Justin Cloud and Robin Gedge got their commissions on the same day. But
while Robin appeared in Brackenhurst every few weeks, bronzed and
broadened, to bewail his stagnancy, Justin, by luck o’war, or, as Robin
jealously declared, by pulling wires, was out in France and having
parcels sent to him before Brackenhurst had set up its first Belgian
Committee. Laura, going in to tea with Mrs. Cloud on her way home from
the Supply Depôt in the vicarage barn, would sometimes see the parcels
being done up; but she was never asked to help. That was the only
difference that Mrs. Cloud ever made in her treatment of Laura. But for
that circumstance Laura would have said that she knew nothing of that
summer morning in another life. She seldom spoke of Justin, but when she
did, it was as gently and openly as usual. Yet that she should not know
all that had happened seemed incredible.... Justin told his mother
everything ... and surely, if she knew——Did she know?...
The uncertainty made Mrs. Cloud’s unfailing kindness hard to bear.
But it was typical of the girl and the woman alike that they never
dreamed of approaching the subject in their almost daily intercourse. If
either had been less occupied it is probable that their common anxiety
might have loosened at least Laura’s tongue. But Mrs. Cloud was at the
head of every good work in the village and Laura, as the year wore to an
end, had her hands full at home. For Gran’papa, testily intolerant of
cinnamon or sympathy, packing off his daughter to her depôt, submitting
grudgingly to his granddaughter’s ministrations, Gran’papa, denying it
with every difficult breath, fell ill. “Nothing serious, I hope, Miss
Valentine?” “No—only a cold. Every one catches cold in winter time.
Gran’papa has a cold.”
But the wet bitter weather of that first winter of war was a harvester
who reaped in the camps and training grounds on behalf of death himself,
more bloodily busy elsewhere—a harvester whose sickle was chill and his
reaping hook pneumonia—a busy harvester who yet had time to go gleaning
in the bare homes of the land for such bent and broken straws as had
been left behind.
Looking back, looking down the civilian death lists for which nobody has
had time these three long years, you see how abnormally the old and the
half-old suffered. Death after death in the ’sixties and early
’seventies—’Quite suddenly’—’After a short illness’—it comes over and
over again. You think of them as old limpets, wrenched from their rocks
of ages, flung, too old to learn to cling again, into the sea of this
war. And then, fastening on their shocked feebleness—the cold.
In Brackenhurst alone there were more deaths in that first autumn than
in all the two years before.
Old Mrs. Whittle was the first to succumb—old Mrs. Whittle, the
Valentines’ half bed-ridden pensioner who lived in one room at the top
of rickety stairs, which Wilfred and James had never been induced to
climb when they went with Laura and Nurse on Sunday afternoons to carry
Mrs. Whittle beef-tea and sixpences. It always struck Laura as so unfair
that because of their easy blubberings they should be allowed to wait at
the foot of those witch-cottage stairs, while she, as frightened as they
of the bright eyes and the hoarse whisper and the movements in the
crimson shawl, always found herself following Nurse without a protest
into the tiny, rank room. Yet, though she did not know it, it had not
been Nurse, but her own innate fear of causing pain, that had forced her
steps. More insistent than the fear of Mrs. Whittle had been the fear of
hurting Mrs. Whittle’s feelings. She had stolidly endured the dim
airlessness, the fire that spat startlingly, the bedclothes-smell, and
sometimes—setting her teeth—a kiss from Mrs. Whittle, rather then hurt
the feelings of Mrs. Whittle who had rheumatics.
“Bless everybody, and Justin, and give Mother my dear love, and make
Mrs. Whittle quite well,” had run, in the dim years, her nightly
petition.
Laura hated pain.
And now Mrs. Whittle was dead, needing neither sixpences nor Sunday
visits any more from a grown-up Laura.
Old Jackson, digging her water-logged grave, in an absent son’s stead,
shivered and coughed in the keen wind and followed her in a week. Two
children from Laura’s Sunday-school fell sick of neglected colds and the
listless, pining mother, in her dyed mourning, let Laura and the doctor
do as they pleased. The long lists lengthened in the church porch and
for a month there had been no news of Justin, not even the second-hand,
meagre comfort, the ‘I am quite well’ of a field-postcard, filtering
through to her by way of Mrs. Cloud. She had been glad to have her hands
full. It helped to help people.... And the news got worse and worse.
And then Gran’papa had caught cold.
Aunt Adela was inclined to blame Papa. Papa had insisted on going—at his
age!—all the way to the station last Sunday, to get a paper for
Laura—he, who so strongly disapproved of Sunday papers. And all because
Laura, at lunch, before she hurried off to those wretched children, had
said something about wishing for a Sunday delivery! Papa was very
difficult to manage. She had spoken to Laura seriously about it on her
return. Between them they might, another time, circumvent easily enough
an obstinate old man—for his own good, of course. But Laura, who was a
peculiar girl in some ways, had merely stared at her aunt with those
blank, black eyes, had merely said with a ridiculous catch in her voice—
“Do you mean to say that Gran’papa——” And then, breaking off in that
irritating way of hers, had gone up without another word to Papa’s room.
Had stayed there till supper-time—had not even come down to say how do
you do to the rector—had spent every spare minute of her time there
since. Well—she would catch Papa’s cold for a certainty, and then she
would see!
But Laura did not catch Gran’papa’s cold. It was not one of his usual
colds, the angry, vigorous, resentful colds of his healthy old age, but
a feverish indisposition, a certain fading and shrinking of body that
accompanied a glittering, fitful, mental activity. The change in him was
so marked, so swift, that at the end of the week Laura looked back to
the Gran’papa of last Sunday as to a memory, as to a stranger.
He would not go to bed, but sat crouched over the fire in the armchair
that Laura had never before realized was so much too big for Gran’papa.
She, when she could, sat with him, eternally knitting socks for the army
that must always be to her but a multiplication of Justin, thinking of
him and herself, and now, with new, bewildered thoughts, of Gran’papa.
She had been touched, almost beyond her strength, by that thought of his
for her—by the sight of the paper in Gran’papa’s shaking hand, handed to
her with a gesture that he could not, even then, prevent from being
gingerly. The knowledge that he had guessed something, that he had been
aware of the anxiety that showed itself in her feverish lust for news,
that he, behind his reserves and absorptions, had watched her, felt for
her—made her want to cry. She could be Spartan, but of necessity, not
from choice. There was nothing of the Emily Brontë in her nature: she
took as generously as she gave. She had strength and pride, but though
she did without it, she never pretended that sympathy would not have
been sweet. In those days, though she did not know it, though she had
nearly forgotten her, she wanted her mother.
Gran’papa’s look at her as she came to him that Sunday, his silence, his
awkward thrust of the rag he abhorred into her hand, did more than touch
her—it strengthened her. She, to whom kith and kin had never meant much,
had felt for the first time the comfort of the blood-tie, of the
clan-love that is independent of all accidents of personality or desert.
Gran’papa might not love Laura, but she realized at last how faithfully
he loved his granddaughter.
She had taken the paper and thanked him, and settling herself opposite
him in her grandmother’s chair, had sat quietly reading the aching
headlines. And in the silence that followed she had felt, through all
her urgent anxiety, how the icy crust under which the quiet river of
their mutual affection had always flowed imprisoned, was melting at
last. They made no demonstration. It was not in his nature, even in its
strength, and now he was old, enfeebled; while she had been so drilled
by the necessities of her life with Justin that she wore repression,
like a dress, laced over her natural impulsiveness; nevertheless they
had eased each other. For the first time in her life she was not on her
best behaviour with him: her little ways, the occasional mannerisms, he
passed over in silence, or perhaps, because she was at her entire ease,
they occurred no longer.
She nursed him, in as far as he would allow it, in her busy aunt’s
stead; for his cold ran no normal course: a spell of sunshine did not
brisken him: he coughed and faded.
After a paroxysm—it was distressing to see him—he would lie exhausted in
his chair, and sometimes wander a little or, rather, break into speech
that was but drifting and idle thought. And Laura, listening, half
guiltily, as one eavesdropping, marvelled how little she knew, and yet
she had thought she knew, Gran’papa.
He talked to her, of his schooldays, of his youth, of mild adventures
before he married. But they all led in the end, she noticed, to
Grandmamma, whom she remembered vaguely as a sweet voice and a smile, in
a pale-brown camel’s-hair shawl.
He would speak of her, watching Laura’s face and her beautiful, busy
hands.
“You don’t remember your grandmamma, of course?”
“You are very like your grandmamma.”
“You are very like my wife.”
And once he called her “Anne.”
Yet another side to Gran’papa! Laura, as she dusted the drawing-room,
would find herself pausing thoughtfully, wasting long minutes, before
the faded crayon on the bamboo easel. The youthful, slim-waisted man,
with the ringlets and Roman nose and serious eyes, who reminded her of
_David Copperfield_ and the Duke of Wellington, was, not nominally but
really, Gran’papa: that was the strange part of it. Gran’papa, behind
his shell of white hair, and trembling hands, and hectorings, and
fidgetiness, was—not a habit, not an institution—but a man.... There was
a closer tie between them than the accident of kinship: they were knit
by the common experience of their common humanity.... He was a man and
she was a woman.... He knew—incredible that Gran’papa should know—all
that she knew.... He had loved ‘Anne,’ who was her little old dead
grandmother.... She remembered hints of Aunt Adela—scraps of stories
about a courtship that had not been all plain sailing.... He, Gran’papa
upstairs, knew then what pain meant—knew as well as Laura the sickness
of uncertainty ... the unnerving hopes and fears ... knew how like a
stone one’s heart could lie in one’s breast.
She remembered again—it had been so forgotten—the day Grandmamma died.
Gran’papa had sat all the morning in the dining-room, instead of in his
room, which made it strange enough. Gran’papa—cold, aloof Gran’papa—had
been stranger still. He had sat bowed over the fire, with his big silk
handkerchief in his hand. With a sort of horror Laura had watched him,
had seen that he was crying. He had looked up at her then and had
said—she remembered his voice and his words—“Forty years—forty years—”
over and over again. And then kindly, as if he knew she were
frightened—“You’ve never seen a man cry, have you, child?” And Aunt
Adela had said “Papa!” in a queer, warning voice.
That was all she remembered. But the words would not leave her as she
rubbed the shining chair legs and pounded ostentatiously up and down the
key-board, to assure Aunt Adela, if Aunt Adela should be on the alert,
that she was dusting properly.
“A man”—not “Your grandfather.”... “A man”.... “My wife”....
So Gran’papa thought of himself as a man still.... He was a man.... The
years they had passed on earth, eighteen or eighty, could alter their
bodies, but not their souls.... Gran’papa’s soul—if she win through this
barrier of his old and dying body to it—was as young as hers.... And
hers as old as his.... A soul hadn’t any age ... or reckoned its age,
not by years, but by wisdom, more or less, that its years had taught
it.... And so—why shouldn’t they talk to each other? Gran’papa might
help her.... She might ease Gran’papa.... For so long he had had no one
to whom to tell his thoughts....
She would come up thoughtfully after her housework to spend the hour
before lunch with him, to listen or to share his silence and to talk to
him sometimes in her turn, jerkily, by fits and starts. She never knew
how much he heard.
And then one day, quite suddenly, he took out his big pocket-book and
showed her, wrapped in tissue, a strand of hair, a long coil that shone
like old gold in the winter sunshine.
“She had beautiful hair,” said Gran’papa.
Laura let it shower through her fingers. It was as soft and fine as her
own. But Grandmamma’s hair—she could just remember—had been silver, not
gold.... Queer.... Life was queer....
She watched him coil and fold and put away again the golden hair.
“Was Grandmamma—? Did Grandmamma—? Did you and Grandmamma—ever get angry
with each other?” she asked him abruptly.
Gran’papa was staring at the fire. She knew by the turn of his head that
he had heard her, but he made no answer.
They were silent for a time, each seeing what they chose in the red and
black grotesques of the coal.
“She had the gentlest face,” said Gran’papa at last, his lips scarcely
moving. “Serene. Patient. But I have known her—firm.”
Laura nodded softly.
“He is, too——”
There was a shadow of a smile on Gran’papa’s face, the smile we keep for
our thoughts and our ghosts.
“It never lasted long,” said Gran’papa. “Only once—before I married
her.” He was silent again.
“It lasts—with Justin,” said Laura. And then—“Gran’papa—Justin is angry
with me. We are not engaged any more.”
“It was my fault, I do believe,” said Gran’papa to the fire.
“Oh, it was my fault,” said Laura. “I think I was mad.”
She sat silent. Her thoughts were a bitter sea. Its winds and waves
tossed her hither and thither.
Her words came again mechanically, as if she did not know that she was
speaking, like a child learning lessons it its sleep.
“If I could only tell him! If I could only make him see! I mayn’t even
write to him. He’s fighting. Any minute may kill him. Mrs. Cloud and
Rhoda and Lucy—they all write to him. And I mayn’t.”
“Anne wrote to me,” said Gran’papa.
“He’d sneer. He’d tear it up. He’d say ‘What’s up now? She might have
the decency to leave me alone.’ Can’t you hear him saying it? He doesn’t
want me. Why should he, for that matter?” Her fingers locked and relaxed
and interlocked again. “If I could only make him understand,” said
Laura. “If he dies——”
“Anne died,” said Gran’papa.
“Gran’papa,” Laura touched his sleeve, “it’s such misery.”
“Anne wrote to me,” repeated Gran’papa.
She moved restlessly.
“I can’t. I’ve no right any more.”
She stared across at him, questioning him with tired young eyes.
“Gran’papa—why is it? Why have we got to be so awfully unhappy?”
He muttered and smiled to himself, half hearing.
“_The time—out of joint_—that’s it—_out of joint_. In my young
days—April showers in April—May flowers in May. Anne didn’t want a
vote.”
“There was the Crimea. I suppose there were women—just the
same—widows—and lovers——”
He drummed on the arm of his chair.
“_Something is rotten in the state of Denmark._ Do you ever read
Shakespeare, my dear? I advise all young people——The young people have
turned the world upside down.” He shivered. “It’s cold.”
She got up quietly and shut the window, and sat down again pulling her
chair a little nearer to him.
“Rain and soft weather and a little sun,” he rambled. “Winter? _We_ used
to skate. But now-a-days——” He cleared his throat. His eye brightened.
He was the old Gran’papa, declaiming—
“_The seasons alter, hoar-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose—the crimson rose_——”
His voice faded. He peered at her.
“You should go for a walk. White cheeks! White cheeks!” Then—“What’s the
date?”
“Tuesday, Gran’papa.”
“Tut—the month?”
“December.”
“Ah, it fits—it always fits—
_And on old Hyem’s thin and icy crown_—
Read him! Read him! There’s a man! And died at fifty—thirty years too
young to know old Hyem’s ways. But _he_ knew!” He chuckled. “I’d like to
have met him,” said Gran’papa condescendingly.
He stared across at his granddaughter, lost in her own thoughts. His
expression changed. He leaned forward, touching her hot, locked hands
with his cold, papery fingers.
“These things pass,” said Gran’papa.
He shivered again and glanced over his shoulder.
“Very cold. The window——”
Laura roused herself.
“It’s shut, Gran’papa. But I’ll make up the fire.” She bent blindly over
the dim hearth.
But Gran’papa, with a fretful sigh, got up shakily out of his chair. He
was sure the window was open. Then he remembered his birds, clustering
on the roof of the drawing-room below, and that he had not fed them. His
fingers rattled on the pane as he threw up the sash. Very cold.... The
wind slid in like a snake, striking at Gran’papa, but though he shivered
he threw out the crumbs and stood watching the instant, twittering
turmoil, with a glance now and then at the empty cage, that swung,
grazing his skull-cap, overhead. He missed his bird.... Its notes ...
particularly fine ... a strain of bullfinch ... inclined to be shrill,
of course ... but a wonderful ear ... indeed he had had to cover the
cage when he played on his fiddle for any length of time.... It had
been—Gran’papa smiled—jealous, positively jealous, of his fiddle.... He
thought he might get out his fiddle. He must not let his fingers get
stiff....
What was that?...
He turned sharply, holding up his finger. Absurd, of course, but he had
thought, for a moment, that he heard at his ear the quick ruffling of
feathers, the pretty, questioning twitter, that had always been the
prelude to full-throated, indignant song.... The cage——
The cage of course was empty.
Some bird outside.... He had left the window open.... He tried, in a
childish pet against the birds who had tricked his ear, to push down the
sash again, but it was stiff and heavy—suddenly too stiff and heavy for
Gran’papa.
He called peevishly——
“Laura!”
But she was adjusting the fire-irons and did not hear.
He left it open and turned back again into the room. He was fumbling
with his fiddle-case when Laura straightened herself, and with a smile
and a show of blackened fingers, slipped out of the room.
“Come back,” muttered Gran’papa.
She meant to come back when she had washed her hands; but Aunt
Adela waylaid her, discovered her using the basin in her
room—inconsiderate—making fresh work—when there was the bathroom!
Laura, undeniably in the wrong, had, by all unwritten rules,
necessarily to pay forfeit to Aunt Adela, to attend without
protest to a criticism of her untidy room, to hang up skirts under
Aunt Adela’s eye, to dust a mantelpiece and re-adjust ornaments to
the high-pitched ripple of Aunt Adela’s voice, and to respond
cheerfully in the infrequent pauses.
“Yes, Auntie. Oh, of course. Yes—I think you’re right.”
That, she thought, was all Aunt Adela wanted.... She hated having her
room overhauled.... But, after all, what did it matter—what did anything
matter now-a-days, with Justin away at the front ... fighting?...
She wondered if he had liked his parcel....
She wondered if he were still alive....
“What did you say, Auntie? Oh, I see. Oh—perfectly disgraceful—I should
give her notice——”
She pushed back her hair. Her back ached. She felt very tired. She
wanted to get back to Gran’papa. She could hear the thin scrape of his
bow, and the fiddle’s stray uncertain notes as he tuned it. And then,
suddenly, swiftly, joyously, it broke into the thrice-familiar tune—
_Duncan Gray cam’ here to woo,
Ha, ha, the wooing o’t,
On blythe yule night when we were fou,
Ha, ha, the wooing o’t._
She knew the words by heart, in the unintelligent fashion in which one
knows the words of a song. But today they caught her ear, rang in her
mind to the staccato of the fiddle, significant, suggestive.
She had often wondered that it should be such a favourite tune with
Gran’papa. Today she knew why. The music, like strong sunlight shining
on a palimpsest, revealed beneath her mind’s modernity an older picture,
faint and faded, of a shadowy, gallant young Gran’papa, quarrelling
deliciously, a fiddle under his chin, with a slim girl who was called
Anne (like _Anne_, the ‘elegant little woman’ in _Persuasion_) and sat
at a pianoforte fingering out the accompaniment of an old song. She had
a sweet voice and wore a dress of lavender print, but her smooth golden
hair, as the impression faded again, was not golden at all, but red, a
dull, beautiful red, matching exactly, as Laura was aware, with the
beech leaves under which she sat as she bickered with Justin and made it
up again, one spring, not sixty springs, ago.
“Laura—you’ve shut your new skirt in the cupboard door! You never look.”
“Sorry, Auntie.”
“Well, as I was saying—I went down to the kitchen directly after
breakfast and I said——”
Gran’papa had been playing that day too. They could see him at his
window, sawing vigorously, from where they sat.... Justin had made one
of his comical remarks about it.... It seemed such ages ago, now—that
spring.... It had been the last of the happy times.... It was soon after
that, that things began to go wrong ... badly wrong.... Her thoughts
roamed achingly over all the trivial, tragical wrong that she and Justin
had done each other in the eternity that was not two years—not two
years.... Gran’papa had sixty years to retrace. Her thoughts hovered
over Gran’papa awhile and then back again to Justin. He was hard.... She
didn’t think she could be so cruel to her worst enemy as Justin was to
her.... Not a word.... Not a message.... And not to want a word!... Yet
he was essentially a kindly man. It was a queer lack of imagination, she
supposed.... She supposed he never thought of her at all.... It was
just—over—for him.... It never occurred to him that she loved him still
... that she lived in hell.... But it wasn’t that he wouldn’t have cared
if he could have understood, she told herself in sudden passionate
defence of him. He couldn’t help it—it was the way he was made....
Well—she had known all that.... That was why she had done what she had
done. She had staked all she had ... failed ... so she must pay.... Yet
such a price for birds’ eggs! Birds’ eggs! Her mouth twisted
sardonically. If it had happened to any one else—how Justin would have
laughed ... how they would have talked it over! She could hear him,
laying down the law about it.... She missed that most of all—that dear,
absurd solemnity of his as he laid down the law to her.... She stood,
remembering, hardening her eyes and her heart against the tears she
despised. How she missed him ... how unspeakably she missed him....
What a fool she had been.... What was the use of scruples.... Why hadn’t
she kept what she had?... She might have been married to him at that
moment.... Even if he didn’t love her—half a loaf was better than no
bread.... Who was she to have imagined herself his keeper?... He knew
his own mind.... He had asked her to marry him....
_Ha, ha, the wooing o’t._
squeaked the violin.
“Did you ever hear of such a thing? Well—I said to her, quite quietly,
you know, but with dignity—I said to her: ‘I think, Ellen, the time has
come to make a change.’ Simply that. It was quite enough. She apologized
at once.”
Laura murmured congratulations. She wished Aunt Adela would be merciful
enough to stop talking, or at any rate needing answers.... It was so
difficult to think of the right answers with that insistent tune ringing
in one’s ears....
It wavered and sank to a sigh as she listened against her will—
_Time and chance are but a tide;
Ha, ha, the wooing o’t;
Slighted love is sair to bide_——
It slackened and jarred as Gran’papa’s hand—she knew that pathetic,
involuntary relaxation of his stiff fingers—mumbled the strings. But the
half learnt words ran on in her head, perverted into absurd
appositeness—
_She may gae to—France for me!_
But it was Justin who had gone to France.... They were killing three
hundred men a day in France—in the trenches ... where Justin was....
For long minutes her terrible phantasy made it all very clear to her,
while the tune jangled on again to its happy ending—
_Now they’re crouse and canty baith_——
and stopped.
She waited for the last line, impatiently, as for release, as for the
breaking of a spell; but there came no sound—only a sudden silence that
was louder than any sound. She roused at it, pitifully chiding herself
for the selfishness of her misery and, regardless of Aunt Adela, bundled
the rest of her clothes into the wardrobe and hurried out of the room.
Poor old Gran’papa ... to leave him so long alone.... A string or
something must have snapped.... She must run down and see, and get him a
new one ... the dresser drawers were so heavy for him to pull out....
She ran down the stairs in her swift, noiseless fashion and tapped at
his door, and tapped again, and then, with a sudden catching of breath,
opened it.
She had been right: something had snapped indeed. A cord—a silver cord
had been loosed; but it was not the G string of the little old fiddle.
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