's absence and
gain his object, by deception. So, perhaps, it was in the beginning, when
the world was young. In those days also a mother and son helped each
other in deception, and so since then have many thousands of mothers
(incompetent or vicious) led their children to ruin.
“Of course,” said Mrs. Agar, “if Jem goes and does things of that
description he must take the consequences.”
Arthur said nothing in reply to this. The thought had been his for some
months, but he had never put it into shape.
“We are perfectly justified,” she went on, “in acting as if Jem were dead
until he deigns to advise us to the contrary.”
This also was putting a long-cherished thought into form.
Arthur knew that he ought to have told his mother then and there that Jem
had taken every step in his power to advise him as soon as possible of
the falseness of the news transmitted to the newspapers. But something
held him silent, some taint of hereditary untruthfulness.
“I do not see,” she said, “that this news can, therefore, make much
difference. There is no reason to alter any of our plans. To begin with,
I am certain that he is dead. We must have heard by this time if he had
been living.”
Arthur gave a little nod of acquiescence.
“And also,” pursued Mrs. Agar, with characteristic inconsistency, “he
evidently does not care about us or our feelings.”
Arthur knew what she meant, and he descended as low in the moral scale as
ever he went during his life.
“But,” he said, “there is, all the same, no time to lose.”
He passed his hand over his sleek, lifeless hair with a weary look.
“Well, dear,” said his mother soothingly, “I will see Ellen Glynde
to-morrow, and try to make her say something to Dora. A girl's mother has
always more influence than her father.”
This idiotic axiom seemed to satisfy Arthur, probably because he knew no
better, and he rose to take his bedroom candlestick.
Mrs. Agar was a person utterly incapable of harbouring two thoughts at
the same moment. She never even got so far as to place two sides of a
question upon an equal footing in her mind. All her questions had but one
side. She was not thinking of Arthur when she went to her room. She was
not thinking of him when she lay staring at the daylight, which had crept
up into the sky before she closed her eyes.
She tossed and turned and moaned aloud with a childish impatience. Her
mind could find no rest; it could not throw off the deadly knowledge that
Seymour Michael had come back into her life. And somehow she was no
longer Anna Agar, but Anna Hethbridge. She was no longer the fond mother
whose whole world was filled by thoughts of her son--a miserable,
thoughtless, haphazard world it was--but again she was the wronged woman,
moved by the one great passion that had stirred her sordid soul, a
fearsome hatred for Seymour Michael.
She was not an analytical woman; she had never thought about her own
thoughts; she was as superficial as human nature can well be. That is to
say, she was little more than an animal with the gift of speech, added to
one or two small items of knowledge which divide men from beasts. But she
_knew_ that this was not the end. She never doubted for a moment that it
was merely a beginning, that Seymour Michael was coming back into her
life.
Like a child she tossed and tumbled in her bed, muttering
half-consciously, “Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?”