The Man with the Medals
Though Paul left Mr. Ferguson’s office with a calm enough face, his mind
was bewildered and fear clutched at his heart. Things were happening to
him which he had never imagined at all. He had been confident with all
the perfect confidence of eighteen years and his confidence in a second
was gone. He was in real distress, which made him ache like some
physical hurt and tortured him at night so that he could not sleep till
long after daybreak. He could not adjust himself to the new conditions
of his life. He looked with surprise upon other people, in the streets
or in the public rooms of his hotel, who were unaware of the troubles
which had hold of him.
He had planned his visit to London full with many a pilgrimage. The
London of Dickens and De Quincey—its inns, its gardens and churches!
That old mansion at the northwest corner of Greek Street, where Mr.
Brunell had given a lodging and a bundle of law papers for a pillow, to
his youthful client—all were to be visited with a thrill of excitement
and a hope that they would not fall short of the images he had made of
them in his thoughts. But the glamour had faded from all these designs.
He paced the streets, and indeed all day, but it was to get through the
long dismal hours and he walked like one in a maze.
He knew no one and throughout the four days no one spoke to him at all.
He moved through the crowded thoroughfares unnoticed as a wraith; he sat
apart in restaurants; and as his father had done, he tramped by night
the hollow-sounding streets of the city where the lamp-posts kept their
sentry guard. On the fifth day, however, the expected letter did come by
the first post from Mr. Ferguson.
“If you will travel to Pulburo’ in Sussex by the 3.55 P. M. train from
Victoria on the day you receive this, Colonel Vanderfelt will send a car
to meet you at the station and will put you up for the night. Will you
please send a telegram to him”; and the Colonel’s address followed.
Paul sent off his telegram at once and followed it in the afternoon.
Outside Pulboro’ station a small grey car was waiting and a girl of his
own age, with brown eyes and a fresh pretty face and a small bright blue
hat sitting tightly on her curls, was at the wheel.
“I am Phyllis Vanderfelt,” she explained. “My father asked me to drive
in and fetch you. He has had to be away to-day and won’t get home much
before dinner time, I’m afraid.”
She turned the car and drove westwards under the railway arch talking
rather quickly as people who are uneasy and dread an awkward silence
will do. They passed through a little town of narrow winding streets and
high walls clustered under a great church with a leaping spire, like a
piece of old France, and swung out onto a high wide road which dipped
and rose, with the great ridge of the South Downs sweeping from
Chanctonbury Ring to Hampshire on their left, forests and bush-strewn
slopes of emerald and cliffs of chalk silver-white in the sun, and from
end to end of the high rolling barrier the swift shadows of the clouds
flitting like great birds.
They had ceased to talk now and there was no awkwardness in the silence.
Paul was leaning forward gazing about him with a queer look of eagerness
upon his face.
“To come home to country like this!” he said in a low voice. “You can’t
think what it means after months of brown earth and hot skies.”
Upon their right a low wall bordered the road, and on the other side of
the wall fallow-deer grazed in a Park. Beyond, a line of tall oaks
freshly green was the home of innumerable rooks who strewed the air
about the topmost branches, wheeling and cawing. The square tower of a
church stood upon a little hill.
“It’s friendly, isn’t it?” he cried, and a look of commiseration made
the eyes of the girl at his side tender. Would he think this countryside
so friendly when the evening was over and he had got to his room?
“Do you know our Downs?”
Phyllis spoke at random and hastily as he turned towards her.
“I wonder,” he answered. “Could I have forgotten them if I had once
known them? I seem to have been within a finger’s breadth of recognising
something.”
“When you have seen my mother we will walk through the village. We shall
have time before dinner,” said Phyllis, and she turned the car into the
carriage-way of a square old house with big windows level with the wall,
which stood close to the road.
Mrs. Vanderfelt, a middle-aged woman with shrewd and kindly eyes
received him with a touch of nervousness in her manner and, as her
daughter had done, talked volubly and a little at random whilst she was
giving him some tea.
“I don’t know what you would like to do until dinner time,” she said,
and Phyllis said:
“I am going to show Mr. Ravenel the village.”
A glance of comprehension was swiftly exchanged between the mother and
the daughter, but not so swiftly but that Paul intercepted it.
“You can get the key at Rapley’s,” said Mrs. Vanderfelt.
The two young people came to four cross-roads, and Paul exclaimed:
“Up the hill to the right, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
They mounted the hill and Paul stopped. He pointed with his stick
towards the signboard of an inn built on the high bank above the road.
“Now I know. I lived here once as a child. I always wondered why the
Horse Guards had an inn here, and what sort of people they were. I used
to imagine that they were half-horse, like the Centaurs, and I always
hoped to see them.”
Phyllis Vanderfelt laughed.
“Isn’t that like a man? I show you a place as beautiful as any in
England and the only thing which you have remembered of it from the time
when you were four is the place where you could get a drink.”
“Yes, the Horseguards’ Inn,” repeated Paul cheerfully. “Let us go on!”
But it was now Phyllis who stopped with a face from which the merriment
had gone.
“I don’t know,” she said indecisively. “It shall be as you wish. But I
wonder. We talked it all over at home. We couldn’t tell whether it would
be helpful to you, whether you would care to remember everything
to-morrow—whether you already remembered. My father was quite clear
that you should see everything. But I am not sure—”
Paul felt the clutch of fear catching his breath once more as he looked
into the girl’s compassionate eyes.
“I am with your father,” he said. “My recollections are too faint. I can
only remember what I see. Let us go on!”
“Very well!”
Phyllis Vanderfelt went into one of the cottages and came out again with
a big key in her hand. Beyond the cottages a thick high hedge led on to
an old rose-red house with an oriel window looking down the road from
beneath a gable and a tiled roof golden with lichen. Wisteria draped the
walls in front with purple.
“It is empty,” said Phyllis, as she put the key into the lock and opened
the door. The rooms were all dismantled, the floors uncarpeted. Paul
Ravenel shook his head.
“I remember nothing here.”
Phyllis led him through a window into a garden. A group of beech trees
sheltered the house from the southwest wind and beyond the beech trees
from a raised lawn their eyes swept over meadows and a low ridge of
black firs and once more commanded the shining Downs. Paul stood for a
little while in silence, whilst Phyllis watched his face. There came
upon it a look of perplexity and doubt. He turned back towards the
house. On its south side, a window had been thrown out; on its tiled
roof a wide band of white clematis streamed down like a great scarf. On
the wall beside the window a great magnolia climbed.
“Wait a moment,” cried Paul; and as he gazed his vision cleared. He saw,
as the gifted see in a crystal, a scene small and distant and very
bright.
There was a table raised up on some sort of stand upon the gravel paths
outside this window. A man was sitting at the table and a small crowd of
people, laughing and jeering a little—an unkindly crowd—was gathered
about him. And furniture and ornaments were brought out. He turned to
Phyllis. “There was a sale here, ever so long ago—and I was present
outside the crowd, looking on. I lived here, then?”
“Yes,” said Phyllis.
“And it was our furniture which was being sold?”
“Yes.”
So far there was no surprise for Paul Ravenel, nothing which conflicted
with his conception and estimate of his father. Monsieur Ravenel had
sold off his furniture, just as he had changed his name and abode. It
was part of the process of destroying all his associations with the
country and people of his birth. Only—his recollections had revealed
something new to him—and disquietingly significant.
“Why were those who came to buy unfriendly and contemptuous?” he asked
slowly.
“Are you sure that they were?” Phyllis returned. But she did not look at
Paul’s face and her voice was a little unsteady.
“I am very sure about that,” said Paul. “A woman was with me, holding my
hand. She led me away—yes—I was frightened by those noisy, jeering
people, and she led me away. It was my nurse, I suppose. For my mother
was dead.”
“Yes,” replied Phyllis, and then, not knowing how hard she struck, she
added, “Your mother had died a couple of months before the sale.”
Paul Ravenel, during the last days, had been schooling himself to a
reserve of manner, but this statement, as of a thing well known which he
too must be supposed to know, loosened all his armour. A startled cry
burst from his lips.
“What’s that?” he exclaimed, and with a frightened glance at his white
face Phyllis repeated her words.
“I thought you knew,” she added.
“No.”
Paul walked a little apart. One of the garden paths was bordered by some
arches of roses. He stood by them, plucking at one or two of the flowers
and seeing none of them at all. The keystone of the explanation which he
had built in order to account for and uphold his father was down now and
with it the whole edifice. It had all depended upon the idea of a
passionate, enduring love in his father’s heart for the wife who had
died in giving birth to her son, the enemy. And in that idea there was
no truth at all!
Paul reflected now in bitterness that there never had been any reason
why he should have held his belief—any wild outburst from Monsieur
Ravenel, any word of tender remembrance. He had got his illusion—yes,
he reached the truth now in this old garden—from an instinct to
preserve himself from hating that stranger with whom he lived and on
whom he depended for his food and the necessities of his life. He turned
suddenly back to Phyllis Vanderfelt.
“What I don’t understand, Miss Phyllis, is how it is that remembering so
much of other things here, I can remember nothing of my mother.”
“She only came home here to die,” Phyllis replied gently.
Paul pressed his hands over his eyes for a moment or two in a gesture of
pain which made the young girl’s heart ache for him. But he looked at
her calmly afterwards and said: “I am afraid that Colonel Vanderfelt has
very bad news to tell me to-night.”
Phyllis Vanderfelt laid her hand gently upon his arm.
“You will remember that you have made very real friends here in a very
short time, won’t you?” she pleaded. “My mother and myself.”
“Thank you,” said Paul.
Yet another shock was waiting for him in Colonel Vanderfelt’s house. For
as he entered the drawing room three-quarters of an hour later, a tall
man lifted himself with an effort from an easy chair and with the help
of a stick limped across the room towards him.
“This is my husband,” said Mrs. Vanderfelt, and before Paul could check
his tongue, the cry had sprung from his lips:
“The man with the medals!”
The older man’s eyes flashed with a sudden anger. Mrs. Vanderfelt gasped
and flushed red. Phyllis took a step forward. All had a look as if they
had suffered some bitter and intolerable insult.
Paul quickly explained. “My father and I crossed you one night a long
time ago when you were coming from a banquet at the Guildhall. You
called to my father. I was a child, and I always remembered you as the
man with the medals. The phrase jumped out when I saw you again.”
The fire died out of Colonel Vanderfelt’s eyes. A look of pity sheathed
them.
“We will talk of all these things after dinner,” he said gently, and his
hand clasped the youth’s arm. “Let us go in now.”