“Rosamund!” wrote Hazel from the North. “The most marvellous things
in all the world are happening. I am in love--with a man who wears
an eyeglass--(you know how I’ve always hated an eyeglass) and he is
in love with me. He is Sir Guy Marleswood, and he’s thirty-four, and
_quite_ six foot, and I don’t think I should mind if he were five
foot nothing. I _know_ I shouldn’t. I’ve known him a fortnight, and
yet we both feel as though we’d known each other all our lives, and
yet it’s new and wonderful all the time. It’s indescribable. There’s
one thing--which _I_ have to keep reminding myself of, but which will
assume enormous proportions as soon as one begins to do anything--I
mean, write to mother, or wear an engagement ring. (He’s given me a
most beautiful one, a ruby marquise, only I won’t wear it.) He’s been
married before, and he had to divorce his wife five years ago. I knew
it before we met, because the girls here had been talking about him,
and said that was why their mother had not asked him to stay in the
house, but he came to the dance, and he is staying at the Ludleys’,
a mile away. That’s where we met, and I’ve seen him nearly every
day since--and the days when I don’t see him are just _hell_--only
knowing that Heaven may open again at any minute.
“Rosamund dear, I know now that I was a fool ever to let boys make
love to me or propose in the sort of half-and-half way that a boy
does--asking one to wait for him because he may have enough to marry
on in fifteen years’ time, and meanwhile exchange photographs and
write every Sunday afternoon. You know the sort of thing--that does
to tell other girls about, and sentimentalize over when a waltz that
you used to dance with _him_ is being played. But when it’s the real
thing--when a _man_ tells you that he cares for you and asks you to
be his wife--it’s absolutely and utterly different. Guy asked me the
fifth time he saw me. He told me about his wife first. The odd thing
is, that I don’t mind. Of course I shouldn’t mind about the moral
part of it, anyhow--I mean whom God hath joined together and all
that--but I don’t seem even to mind about his having once loved her
and married her. They only cared for one another a very little while,
and it’s all past and over. The present is ours--and more glorious
and wonderful than any words can ever say. As for the future--he says
he is going to marry me before the end of the year. And I am to put
off my other visits and come home this week, and then he will write
to daddy, and come down to Cornwall. Of course it isn’t daddy that
counts at all, since I can manage him perfectly, but I have a sort of
an idea that Guy will get exactly what he wants, even out of mother.
He’s the sort of person that does.
“We haven’t told anybody anything. I haven’t the slightest doubt that
Lady Alistair has guessed, and the girls too, but even if she writes
to mother it’ll only bring things to a crisis rather sooner. I’m
writing to her myself this evening, so she’ll know by the time you
get this.
“I’m not afraid of anything or anyone in the world. Guy and I have
found one another, and nothing else matters. Besides, I _know_ he’ll
manage everything!
“As ever,
“Your loving
“HAZEL.”
If Hazel’s letter brought a strange wondering sense of disquietude to
Rosamund, and that not wholly on her cousin’s account, the much shorter
note which she had sent her mother apparently produced no such effect.
Bertha appeared at luncheon with a brow but slightly corrugated, and
only an added tinge of briskness in her manner to betray perturbation
of spirit.
“I see you’ve had a letter from Hazel by the midday post, Rosamund,”
observed Miss Blandflower in the middle of luncheon, with a
praiseworthy desire to dissipate the slight atmosphere of constraint
which had lately been noticeable at meals, in spite of the valiant and
hearty efforts of Mrs. Tregaskis. “When does she return to the bosom of
her family?” She gave a slight giggle in lieu of quotation marks.
Rosamund hesitated, felt her cousin Bertha glance sharply at her, and
answered nervously:
“I’m not sure--soon, I think.”
“She has two more visits to pay,” said Mrs. Tregaskis coldly. “You knew
that, Rosamund.”
Her husband looked up suddenly.
“She’s coming back on Friday. You knew that, Bertha,” he said
mockingly. “I understand that our parental sanction is required to an
engagement of marriage. Very gratifying, I’m sure, in these emancipated
days.”
Miss Blandflower turned startled eyes from one to the other of Hazel’s
parents.
“They say one wedding makes another,” she sighed with nervous
inappositeness. “But is it really--who is it...?”
“My dear Minnie, Hazel is a silly little girl who ought never to have
been allowed to pay visits without a chaperoning mamma. It serves me
right for having relaxed my rule--but one can’t be in two places at
once, and really these young ladies require such a lot of looking
after!”
Bertha sighed gustily.
“One only wonders how you can manage in the marvellous way you do,
with so much upon your hands,” said Minnie, feeling that this remark,
although far from being original, came at any rate from a safe stock,
and might be more acceptable than further questions.
At all events it steered the conversation into smoother channels, and
no further allusions were made in public to Hazel’s affairs, until
three days later, when Hazel herself returned to Porthlew.
Rosamund was instantly conscious of an indefinable change in her cousin.
Self-possessed Hazel Tregaskis had always been, but the youthful
security of her manner had somehow deepened into an impression of
inward assurance that held less of self-confidence, and more of some
larger stability, that would not be easily shaken. When her mother
greeted her with matter-of-fact warmth, and said gaily, “Well, my
little girl, I’m glad to have you under my wing again; I think it’s
the last time we must let you go gallivanting off on your own for the
present,” Rosamund saw that Hazel did not give the petulant shrug or
grimace with which the girl Hazel would have received such a greeting,
but looked at her mother with a strange, remote look that held
something of an almost impersonal compassion.
It was that same look, Rosamund thought, which angered Mrs. Tregaskis
when her daughter resolutely asked her for an interview that evening.
“No, my darling; I’m not going to let you stay and chatter now. You’ve
had a long journey, and must pop off to bed early. We’ll have a long
talk to-morrow. Dad and I are not at all angry with you, but I’ve had a
letter from Jessie Alistair, and it’s quite plain that I ought never to
have let you go and stay away without me. Now run along with Rosamund,
my pet.”
“What did Lady Alistair say?”
“I shall talk to you about that to-morrow. I am not at all angry with
you, Hazel, but one thing you and Rosamund may as well understand,
since I suppose you’ve told her all about it. You may flirt with boys
of your own age, if you like, and have all the fun that’s natural and
proper, but----” Bertha Tregaskis paused. She spoke with a quiet and
good-humoured implacability, her hands resting on her broad hips, and
her resolute mouth set firmly. “_But_--to flirt and get yourself talked
about with a married man, is--a--thing--I--don’t--allow. See, darling?”
Rosamund caught her breath and looked at her cousin. Hazel, who seldom
or never blushed, had flushed the slow, deep crimson of a woman who
hears herself insulted.
“Sir Guy Marleswood is not a married man,” she said slowly. “At least,
neither he nor I think so, which is what matters, after all. He
divorced his wife five years ago. He has asked me to marry him.”
“Very well, darling. When he writes and asks the permission of your
parents, we shall see. But a man of four- or five-and-thirty, who has
led the sort of life that he has led, does not generally want to marry
a little girl of nineteen, even though he may be dishonourable enough
to play at making love to her.”
But this agreeable theory was shattered next day, when Sir Guy
Marleswood wrote a formal statement of his position, and an almost
equally formal request for his daughter’s hand in marriage, to
Frederick Tregaskis. He also stated unemphatically that the following
day would find him at Porthlew Railway Hotel.
Thereafter, Rosamund watched the storm break over the household with a
strangely aching heart.
Bertha regarded Sir Guy as a married man, and said so staunchly.
Frederick Tregaskis, whom Rosamund had never yet heard to agree with
his wife, declined to view the question from an ethical standpoint,
but declared Hazel too young to enter upon a marriage which would of
necessity be regarded more or less dubiously by the world in general.
“Wait another five years,” he remarked grimly to his daughter, “and see
if you can’t do better for yourself than a divorced baronet fifteen
years older than yourself.”
“No,” said Hazel, her small face set like a flint. “He wants me to
marry him now.”
“I dare say. And I want you to wait. I suppose you owe something to
your father?”
“Yes,” she said, and began to cry. “But not everything in the world. I
owe something to myself. It’s _my_ life.”
It was the passionate cry for individualism that Rosamund had heard
from Morris Severing.
But Hazel Tregaskis, unlike Morris, was directing all the energies of
her will into one channel. And Rosamund, watching, saw those energies
guided and strengthened day by day by the stronger force that held
steadfast behind her.
Guy Marleswood was not of those who fail.
Before the close of that year, the day came when he extorted from the
exasperated Frederick: “Marry her, then. I see you mean to do it, both
of you, and it may as well be with my consent as without it. Anything
to put an end to the subject.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Sir Guy imperturbably. “I will go and tell Mrs.
Tregaskis that we have your consent to the marriage.”
“You will do nothing of the kind. I shall tell her myself. I may as
well get some satisfaction out of it,” said Frederick viciously.
He sought his wife in the library, where she sat, looking unusually
disheartened, amid a pile of leaflets.
“Bertha, you are about to be relieved of one of your responsibilities.”
“I’m thankful to hear it,” she returned wearily.
“I have decided to give Hazel into Marleswood’s keeping.”
“Frederick! You can’t. You’re mad. A child of nineteen--and a marriage
that’s no marriage--she’ll be no more married in the eyes of God than
if she were openly living as that man’s mistress.”
“I’m not concerned with the eyes of God,” said her husband in detached
tones. “It’s perfectly evident to mine that if we don’t give our
consent they mean to do without it, and I don’t choose to have my
daughter making a runaway match. We had better give in gracefully while
it is still possible, Bertha. Marleswood is not the sort of man to heal
a breach, if it came to that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that we don’t want to be cut off from the little girl for
ever after her marriage,” said Frederick, his voice shaking a very
little. “That’s what it’ll mean if we let her go from under our roof in
defiance, Bertha.”
“Hazel is an infatuated, self-willed child, but she is not heartless,”
cried Bertha.
“I do not intend to put her to the test.” Frederick Tregaskis had
regained his habitual dryness of utterance.
With unwonted consideration, he added a word of consolation for his
wife.
“I may as well tell you that I am perfectly satisfied that Marleswood
is a good fellow in every way, and devoted to her. The whole thing,
after all, amounts to a question of conscience, which she is entitled
to judge for herself.”
“She’s not,” flashed Bertha. “She’s only a child, and ought to accept
the ruling of her parents until she’s old enough to judge for herself.”
“I have no doubt,” said Frederick drily, “that all parents, taken as a
class, would agree with you. Unfortunately for ourselves, however, we
have passed into an era where the individual, and not the class, will
rule.”
He walked out of the room, looking older and more deeply lined than
ever.
Rosamund found Mrs. Tregaskis, who never broke down, weeping violently
among the piles of disordered pamphlets.
“Cousin Bertie! Don’t!” cried Rosamund fearfully. “Is it about Hazel?”
Bertha raised a piteously mottled and disfigured face.
“I’m beaten,” she cried. “Frederick has consented to this iniquitous
marriage, and nothing can stop it now. My little girl, whom I’ve
brought up to be good, and to whom I’ve tried to teach religion--that
she should be willing to break my heart, and rush deliberately into
sin, the first time temptation comes near her!”
“No--no. It’s not that. She doesn’t think it’s sin. She doesn’t believe
it’s sin--not for an instant. Her point of view is different.”
“Her point of view!” cried Bertha bitterly. “How dare you talk to me,
a woman of fifty, of such preposterous nonsense? You and she are
children; you know nothing of life, you’ve had no experience. How can
Hazel judge of what is right or wrong? She’s a child--a child.”
In the vehement repetition of the assertion, it seemed to Rosamund that
she found her clue to Bertha Tregaskis’s impotent suffering. She would
not, could not, admit in her daughter any claim to the rights of an
individual.
Hazel’s judgment, unrecognized by her mother, carried with it no
amazement to Rosamund.
Certain faiths, certain scruples and acceptances inborn in Rosamund
and Frances, had been the veriest lip-service to the child Hazel
always. Rosamund recognized in her the purest and most natural type of
highly-evolved paganism.
“You know, Rosamund, I’m not doing anything wrong, although they won’t
believe it. It isn’t wrong _to me_, and I don’t believe in an abstract
right and wrong. Each individual case has its own laws.”
“Should you do it if you thought it _was_ wrong?”
“I don’t know,” said Hazel thoughtfully. “I can’t imagine seriously
believing that it would matter to God, one way or the other. Should
you? Frances wouldn’t, one knows.”
“If I did it,” slowly said Rosamund, “it would be as a deliberate
choice between good and evil. I should believe myself to be breaking
God’s law--but I might do it, if I thought it worth while.”
She knew that if, as she said, it seemed to her worth while, no laws
of God or man should bind her. But she would break them of deliberate
intent, whereas to Hazel Tregaskis they were non-existent, myths
designed for the wanton frightening of children.
Rosamund recognized the absolute sincerity of Hazel’s point of view,
and sometimes found herself wondering what Sir Guy’s might be. One day,
very soon before the marriage, she held an odd little conversation
with him, standing in the wintry sunshine of the terrace. Frederick
Tregaskis was ahead of them, grimly poking with a walking-stick at a
little drain that was choked with leaves.
“He’s been very kind to me,” said Sir Guy abruptly, indicating with a
gesture the odd little figure.
“I think that he really likes you very much,” said Rosamund. “And
though he would be very angry at being told so, I have always known
that Cousin Frederick adores Hazel.”
Sir Guy nodded with full comprehension.
“Yes, of course. She knows that, too. It’s been the best thing in her
life so far--that and having you and your sister here.” He paused for a
moment or two. “You know,” he said slowly, “I want to try and make up
to her for everything that she hasn’t had, so far. She ought to have
everything. She seems, somehow, so made for happiness.”
“I have never seen Hazel sad,” said Rosamund, rather surprised. “I
think she is happy by nature.”
“Yes, though an atmosphere which might perhaps seem an unsympathetic
one----”
He left the sentence unfinished, and it required no effort on
Rosamund’s part to conjecture his meaning. Sir Guy resented, none the
less implacably that his resentment was expressed by implication only,
the attitude of Mrs. Tregaskis towards her daughter. That Hazel herself
had never resented it, and had only opposed to it the bright glancing
hardness of her impenetrable self-confidence, did not, Rosamund felt,
in any way diminish his perfectly silent ire. Mrs. Tregaskis herself
would be forced to recognize that in this man fifteen years her senior,
Hazel had found champion as well as lover, knight as well as comrade.
Rosamund turned away with an aching heart, wondering dimly whether her
need had not been greater than Hazel’s.
After the formal consent given by Frederick Tregaskis, there had
been no further discussions between Sir Guy and Mrs. Tregaskis. She
accepted her defeat with the sort of grim gallantry that would always
be characteristic of her, and, as far as Rosamund knew, attempted no
appeal to Hazel. But she aged more perceptibly in the weeks before
Hazel’s marriage than during all the five years that Rosamund had
passed at Porthlew.
No other indication that her guardian recognized defeat was evident
to Rosamund’s eyes. Her manner to her daughter was what it had always
been--kindly, authoritative, at times possessive. She admitted Sir
Guy’s claims to much of her daughter’s time, and even seemed disposed,
gradually, to concede to him rights which he had not tried to arrogate
for himself.
“You mustn’t let this little person be too much in London,” she
observed, with a hand upon Hazel’s shoulder. “We’re very excitable, and
it knocks us up. I had to be a very strict mamma and bring her home
long before the dances had come to an end last year.”
“If we take the St. James’ Square flat, there is no reason why we
shouldn’t spend all the week-ends Hazel likes at Marleswood.”
“Well, I don’t know about week-ends,” said Bertha doubtfully. “They’re
not very restful. I think a home in the country and an occasional fling
in London must be Hazel’s programme.”
She spoke with her customary matter-of-fact assurance and kindly good
sense.
Sir Guy fixed his objectionable monocle more firmly.
“That,” he observed in a detached manner, “is a decision which I shall
leave entirely to my wife.”
If Mrs. Tregaskis found it necessary to readjust her forces after this,
the readjustment was made silently and without delay. But it was very
shortly after that, when it only wanted a week to Hazel’s wedding-day,
that Rosamund again found Cousin Bertha in the library, struggling
with hard, choking sobs. Hazel hung over her, caressing her with most
unwonted demonstrativeness and with tears in her own pretty eyes. But
that they were tears of the merest surface pity and tenderness was
abundantly obvious even without the gently mournful observation which
she made to Rosamund that evening.
“Poor mother! I hate to see her minding it so, but you know, Rosamund,
I _can’t_ feel as unhappy as I ought.”
“Don’t you wish--sometimes--that you’d waited, as they begged you to?
It would have been the same for you in the end.”
“The same for me, and the same for them,” returned Hazel crisply. “They
wouldn’t have liked it any better ten years hence--at least mother
wouldn’t. I believe daddy’s reconciled already. Mother wants me to be
happy, but in _her_ way.”
“Are you really happy, when you know she is miserable?” spoke Rosamund
with more curiosity than compassion. Hazel coloured, but faced her
cousin with unflinching honesty.
“Yes,” she said, “I am. It’s of no use to pretend, Rosamund. I am
happier than I have ever been in my life. Of course, I should have
preferred it if everything had been straightforward, and there hadn’t
been all this fuss, and having to extort a consent--but it would have
been just the same if they hadn’t given it. Do you know, that’s the
pathos of it, to my mind--they couldn’t do anything. Guy and I would
have married without their consent, just as much as with it.”
“He asked you to, I suppose,” said Rosamund, as though stating a fact.
Hazel pushed her curling tawny hair from her forehead.
“He asked me if I would, if it came to that, and of course I said yes.
But we both knew it wouldn’t come to that, and that mother would have
to give in. I used to think that if one’s parents forbade a thing, it
became impossible _ipso facto_, but it doesn’t. _They just can’t do
anything at all._”
To Rosamund, Hazel had summed up the situation in that sentence.
They could not do anything at all.
The wedding took place quietly at Porthlew, and they said good-bye to
Hazel, radiant-eyed, and clinging in an unwonted embrace to her father
at the last moment.
Then she drove away with her husband, and Miss Blandflower, in a piping
soprano, remarked to Rosamund:
“It’s like a death in a house, isn’t it? But we must all try and take
her place, now.”
The suggestion drove Frederick, snarling disgustedly, into the study.
Frances went quietly to put away some of the litter in Hazel’s room,
while Rosamund, feeling herself useless and in the way, yet hung
helplessly in the vicinity of Nina Severing, who had remained with
Bertha in the drawing-room after the departure of the few guests.
But no word of Morris reached her.
Nina was murmuring consolation to her friend who, for once inactive,
sat gazing heavily into the fire.
“After all, dearest, the young birds will fly out of the old nest and
leave it desolate. It’s nature.”
Bertha groaned.
“It’s not the selfish loss to myself that I mind, Nina, but the thing
she’s done. If I were giving her to some simple, honest boy of her own
age, how gladly I’d see her go. We mothers don’t ask more than that,
after all--just to see the children happy.”
“I know,” breathed Mrs. Severing. “It’s all one lives for.”
“I’ve no plans or wishes for myself--it’s all for them,” muttered
Bertha disjointedly. “What else has one to care about--an old
gargoyle....”
Nina straightened herself slightly.
“‘Having outlived hope, fear, desire....’” she quoted softly, at the
same time turning her long neck so that the firelight fell upon her
burnished hair and exquisite, appealing profile.
“A man she’s only known a few months,” pursued Bertha bitterly. “And
she’ll disobey her parents, the mother who’s loved and guarded and
cherished her all her life, and break their hearts, for his sake.”
“God grant the poor child may not regret it bitterly one day,” breathed
Nina piously.
There was a long pause.
“Well!” said Bertha, and slowly stood up. “There’s a lot to be done.”
“Do let me help you, dearest.”
“Thanks, Nina, if you would. The girls are somewhere, I suppose.”
“Ah, they’ll be a comfort to you, I hope. They who owe you even more
than Hazel does, if possible.”
“One does what one can. It seems to me that it’s all give, give, give
on our side, and take, take, take on theirs. I feel rather like an
unfortunate pelican feeding its young, sometimes.”
With the words, and the curt laugh that dismissed them, Bertha
Tregaskis regained possession of herself.