“Well, Nina, you see I’ve trebled my responsibilities,” observed Mrs.
Tregaskis to her greatest friend.
The greatest friend leant back in her chair and looked exquisitely
sympathetic.
“I _know_,” she murmured, in tones which prevented the words from
sounding too blatantly non-committal.
“You may say that I had my hands fairly full already, one way and
another,” said Bertha, who was frequently obliged to resort to this
oblique method of dragging to light Nina Severing’s opinion, in order
to set it right. “But one simply couldn’t help it. Those poor little
things orphaned, and with no alternative but a cheap school. I must
own I acted on impulse--which I’m rather apt to do, I’m afraid, though
I deplore the tendency--but somehow one hasn’t quite outgrown one’s
youthful impetuosity----”
“Oh,” said Nina Severing with widely open childlike eyes; “but indeed
I _quite_ think you’ve left all that behind, Bertie dear. I always
envy your wonderful clear-headed prudence and far-seeing ways. I’m
sure you’re quite the last person to be carried away by an impulse--so
unlike my silly self, as I always say! But then I was left to be my
own guide and mistress so very young--a child. Looking back, I could
sometimes almost cry at the thought of that pitiful little figure--a
child of twenty, with nothing left but another child to take care of, a
memory--and--a star.”
Bertha knew of old her friend’s passion for analogy, more poetical than
exact, and had no intention of inquiring into the antecedents of the
star. Besides, she was well aware that Nina Severing was a musician,
and had no difficulty in connecting the astral body in question with
the composition of several extremely popular drawing-room songs.
She said: “I simply took those two and told them----”
“Not a seventh sound, but a star,” Nina quoted penetratingly, immovably
determined that her allusion should be made perfectly clear.
Bertie, seeing that the star was not to be ignored, disposed of it
by a hurried but sufficiently intense-sounding “Ah--one knows what
music means----” She might have added “to you,” but for Nina’s gentle
movement of acquiescence, unmistakably claiming and sheltering all
music as her own.
“Well, darling, I simply wrote straight to Frederick and asked if we
_could_ do anything else than take those two little solitary things
home. Of course it isn’t an actual expense, because that wouldn’t be
fair to one’s own belongings--they’ve got quite enough to make it
possible. But the other things are what matter, after all.”
“Alas! who knows that better than I do?” sighed Nina, a widow, and a
rich woman.
Mrs. Tregaskis, a poor one, instantly observed, “Not that it doesn’t
imply a good many actual material little sacrifices, which perhaps may
pinch here and there--but who would think twice about that? When people
tell me that I’m an improvident woman, I never can help thinking of the
dear old French saying: ‘Chaque enfant apporte son pain sous le bras.’”
To which Nina, who spoke no French, promptly retorted with much
presence of mind:
“Dicunt. Quod dicunt? Dicant! That has been my answer for years to
people who can’t mind their own business.”
The classical nature of this _riposte_ left her so content that she was
able to ask with affectionate interest:
“And do tell me how it all works? Of course they appeal to me, if
only as the children of an intensely musical mother. I heard her
play once, I remember--oh, ages ago--when I was in London. Rather a
striking-looking woman, and the eldest girl reminded me of her at once.
It somehow gave me a little pang--it seemed to bring back that concert,
years ago when Geoffrey and I were together.”
Bertha was too familiar with the singular power that the most unlikely
incidents possessed of recalling Nina’s happier hours to accord more
than a passing acknowledgment towards this tender tribute to the past.
“My poor dear,” she murmured rapidly. “Rosamund is like her mother, but
she reminds me of poor Dick Grantham too. My cousin, you know; we were
almost brought up together.”
Her sigh was perhaps intended to remind Nina that she held no monopoly
of lost relatives. “They seem dear children, and very easy to
understand, though really I always think that to understand children is
a sort of God-given knack, which one is simply lucky enough to possess.”
“One” does not sound particularly egotistical, and conveys “I” quite
successfully to a practised listener.
“They’re very backward about lessons, poor little things; and just
imagine! neither of them has ever held a needle or been taught to keep
accounts! Why, at ten years old I remember making my own pinafores and
darning the boys’ socks!”
“Ah well, you’ll teach them all that kind of thing too
beautifully--_so_ useful and necessary,” declared Nina negligently,
“though I’m afraid I’ve rather a sneaking sympathy for unpractical,
helpless creatures like myself. Poor Geoffrey used to tell me that I
was too ornamental to be really useful. One can say it at this distance
of time, without being thought vain by the unimaginative.”
Having thus skilfully precluded the possibility of Bertha’s attributing
her innocent anecdote to vanity, Nina added tenderly:
“You’re so wonderful about clever, practical things, I know. You and
I, I always think, Bertie dear, are like Martha and Mary--you know--the
two types of active and contemplative, as it were.”
Bertie had heard this Scriptural parallel before, and was not in love
with it.
“Oh, one has one’s hours for dreaming, of course,” she replied lightly,
but with a distinct frigidity. “But with a husband and house, and those
three children, I simply _must_ put my shoulder to the wheel.”
“Yes, indeed. I always wish I had your sense of responsibility. I’m
afraid I’m dreadfully apt to feel that my little songs are all the work
I’m meant to do, having once given a son to the nation,” sighed Nina,
who was aware that her friend had always regretted Hazel’s sex.
“How _is_ Morris? Does he ever write?” was the subtle rejoinder of Mrs.
Tregaskis, uttered in markedly sympathetic tones.
Morris Severing, aged seventeen, and his mother each frequently told
their numerous friends in confidence that they did not understand one
another. This was untrue--they only understood one another too well.
“My poor Morris!” sighed Nina. “He will see things so differently later
on. Oh the _blindness_ of youth, Bertie! It makes one’s heart ache
sometimes. When I think of the stores of sad, sad, unavailing memories
that my poor wayward, foolish boy is laying up for himself, when it is
all too late!”
A certain complacency might have been detected in these heartrending
glimpses into the future.
But Mrs. Tregaskis said consolingly: “He will learn, Nina. After all,
he _is_ so young--only a boy at Eton, for all his ridiculous airs.”
“He looks a man already. No one will ever believe I am the mother of
that great tall creature--it’s simply too absurd. I always think that’s
the penalty we poor fair-haired people have to pay.”
Nina Severing’s wavy hair was pale gold, barely flecked with grey, and
her enormous eyes had up-curling golden lashes.
“I don’t see much penalty about it,” Bertha remarked with great truth.
“But, of course, in a way it’s very much better to have married later
in life. One has so much more to _give_ one’s children. I was over
thirty when Hazel was born, and I’m simply thankful for it. All the
added experience and confidence one had acquired--it’s all helped to
make and form her little life. I do feel so strongly that a mother
ought absolutely to _make_ her child, as it were--help it and guide its
development along the lines meant for it. You know----”
“Hazel always seems to me such an extraordinarily self-contained little
girl,” Nina interrupted languidly.
“So she is. She gets that from me. She’s nearly as reserved as I was at
her age--except, of course, with me.”
“Oh, but Bertie dear, don’t you think she gets it from her father?
Frederick always strikes me as _the_ most reserved man of my
acquaintance. Though perhaps that’s only the effect of my own reserve,
which I believe reacts on shy people.”
The quality popularly described as “reserve” is one to which the
majority of people cling passionately. Murderer, thief, atheist if you
will, but always strongly, impenetrably reserved.
“I give myself away only when I am at the piano,” Nina pursued her
reflective way. “One’s art can never lie.”
“You mustn’t malign yourself, dear,” said Bertie with a hand laid
fondly on her friend’s. “I assure you no one could really look upon you
as reserved--for one moment. I’ve never thought you so.”
Nina gave her well-known childlike smile, and said “Dear Bertie!” with
her head rather on one side.
“But you haven’t told me about Morris yet.”
“Oh, he writes from time to time--poor boy. You know--the kind of
letters that tell one nothing. It’s so curious that so many many others
should come to one for help or sympathy or advice and one’s own child
prefer to turn elsewhere. At least I suppose he turns elsewhere. Morris
is very expansive--quite unlike me,” said Nina firmly in parenthesis,
“and makes every sort and kind of friend, and confides in them all
without discrimination. Some day he will know, I suppose, that he has
only one true friend in all the world--his mother.”
Bertha was suitably silent for a moment.
Then she asked tentatively: “What does he mean to do later on? Oxford,
I suppose.”
“I suppose so. Of course, he really is most tiresome about his music,
poor boy; he thinks he wants to be a professional pianist.”
“Toujours?” inquired Bertha with raised eyebrows.
“Alas, yes! Of course it’s a boyish fancy and won’t last--besides, when
has Morris ever stuck to _anything_? But you know what opposition is to
any boy of that age--he simply enjoys it and poses as a misunderstood
genius--not that I should say so to anyone on earth but you, Bertie.”
“Nina dear, of course I know that,” warmly said her friend, who was
perfectly well aware of the extensive area covered by Nina’s deepest
confidence.
“My dear,” Nina Severing declared, with wide-open brown eyes, “it’s
_absolute_ nonsense. As you know, I should be the very last person on
earth to quench one single spark of the Divine Fire in anyone, least
of all in my own nearest and dearest. But Morris has got absolutely
nothing more than an inherited gift, and a certain amount of technical
skill because I insisted, absolutely insisted, upon his having really
good teaching from the time he was quite a little boy. He hasn’t got
the temperament to get over the footlights, to begin with.”
Bertha Tregaskis, at the slight tinge of expertism discernable in Nina
Severing’s tones, at once retorted firmly:
“Ah! getting over the ‘floats,’ in the slang of the profession, isn’t
easy in any art, as I know from my own small dramatic experiences.”
She had some reputation as an amateur actress.
“No, is it?” agreed Nina gently. “I wish you’d talk to Morris a little,
Bertie dear, you _are_ so sensible, and I know he’d listen to you. He
always looks upon _me_ as too young, more like a contemporary than a
mother, you know. I suppose it’s very natural.”
She sighed.
“Well,” laughed Bertha tolerantly with raised eyebrows, and contrived
to insert into the monosyllable a distinct quality of scepticism with
regard to Nina’s supposition.
“Anyhow,” she resumed briskly, after a moment in which to allow Nina
fully to appreciate the subtlety of her retort, “I really think Morris
might do worse than have a talk with me. I’ve helped plenty of boys,
and of girls, too, for the matter of that, in my time. When Hazel comes
out, I tell her, she’ll be cut out by her old mother. My dear, young
men are always telling me they adore me, but, as I say, it’s quite safe
to adore an old gargoyle.”
She laughed heartily, and Nina murmured with the deprecating smile she
kept for such speeches, “How ridiculous you are, Bertie. Do enrol my
poor Morris into the regiment of worshippers. I’m sure you could. It
would do him a lot of good to have his thoughts taken off himself.”
“That’s what one feels,” agreed Bertha. “Self-absorption is a disease
with modern youth.”
“Introspection carried to the verge of mania,” returned Nina, no less
psychologically. “When one thinks of what one was at that sort of age,
oneself!”
Bertha, however, appeared to feel that one might think of what one
was at that sort of age too frequently, and offered her friend no
encouragement to pursue this retrospective path.
Instead, she rose from her low seat on the terrace and remarked
matter-of-factly that it was too cold to sit still for long.
“Let’s go and have a look at the chicks.”
“Are their lessons over?” inquired Nina Severing, drawing her furs
closer.
She had been wearing them loosely over one shoulder, but such is the
effect of suggestion.
“Certainly, or I shouldn’t go near them. You know what a disciplinarian
I am, Nina, and nothing is ever allowed to interfere with regular hours
for my little people. It’s more than half the battle, in my opinion.
Lessons, a good long walk twice a day in all weathers, and plenty of
healthy play in the garden. Hazel thrives on it, and I mean the other
two to do the same.”
She gave her ready, jovial laugh.
“Lazy little cats, both of them! Rosamund would like to sit over a
story-book all day, and Frances says that walks make her legs ache. I
don’t believe they ever set foot outside the garden in Monmouthshire.
Their mother was half a Hungarian, which, I suppose, accounts for it.”
“My sympathies are frightfully cosmopolitan, I’m afraid,” sighed Nina,
“but I do think you’re absolutely right about the children, of course.
Fresh air and exercise are so important at that age.”
“At any age,” laughed her friend. “_I_ couldn’t get through my work
without my daily tramp.”
Nina, with great skill, immediately assumed an appearance irresistibly
recalling a fragile hothouse plant.
“As you know,” she murmured, “_my_ poor little art has always had to
thrive in spite of my wretched health. I’m always trying to think
myself a robust woman, but everyone always laughs at me for so much as
suggesting such a thing.”
She imparted a tinge of pathos to her slight laugh.
Bertha Tregaskis, who did not for a moment suppose that Nina had ever
tried to think herself a robust woman in her life, laughed also, but
with a marked absence of pathos. Before she could frame a further
reply, however, they saw Miss Blandflower and her three pupils.
“Who are these like stars appearing?” absently murmured Miss
Blandflower, within sight of them. “Run, Hazel dear, there’s mother.”
Nobody ran, and the meeting took place with modified enthusiasm.
Nina Severing, who, in the abstract, adored children, did not find
very much to say to them, but interspersed her infrequent remarks,
which generally took the form of questions, with numerous ejaculatory
“darlings” which gave a tone of intimacy to the proceedings.
“Do you remember Morris, darling?” she amiably inquired of Hazel. “He’s
coming back very soon for his Christmas holidays. Won’t that be lovely?”
A month later this agreeable forecast was realized, and Morris Severing
was causing his mother acute anxiety in the billiard-room at Pensevern.
“My dearest boy, won’t you believe that I know best?”
“Not in this case,” said her son with an implication unjustified of
their joint past, of innumerable other cases in the background where he
had unhesitatingly accepted his mother’s judgments.
“My poor romantic darling,” cried the unwise Nina; “because you know
nothing of life, _nothing_, you think that the career of a musician
would amuse you, and that it would be all easy success and triumph. But
remember that I _know_, and that a far, far greater talent than yours
is necessary to be of any use at all, my poor boy.”
“That isn’t the point,” retorted Morris, white with fury. “I don’t wish
to be a popular success. In fact I’m not suggesting a public career at
all, for the present, but simply a year or two’s study in Germany.”
“Because you think that it may lead to your becoming a professional. If
you weren’t absolutely breaking my heart, Morris, I could laugh at the
futility of such an idea, positively laugh,” cried Nina tragically.
“Mother, how can you talk about it’s breaking your heart? What _can_
it matter to you if I choose to make music my career instead of some
rotten profession for which I have no aptitude?”
“Aptitude! What can you know of the meaning of the word, at your age?
Even I, after all these years of study and toil and experience,” said
Nina pathetically, “should not dare to boast about an ‘aptitude’ as you
do, my poor Morris. The daring of ignorance indeed!”
By these and similar taunts, she always reduced him, in their frequent
disputes, to bitter, inarticulate rage and mortification. He stood and
looked at her, with his angry young face set. He was a good-looking
stripling, with his mother’s light tawny hair, and blue eyes set in a
sunburnt face. His straight gaze and squarely-shaped jaw would have
denoted strength to a writer of fiction. His mouth, as surely, would
have typified weakness to an acute observer.
“What’s the use of being melodramatic?” cried Nina, gazing at him
coldly.
Each knew by intuition the other’s vulnerable spot. Morris winced in
spite of himself.
“You think that I mind that sort of accusation,” he said; “but as a
matter of fact, I should only mind it if it were true. I am a great
deal too much in earnest to be melodramatic, or to be turned from
my purpose by any sneers, mother. I’ve wanted all my life to be a
musician, and you are the last person in the world who ought to
discourage me.”
“When you talk about ‘all your life,’ my poor darling, it makes one
smile. The life of a child of seventeen! You will want something
absolutely different in a year’s time. When have you ever been known to
stick to anything?”
“I’ve stuck to this, and I mean to stick to it. Why, mother, you
haven’t any reasonable grounds for opposing it even. You only say that
I haven’t got enough talent to make a success of music.”
“Well, and who is better qualified to judge? I’ve had years of
experience as a composer, and I’ve seen as much of the professional
life as though I’d belonged to it, as you very well know. People whom
I hardly know, and perfect strangers, come to me for advice, and even
musicians of experience, because they are wise enough to know that one
_can_ help them. But you, my own son, and a mere boy, think that you
know better than I do. I tell you it’s preposterous, Morris!”
He stood silent, glaring at her. “It’s my own life,” he said at last,
sullenly.
“That’s a very old argument. But is nothing owing to the mother who
gave you that life, took care of your babyhood and childhood, had you
educated and taught everything you know, from whom, my poor boy, you
even derive what talent you may possess? Why, everything you have in
the world is owing to your mother and father.”
Morris, furiously conscious that his mother was taking her stand upon
false ground yet found no answer to that which he had heard a hundred
times before.
“Do you suppose,” cried Nina, pursuing her advantage, “that you have
a single _real_ friend in the world, besides your mother? I know you
boast as though you had always been popular wherever you went--you know
best how much truth there is in it--but the people who flatter you and
say they like you, have all been bought with my money. _I’ve_ sent you
to expensive schools, and allowed you to stay with anybody who asked
you, and God knows I’m glad you should have friends and enjoy your
youth. You can never say that I’ve grudged you anything, Morris.”
“Oh, I know very well you’ve given me every sort of thing,” he
muttered. “I’ve never been ungrateful.”
“As though I wanted gratitude!” she cried in a sort of holy scorn. “You
know very well, Morris, that I love you better than anyone else in the
world--you are all I have left--and for seventeen years you’ve been
my only thought, day or night. It’s very, very little I ask of you in
return--only a little affection and unselfishness. Youth is very hard
and ignorant, and one doesn’t ask much in return for all one gives.”
She suddenly pitched her voice three semitones lower.
“But the day will come, my poor Morris, when you will look back with
wonder and bitter, bitter regret, to think that you refused to do the
very little asked of you. And it will be too late then.”
As a little boy she had always worked on his feelings, since he
was impressionable and highly-strung, but custom had dulled his
sensibilities. But still he could not do more than look at her with
anger and distrust in his young tragic gaze.
Nina slowly allowed the tears to well into her enormous eyes. They were
always obedient to her summons, as are the tears of most physically
delicate women, and, moreover, she was really agitated at the thought
that Morris would not accept her judgment as infallible.
“Morris, darling, don’t go away from me. I have only you, now, whom
Geoffrey left to be my comfort sixteen years ago. If you went to
Germany I should not be able to come with you”--Morris looked his
consternation at the possibility of such a proceeding--“whereas if you
go to Oxford, which is what your beloved father wished for you, you can
come back here after a year or two, and we can decide together what you
would care to go in for.”
“There’s nothing for me to do here.”
“The place wants looking after. Mr. Bartlett is very good, but he’s
only the agent. You’re too young to understand how very very difficult
it has been for me to cope with all the business ever since your father
died. I’ve done it all for your sake, Morris, looking forward to the
time when you would be able to take it off my hands yourself. Don’t
disappoint me.”
“I don’t want to disappoint you, mother. But you know yourself what
it is to care about music. Surely you wouldn’t grudge me a few years’
study?”
“That could come later, if you still wish it. The idea of your being a
professional is absurd, and I will never hear of it, but I don’t say I
shouldn’t let you go to Germany for a while _after_ Oxford, though it
is naturally very bitter to me that my only son should wish to leave
home, and his widowed mother, when there is absolutely no reason for
it. It isn’t as though you had to earn your own living. Everything I
have will be yours one day.”
“I can’t live on you for ever,” said Morris angrily. His father’s will,
made before Morris was born, had left everything unreservedly to Nina.
“There’s no question of your living on me. You are my only child, and
everything that is mine is yours,” tearfully exclaimed Nina, who gave
her son a fixed moderate allowance, and had never allowed him to know
the extent either of her fortune or her income, still less to infringe
in the slightest degree upon her absolute power as mistress of the
estate.
“Besides, I want your help.”
A servant opened the door.
“If you please, madam, Mr. Bartlett is here, and would like to speak to
you a moment.”
Decidedly, the stars were fighting for Nina Severing. She rose, with a
gentle, sorrowful glance at her son.
“More business,” she sighed wearily, and left the room with her tardy,
trailing step.
Morris, left alone, became instantly inspired with a number of
conclusive arguments and dignified retorts which should have left his
parent defenceless. He went through several imaginary conversations,
with eloquence and reason on his side. But imaginary victories are
but poor consolation for a defeat. Presently Morris groaned, ran his
fingers through his thick hair, and muttered half aloud:
“Thwarted at every step. It’s enough to make one take the law into
one’s own hands and _go_.”
He was always slightly dramatic, even when alone. “What is there for a
man to do down here? Mother won’t even get a car.”
He reflected gloomily that few other chaps of his acquaintance were
unable so much as to drive a motor-car, and then rebounded hastily on
to the more exalted plane.
“Besides--music! It’s the only thing on earth. I shall go mad if I
can’t take it up properly.”
His eyes lighted up, very much as he meant them to do, with the fire of
the enthusiast, and he paced the room rapidly.
Presently a note in his mother’s handwriting was brought to him. His
brow clouded. Nina’s written appeals, of which she was, like most weak
natures, prodigal, never failed to irritate Morris, who had not yet
learnt to be eloquent on paper.
“Darling,” she wrote with many dashes and splashes of her pen, “do not
wait for luncheon. I shall be some time with Mr. Bartlett, and cannot
interrupt business. Do think over our talk. I had a little surprise for
you these holidays, which I meant to tell you later, but perhaps it may
cheer you up. I am going to get the car you wanted so much, and Mr.
Bartlett tells me he knows of a very good place in Bodmin. We might go
in to-morrow and see, and perhaps arrange for some driving lessons for
you. It will help you to get at some good music, too, and lessons, if
you want them, later.”
Morris stood confounded. By such unexpected _volte faces_ and sudden
generosities, did his mother cause all his resentment to appear
ungrateful and futile. He felt angry with her, and at the same time
touched, and ashamed of his own anger. Perhaps most of all he felt
bewildered. Then he thought of the motor-car, his ambition for the
past two years. It would make all the difference to Pensevern. He
saw himself, a dashing, reckless driver, yet skilled in hair-breadth
escapes, leaning back in the driving-seat with his cap pulled over
his eyes, and one careless hand on the wheel--negligent, cool, yet
infinitely competent.
These pleasing reveries were not new to Morris, but they had never
before been illuminated by any spark of probability. He was happy for
some time. But presently he became once more gloomy.
No number of motor-cars would convey him to Germany or enable him to
make music his career. The motor-car was his mother’s bribe to keep him
at home.
Morris flushed at the thought, and tried to ignore a subconscious
conviction, rapidly forcing itself upon him, that a motor-car in the
garage was worth more than a career in the future.
It was, of course, absurd. Motor-cars did not alter the whole course of
a man’s lifetime.
Did his mother really mean it? Morris turned to her letter again. It
was explicit enough, and he was also struck by the note of appeal
sounded. Inspiration came to him slowly. The appeal of a widowed
mother! Might not the whole ambition of a lifetime be worthily
sacrificed to _that_? Motor-cars might, as it were, be flung in by an
admiring Providence, but they should not be allowed to affect the main
issue.
The vision of the dashing young mechanic was hastily relinquished in
favour of that of a morose, disappointed man, his career sacrificed
to the whim of his mother, his passion for music thwarted by harsh
circumstances in early youth.
“The world has lost a great musician there,” he fancied might be the
sorrowful reply to inquiries about the strong, silent figure whose
story would be so well known to every tenant on the estate in the long
years to come.
“I will stay. I will give it all up,” declared Morris to himself, and
felt a genuine pang at the renunciation.
The pang, recurring at ever-widening intervals, was destined to remain
a source of satisfaction to him for a number of years.
V
Morris Severing reappears in these pages, after an indifferently
successful but lighthearted career at Oxford, not as a disappointed
genius, but as an extremely good-looking young man, in love with life,
with his own universal popularity, and with the goddess of music.
That he should seriously fall in love with a more earthly divinity was
at once Nina’s hope and her terror. She watched the three little girls
at Porthlew growing up rapidly, and spent the long vacations with her
son abroad or in London. He was very little at Pensevern until the
summer when Mrs. Tregaskis took Hazel and Rosamund to London.
Frances Grantham, only sixteen, and delicate, remained at Porthlew with
Miss Blandflower “to keep Cousin Frederick company,” Mrs. Tregaskis
told her.
Nina was not very much afraid that her son would fall in love with
Frances. She was pretty, in a slender, classical style, but lacking in
vitality, and though she came up to Pensevern and played tennis and,
occasionally, golf, with Morris, she did so with the curious lack of
conviction that was characteristic of her dealings with the material
world.
From a psychological point of view Frances was infinitely more mature
than Rosamund, passionate and unbalanced, or than Hazel, possessed
of a sense of humour (which both sisters lacked almost completely),
and charming withal; but Nina Severing, with great acumen, decided
that only Frances could safely be promoted to the rank of “my little
favourite.”
Her little favourite, being idealistic and impressionable, conceived a
youthful adoration for Nina’s gentle tones, appealing prettiness, and
tuneful graces, and refrained, with a completeness which spoke highly
for Nina’s judgment, from transferring any of that adoration to Nina’s
son.
As for Morris, it was enough that he once heard Frances Grantham, with
transparent sincerity, observe that the modern music she liked best
was Mrs. Severing’s highly successful setting of half a dozen _nouveau
genre_ lyrics, entitled “Underworld.”
“It’s rather odd that only one of them should have inherited the
mother’s gift,” observed Nina thoughtfully, after this. “Of course
she’s no performer, but that curious instinct for _the right thing_ is
absolutely inborn.”
“I didn’t know Rosamund was musical,” said Morris, purposely and
viciously misunderstanding his parent, and moreover making it perfectly
clear to that parent’s acute perceptions why he did so. She set her
lips together and assumed the look of pale self-control that habitually
prefaced her most bitter shafts.
“I’m just telling you that _Frances_ is the only one of the two who has
any music in her. Rosamund is absolutely devoid of it. If you had any
spark of the Divine Fire in you, my dear boy, you could not have helped
recognizing it in little Frances, even though she can hardly play a
note. But, after all, one doesn’t expect much perception from youth.”
She murmured the last words as though to herself, which added
considerably to their effect.
Morris, who was seldom able to think of any satisfactory repartee to
his mother’s favourite gibe, hastily decided that a good-humoured
indifference would best refute it. He gave a slight laugh, shrugged his
shoulders so as to make quite sure that Nina did not miss the point of
the laugh, and observed lightly:
“I hear Hazel Tregaskis sings delightfully. She always was good, even
as a kid.”
“Quite good,” agreed Nina, with that air of condescension best
calculated to irritate her son. “Her voice is a charming one, but, of
course, she has to _live_ before she can really _sing_.” She hesitated
for an instant, since the obvious slighting allusion to youth could
hardly be brought in without some appearance of repeating a good effect
_ad nauseam_.
Morris, with his usual fatal perception, instantly took advantage of
her slightly disconcerted pause, for which he perfectly grasped the
reason, to say pleasantly: “I shall be able to judge when I hear her.”
Upon which, having established his own perfect competence to form an
independent opinion, he hastily left the room.
That night they went to dinner at Porthlew, and he heard Hazel
Tregaskis sing.
Her voice, as Nina had said, was charming, and she played her own
accompaniments.
Nina sat well in the lamplight, an absorbed, dreamy look on her face,
and her long, slight fingers slowly twisting her wedding ring, with
a gesture which through long years of conscious pathos, had become
habitual to her. Frederick Tregaskis, smaller and more wizened than
ever, was frankly asleep in an armchair. His wife, devotedly knitting
socks, yet contrived to present an attitude of critical intentness for
her daughter’s performance.
Frances was sitting at the open window, her pure, vague gaze fixed
unseeingly on the darkened garden without. Morris scarcely glanced at
her a moment.
His eyes sought Rosamund, who had been beside him at dinner.
She was sitting, very still, just outside the circle of light cast by
the great standard lamp. Morris had already noticed her capacity for
extreme stillness, oddly at variance with the restless questing spirit
that looked out of her grey eyes, and certain vibrant tones of her
singularly beautiful speaking-voice. Watching her motionless profile,
Morris thought that the Slavonic type was strangely emphasized in the
sharply defined moulding of the salient cheek-bones, sulkily closed
lips, and straight black brows. Her skin was very white, and her brown
hair thick and silky. Morris thought her very beautiful.
He wondered what her thoughts were, as she leant back in her low
chair, immovable. Presently, with that sureness of intuition which
is at once a pitfall and a safeguard, Morris perceived that she was
listening--intently, with every fibre of her being drawn tense.
Hazel’s voice was a soprano of no great compass, well-trained, and
with an indefinably pathetic quality which gave it charm, but the
drawing-room ballads she had chosen to give them seemed to Morris
trivial in the extreme. He had hardly been listening.
He wondered what Rosamund Grantham heard in the clear soft notes.
When Hazel had sung once or twice, and had received Nina Severing’s
judicious comments with a sort of half-mocking deference that recalled
her father’s manner, she turned to Morris.
“Now you’ll play to us, won’t you?” she appealed.
“Do,” cried Bertha heartily. “I haven’t heard you for years, Morris.”
“His execution has improved, of course,” remarked Nina, who was fond of
discussing her son’s music in his own presence.
“Bodmin teaching is not all it might be,” was the retort of Morris,
addressed to Mrs. Tregaskis. “I’ve had to do the best I can by myself.”
“My dear boy!” protested his mother, with a laugh that to her son’s
practised ear betrayed annoyance. “As though you hadn’t had the best
lessons obtainable in Paris!”
“Half a dozen--oh yes. They certainly helped me to carry on alone
afterwards.”
“You’ve had your mother to help you, my boy; mustn’t forget that,”
suddenly said Frederick Tregaskis from his corner. He chuckled a
little: “Mustn’t forget that.”
“_Do_ play something to us, Morris,” interposed Hazel quickly. She
looked at him with the eternal laugh dancing in her pretty eyes.
But Morris had turned to Rosamund.
“Shall I?” he asked her, aware of the subtlety of such an appeal.
“Yes,” she said gently, looking at him.
Morris possessed an almost irresistible attraction, one which is
sometimes the attribute of weak natures--an exceedingly direct gaze.
He looked straight at Rosamund, and his eyes smiled at her.
“Then I am going to play to you,” he said under his breath, with the
lightest possible emphasis. He turned to the piano at once, but not
before he had seen the colour surge up into her face.
He gave them the gayest, wildest, most heartrending of Brahms’
Hungarian dances. When he ceased there was silence for a moment.
Nina Severing turned so that the lamplight fell on her long lashes,
sparkling a little with tears. She always cried a little at music which
deserved to be called good, and she had never heard Morris play so well.
“Thank you, Morris,” said Bertha, less exuberantly than usual. “That’s
a glorious thing--always rouses the gipsy in me. It’s so full of life
and joy and ecstasy.”
“There is something curiously _poignant_ underneath that ecstasy,”
murmured Nina, partly to account for the sparkle on her eyelashes and
partly to make it clear that Bertie did not by any means know all that
there was to be known about Brahms.
“Thank you very much,” softly said Hazel, elliptical, after the fashion
of the modern generation.
“It’s your turn again now. Please sing this,” he said, with an engaging
mixture of supplication and command in his tone.
He had picked up one of the songs strewing the table, almost at random,
but she took it without demur, and advanced to the piano. Under cover
of the opening bars he moved straight to where Rosamund sat in the
shadow.
His eyes sought hers, with a question in them. For a minute she
remained quite still, her dark head bent. Then she raised it, and
he saw that her eyes were blazing with intense excitement. “Oh it’s
glorious,” she breathed, “to be able to play like that! It takes
one right away from--all this.” She looked contemptuously at her
surroundings.
“Do you care so very much?” he asked under his breath. “Is music all
that to you?”
“But I’m not musical,” she said with defiant honesty. “It only makes me
forget everything else.”
Understanding flashed into Morris’s expressive face. At the same
instant Nina turned towards him with a sharp hissing sound of distress
and a prolonged “Hush-sh--_Morris_.”
He was silent instantly.
When Hazel’s song was over Nina Severing asked for her motor.
“It has been so nice, dearest,” she murmured, embracing her hostess.
“I’ve missed you too dreadfully all the summer, and now you’ll be off
again in a week, I suppose.”
“Oh yes, escorting my two young gadabouts to various country houses.
I’m an old-fashioned woman, and don’t let my girls stay away alone, you
know, unless I’m very sure of the house they’re going to. One would
prefer one’s own chimney-corner, of course, but that’s neither here nor
there.”
She laughed cheerily.
“For the matter of that,” cut in Hazel incisively, “I should much
prefer the chimney-corner myself, mother, and so would Rosamund. You
know how we’ve begged you to let us spend the autumn here in peace.”
“Oh yes, yes, yes,” scoffed her mother good-humouredly. “I’ve heard
little girls say that before, my darling.”
Nina, too, laughed softly.
“We mothers make our sacrifices for these young things in spite of
themselves,” she declared lightly. “Good-night, Hazel. I hear you dance
better than any girl in London. Make the most of your time, my dear.
Good-night, Francie dear. Why, you’ve been as quiet as a little mouse
all the evening. It’s very hard to play Cinderella, isn’t it, with your
two ugly sisters going to the Ball every night?”
They all laughed as though the time-worn allusion had not been made
with almost daily regularity by Miss Blandflower.
Frederick opened the door and Nina swept gracefully into the hall.
Frances ran eagerly for her cloak, and the others came out more slowly.
On the dark threshold of the porch Morris spoke to Rosamund.
“I want to see you--I want to talk to you,” he said urgently. “Can’t I
play to you again--just to you all alone? Though for the matter of that
I played that Brahms to you. You did know, didn’t you?”
He spoke with an odd inconsequence that was characteristic of his
ardent, eager temperament.
“I thought perhaps you did,” she murmured, not coquettishly, but almost
sadly, with a sort of uncertainty in her voice.
“Can’t I come over to-morrow? I must come. Where shall I find you?”
“Where’s Morris?” called Bertha Tregaskis.
“Coming,” he cried, and gave Rosamund one look before dashing into the
hall.
She did not speak to him again, but he held her hand for an instant
at parting and said “Good-night, Rosamund,” blessing the wonderful
privilege of childhood which had allowed him always to use her
Christian name.
Only a week and she would have gone away again! But doubt and
diffidence were almost equally strangers to Morris, and he wove
illimitable dreams into that space of eight days as he drove from
Porthlew to Pensevern in the dark of an August night.
The following afternoon he went to find Rosamund. She had given him no
trysting-place--had not even said that he might come--but Morris knew
no uncertainty. He did not go to the house, but sought the shade of the
terrace, and found her alone, in the short avenue that led to Bertha’s
cherished rock-garden.
She was even paler than usual as she gave him her hand, and Morris,
with the intuition that was always his surest guide, greeted her very
gently and gravely.
“Where were you going to?” he asked. “May I come with you?”
“I was going into the orchard. It’s cooler there. The others have gone
out.”
Morris did not dare to ask her why she had not gone with them. He
longed to hear her make the admission that she had been waiting for
him, but contented himself with walking beside her in silence as she
directed her steps towards the sloping paddock that had been converted
into an orchard.
There was a wooden bench set in the furthest corner, and Rosamund sat
down there without speaking. Morris flung himself upon the grass.
There was silence.
Then Morris, looking up at her, said:
“Tell me about everything. Everything that the Hungarian dance
made you feel last night, and why you say that you’re not musical,
and--everything.”
She did not tell him everything. But she told him, with a curious
mixture of childish simplicity and of a most unchildish vehemence, a
great deal; more even than she knew.
Morris listened, understood in a sort of passion of sympathy, and
looked all the while at her beautiful, unsmiling face.
He noticed that she was strangely impersonal. She hardly spoke of
people at all, except once, when she said, “I have always got Francie.
I love her better than anyone in the world.” Of her guardian she did
not say anything. But a lesser intuition than that of Morris Severing
would have felt an intense rebelliousness to be the keynote of her
whole life at Porthlew.
The magic afternoon sped by, and the shadows lengthened across the
grass.
Hazel Tregaskis called “Rosamund!” from the terrace, and they looked at
one another with eyes that had suddenly awakened to another reality.
Morris sprang to his feet.
“Thank you, Rosamund,” he said softly.
Suddenly the laugh appeared again in his blue eyes.
“Do you know, we’ve known one another four--five--years, and I’ve never
really _found_ you till last night!”
“I don’t think I found myself till you played the Hungarian dance,”
Rosamund told him seriously.
Hazel did not express any surprise at seeing Morris Severing. He
surmised that she would not often express surprise. The charming
assurance which characterized her seemed to imply that Hazel Tregaskis
would accept or ignore very much as she chose, with little or no
reference to any standards but her own.
“Have you come to tea, Morris?” she inquired easily. “Mother’s on the
terrace. Isn’t it a shame to think of leaving the garden and everything
next week?”
“Yes,” said Morris energetically. “It’s perfectly rotten. Where are you
going? Must you go?”
“I suppose so,” she returned, shrugging her shoulders. “We’ve both
told mother how much we should prefer to refuse invitations to
shooting-parties, but she won’t hear of it.”
“You’ll enjoy them when you’re there,” morosely remarked Morris, with a
sudden vision of Rosamund watching some ass bringing down partridges by
the dozen. Morris was not a good shot.
“That’s the worst of it!” cried Hazel with mock pathos. “Of course I
shall! I always do enjoy going anywhere, and then mother says, ‘What
did I tell you?’ Now Rosamund at least has the satisfaction of being
consistent. She is quite genuinely bored wherever we go. She didn’t
even enjoy going to dances.”
Morris looked much relieved.
“Didn’t you really?” he asked Rosamund.
“Not much,” she admitted.
It was the last satisfaction that he obtained that afternoon. Mrs.
Tregaskis, with a readiness born of long habit, made her guest useful
by requesting him to roll the tennis lawn, while Rosamund and Frances
hunted languidly amongst the bushes for tennis balls lost the previous
afternoon. Hazel had prudently disappeared.
“Economy, economy!” shouted Mrs. Tregaskis blithely, and hacked with a
racquet at the long grass concealing the roots amongst which possible
tennis balls might be imbedded.
Morris wondered if the same admirable virtue caused his hostess to
refrain from inviting him to stay and dine at Porthlew that evening,
but when she showed no such inclination at seven o’clock he felt
obliged to exclaim:
“I say, how late it is! I must be getting back.”
“Give my love to your mother,” said Bertha cordially. “She must come
over again before we go up North.”
“I’ll drive her over,” declared Morris with alacrity. “Good-bye.”
All that evening he was haunted by Rosamund’s deep eyes, by the sound
of her sweet, serious voice. He told himself exultantly that he had met
his ideal, and that he, and he alone was capable of loving her as she
should be loved. He also cursed himself as a cold-blooded fool for not
having told her then and there of his love. What senseless scruple had
restrained him? He resolved to see her again the next day.
Rosamund, that night, lay awake till dawn in an excitement that was
as utterly out of proportion as were all her emotions. She told
herself, in pure and single-minded earnestness, that this, which was to
transmute her life to gold, was different to anything else in the world.
Morris, who had fallen in love before, also told himself, with fiery
determination, that _this_ was different to anything else in the world.