Last belated figure in that grouping round my uncle’s deathbed is my
aunt. When it was beyond all hope that my uncle could live I threw
aside whatever concealment remained to us and telegraphed directly to
her. But she came too late to see him living. She saw him calm and
still, strangely unlike his habitual garrulous animation, an unfamiliar
inflexibility.
“It isn’t like him,” she whispered, awed by this alien dignity.
I remember her chiefly as she talked and wept upon the bridge below the
old castle. We had got rid of some amateurish reporters from Biarritz,
and had walked together in the hot morning sunshine down through Port
Luzon. There, for a time, we stood leaning on the parapet of the bridge
and surveying the distant peeks, the rich blue masses of the Pyrenees.
For a long time we said nothing, and then she began talking.
“Life’s a rum Go, George!” she began. “Who would have thought, when I
used to darn your stockings at old Wimblehurst, that this would be the
end of the story? It seems far away now—that little shop, his and my
first home. The glow of the bottles, the big coloured bottles! Do you
remember how the light shone on the mahogany drawers? The little gilt
letters! _Ol Amjig_, and _S’nap!_ I can remember it all—bright and
shining—like a Dutch picture. Real! And yesterday. And here we are in a
dream. You a man—and me an old woman, George. And poor little Teddy,
who used to rush about and talk—making that noise he did—Oh!”
She choked, and the tears flowed unrestrained. She wept, and I was glad
to see her weeping.
She stood leaning over the bridge; her tear-wet handkerchief gripped in
her clenched hand.
“Just an hour in the old shop again—and him talking. Before things got
done. Before they got hold of him. And fooled him.
“Men oughtn’t to be so tempted with business and things....
“They didn’t hurt him, George?” she asked suddenly.
For a moment I was puzzled.
“Here, I mean,” she said.
“No,” I lied stoutly, suppressing the memory of that foolish injection
needle I had caught the young doctor using.
“I wonder, George, if they’ll let him talk in Heaven....”
She faced me. “Oh! George, dear, my heart aches, and I don’t know what
I say and do. Give me your arm to lean on—it’s good to have you, dear,
and lean upon you.... Yes, I know you care for me. That’s why I’m
talking. We’ve always loved one another, and never said anything about
it, and you understand, and I understand. But my heart’s torn to pieces
by this, torn to rags, and things drop out I’ve kept in it. It’s true
he wasn’t a husband much for me at the last. But he was my child,
George, he was my child and all my children, my silly child, and life
has knocked him about for me, and I’ve never had a say in the matter;
never a say; it’s puffed him up and smashed him—like an old bag—under
my eyes. I was clever enough to see it, and not clever enough to
prevent it, and all I could do was to jeer. I’ve had to make what I
could of it. Like most people. Like most of us.... But it wasn’t fair,
George. It wasn’t fair. Life and Death—great serious things—why
couldn’t they leave him alone, and his lies and ways? If _we_ could see
the lightness of it—
“Why couldn’t they leave him alone?” she repeated in a whisper as we
went towards the inn.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
LOVE AMONG THE WRECKAGE
I
When I came back I found that my share in the escape and death of my
uncle had made me for a time a notorious and even popular character.
For two weeks I was kept in London “facing the music,” as he would have
said, and making things easy for my aunt, and I still marvel at the
consideration with which the world treated me. For now it was open and
manifest that I and my uncle were no more than specimens of a modern
species of brigand, wasting the savings of the public out of the sheer
wantonness of enterprise. I think that in a way, his death produced a
reaction in my favour and my flight, of which some particulars now
appeared stuck in the popular imagination. It seemed a more daring and
difficult feat than it was, and I couldn’t very well write to the
papers to sustain my private estimate. There can be little doubt that
men infinitely prefer the appearance of dash and enterprise to simple
honesty. No one believed I was not an arch plotter in his financing.
Yet they favoured me. I even got permission from the trustee to occupy
my chalet for a fortnight while I cleared up the mass of papers,
calculations, notes of work, drawings and the like, that I left in
disorder when I started on that impulsive raid upon the Mordet quap
heaps.
I was there alone. I got work for Cothope with the Ilchesters, for whom
I now build these destroyers. They wanted him at once, and he was short
of money, so I let him go and managed very philosophically by myself.
But I found it hard to fix my attention on aeronautics, I had been away
from the work for a full half-year and more, a half-year crowded with
intense disconcerting things. For a time my brain refused these fine
problems of balance and adjustment altogether; it wanted to think about
my uncle’s dropping jaw, my aunt’s reluctant tears, about dead negroes
and pestilential swamps, about the evident realities of cruelty and
pain, about life and death. Moreover, it was weary with the frightful
pile of figures and documents at the Hardingham, a task to which this
raid to Lady Grove was simply an interlude. And there was Beatrice.
On the second morning, as I sat out upon the veranda recalling memories
and striving in vain to attend to some too succinct pencil notes of
Cothope’s, Beatrice rode up suddenly from behind the pavilion, and
pulled rein and became still; Beatrice, a little flushed from riding
and sitting on a big black horse.