yourself to drive her away," he said. "Of course I don't defend what she
did. She had a great chance with Harry, and she lost it. But it is
hard, I suppose, for mothers to lose their sons after they have been so
much to them. There is some excuse for her."
"I don't think there's any," she replied at once. "And as for its being
hard on mothers, it's only that kind of mother--foolish and sentimental
and selfish--who puts herself into rivalry with the other kind of love,
when the time comes for it. The love of a child is very sweet, but it
can't last like that much beyond childhood. She'd had it all. She's had
it to the full. Nobody tried to deprive her of it, though of course she
accuses me of trying to do so. I might have done. I shouldn't have
wearied Harry with my love as she has wearied him. I should have been
less exigent, less selfish, controlled myself more. She doesn't know,
even now, and I shan't take the trouble to tell her, that she doesn't
love him nearly as much as she thinks she does. If it weren't for her
jealousy she would be quite content to live her own life chiefly apart
from him, now he is grown up, and no longer a child to be petted, and to
return petting. She has lived her foolish shallow life apart for the
last two years, and she has let it be known that she thinks herself
raised in living it. Oh, you needn't worry yourself about Charlotte.
She hasn't got the depth to feel anything for long."
*CHAPTER XXVII*
*LADY BRENT AND VIOLA*
Lady Brent wondered, when Mrs. Clark opened the door to her at Bastian's
lodgings, how much was known at Royd of what had already happened in
this house. If Mrs. Clark had not discovered who Harry was, which seemed
unlikely, and had not seen Mrs. Brent, she knew well enough whom she was
admitting now. It was not made plain that she expected the visit, but
she expressed no surprise at it, and evidently expected to be
recognized. Lady Brent said a few words to her about her sister at
Royd, as she was being conducted up the stairs. Everything would come
into the light now, and it was much better so.
Viola was alone in the sitting-room. It had been made very tidy, and
was filled with flowers. The great red roses might have been Harry's
gift to her. The little row of vellum-bound books above the table in
her corner certainly were, for Wilbraham had procured them to his order.
Viola stood by the middle table as they entered. She looked very young
and very beautiful--all the more beautiful because of the colour that
was flooding her delicate skin, and the half-alarmed look in her dark
eyes.
Lady Brent waited until the door was shut behind her, searching her with
her eyes, and then went forward and kissed her. Viola did not seem to
have expected this. She was confused, and there was moisture in her
eyes as she greeted Wilbraham, though she smiled at him.
Wilbraham spoke first. "You've had Lady Brent's telegram," he said.
"And now she's come herself. Everything is all right, Viola."
Her tears fell. "If Harry loves you, my dear, that's enough for me,"
said Lady Brent, taking her hand.
"And you can hardly be blamed for loving him," said Wilbraham. "We all
love him. I don't know why, but we do."
She laughed, as she was meant to do, and dried her tears. "I've had a
telegram from him," she said. "He sent you his dear love."
Lady Brent showed her pleasure. "I wish he'd told me sooner," she said.
"You might have been with him at Royd."
"We've all been making a mistake, Viola," said Wilbraham. "I suppose
I'm most to blame, because I've had this lady under observation for a
good many years, and might have known that nothing so important as you
could have escaped her."
He wanted to keep the interview on a light key, at least until talk
should flow between them. They had both been through a good deal during
the last few days, but the trouble was ended now, and the sooner it
could be forgotten the better.
Lady Brent and Viola were sitting side by side on the sofa. Lady Brent
was not quite ready for the lighter note. "You know that Harry's
bringing up was different from that of other boys," she said. "It was
owing to me that it was so, and though I tried to avoid the appearance
of dominating him, I could hardly escape being looked upon as a person
who might take a decisive line either with him or against him. But I
can say very truly that my guiding rule was love for him. I love Harry
very much, and I have trusted him too. I wouldn't have stood out
against him in anything that he had a right to decide for himself."
"I'm afraid it was I at first who wanted to keep our secret to
ourselves," Viola said. "Or at least perhaps not quite at first, for
then we didn't think about it; but when we first found out that we loved
one another. I think he would have told you then, but I knew more about
the world than he did, and I didn't think that you would want us to go
on loving one another. Afterwards I did what he wanted."
"We all do what Harry wants," said Wilbraham. "He has that sort of way
with him. I've done it myself, when I ought to have stood out."
"Harry is very happy now," said Viola. "He sent me a long telegram.
Would you like to see it?"
"No," said Lady Brent, marking the motion she made with her hand, which
showed the warm nest in which Harry's telegram was reposing. "Keep it
for yourself. I want to ask you if you'd like to come down to Royd now,
or wait till Harry can bring you. You will have a warm welcome
whichever you like to do. He might like to know you are there."
"I expect the claims of the government service will have to come first,
unreasonable as it may appear," said Wilbraham, marking her slight
hesitation. "I know they have to with me."
"I couldn't get away just now," she said. "And in August I was going
away for a fortnight with father--if Harry is all right."
That was what lay like a shadow over the brightness brought by the
recognition of her. The war was to be finished by that hoarded effort
for which those who knew were breathlessly waiting. But the hoard was
chiefly of men, and much of it must be scattered if success was to be
gained by it.
Lady Brent made no pretence of taking it anything but seriously. "I
have friends at the War Office," she said. "We should get news at Royd
as soon as in London, perhaps sooner." She made no allusion to the
other reason that Viola had given. How did Harry regard Bastian? She
had talked that over with Wilbraham. They did not know even if he had
met him. He was not to be asked to Royd until Harry gave the word.
Viola still seemed to be hesitating, and Lady Brent took her hesitation
to mean that she would rather not come to Royd without Harry, and
accepted it at once. She talked to her about Harry, and presently Viola
was talking about him too, filling her hungry ears with news of the
times at which she had missed him.
Viola knew that he had been wounded, though he had kept it from her at
the time. "He was very ill after the second wound," she said. "A man
who was with him wrote to me when he couldn't, and I got a telegram to
say he was better before I got the letter, so I wasn't so unhappy as I
might have been. I don't think he would have got through that if he
hadn't been so splendidly strong and young, and hadn't been so devotedly
nursed. All the men he was with loved him, and this one never left
him."
Lady Brent would not let it be seen how much this news of his past
danger moved her. Here was a thing for which none of her searching
thoughts had prepared her. "He has told us scarcely anything of what
has been happening to him," she said. "It seemed to lie upon him
heavily."
"It doesn't now," said Viola. "Being at Royd has brought him back. He
has told me all about Jane and Sidney. Do you think I might write to
Jane now, and tell her about us?"
Lady Brent was struck by her entire absence of jealousy. She might have
felt sad that the healing process had not been all her own work. It
showed how unselfishly she loved him, and how sure she was of him.
"Jane is a loyal little soul," she said. "She will be very pleased to
hear from you, I know." She smiled at Viola. "The one thing I never
quite gauged at its proper value was the companionship of young people.
I think now that he ought to have had more of it. But he seemed so
happy, with all his own pursuits."
"Oh, he was happy, I know," she said, eagerly. "It is wonderful to hear
him talk of his life at Royd. Perhaps I'm not altogether sorry I was
nearly the first, because I got it all. Harry isn't like anybody else
that ever lived. He's wonderful. He couldn't have been quite the same
if he hadn't been brought up always in that beautiful place, and left a
great deal to himself and the woods and the hills and the sea."
"I am glad you think of it like that," said Lady Brent. "But I have
been troubled by something he said to me when he first came home. His
upbringing has made him what he is, but there are many things it didn't
prepare him for. I think he was dreading going out again, as an
officer. He doesn't know other young men of his class. He is so
different from them, and they want everybody to be alike. With the men
of simpler lives that he has lived with and fought with he would have
made his way more easily."
"Yes," said Viola. "I was very sad at first to think of him thrown into
that rough hard life, but I needn't have been. And I think now he is
happier about the other."
She looked at Wilbraham, who said: "We've had it out, we three together.
It's not as serious as you have been thinking. You must remember that
he hasn't been with young men of his own sort at all; and in the ranks
of course he'd look at them from another angle altogether; and perhaps
he wouldn't like everything he saw about them--his officers, I mean.
That's all it is, really--a diffidence about how he's going to fit in
with them. But of course he'll make his way, with the other subalterns
and people, just as he did with the men. There's so much character in
him, as well as everything that young men do value in each other. I
think we persuaded him that he'd be a good deal better off than he has
been, didn't we, Viola?"
"Oh, he didn't want very much persuasion. He said he had been worrying
himself about things that didn't really matter. But he was so much
happier about everything when he came back from Royd. I don't think
even I could have done that--not alone. It would just have been we two,
keeping out of the world together. And poor Harry is in the world now."
"Yes," said Wilbraham, "and well fitted to cope with it. Of course it
came as a shock to him at first. It would have done that anyhow, and he
would have had to square his accounts with it by himself, before he
could have felt himself at his ease. We couldn't have helped him. If
you're still troubling yourself about having made mistakes, dear lady, I
don't think you need. You made very few. You forged the good steel in
him, but it had to be tempered."
This view of it comforted her. "We shall all be very happy now," she
said.
When they had talked a little longer, Bastian came in.
Lady Brent rose from the sofa, and they stood looking at one another for
an instant before Bastian shook hands with her, with a laugh. "I wasn't
prepared for this," he said. "Have you known who I was?"
"No," she said. "Your people thought you were on the other side of the
world."
"I meant them to," he said. "I'd no use for my people, after the way
they behaved to me. I took rather an absurd name, which was the last
they would recognize me under if they ever came across it, which seemed
unlikely."
Viola and Wilbraham were in bewilderment. "Lady Brent and I used to
know one another in the old days," Bastian said to Viola. "It shows how
I've cut myself off from that world that I didn't even know she was Lady
Brent." He turned to Lady Brent. "It did once occur to me, after we'd
been to Royd, to go to a Public Library and find out who you were, from
a book. But I forgot all about it. I'm a thorough Bohemian you see, and
more comfortable so."
His light tone did not please her. "If I had known who you were," she
said, "when you came to Royd, we should have met, and I should have
known Viola before."
His face changed as he looked quickly from her to Viola. "I'm glad
you've made friends now," he said. "All the same, I doubt if you would
have taken to her two years ago. I've got too far away from what I was
when you knew me."
"Well, it wouldn't have been you so much that we should have thought
about," said Wilbraham.
Bastian laughed. "You needn't worry about me now," he said to Lady
Brent. "I'll own that I have had ideas of fighting you when the time
came. I should rather have enjoyed it. I think quite as highly of
Viola as you do of your grandson, and I was going to tell you so.
But--well, I'm glad to know there's no necessity. I think you've
behaved well; but I remember that you always had the reputation of
behaving well. You'll get some reward for it in this instance, for you
know without my having to take the trouble to prove it to you that
Viola's birth is as good as her manners, and as for me I shall not
intrude upon you with my debased habits when I've once handed Viola
over."
"I used to like you as a little boy," said Lady Brent, calmly. "You
were mischievous and perverse, and afterwards gave a great deal of
trouble to your parents, who had not deserved it; but I don't suppose
your habits are so debased as you pretend they are. I shall be very
glad if you will bring Viola down to Royd when you take your holiday, if
she cares to come. I think Harry would like to know that she is there."
Then Viola accepted the invitation, and Bastian did not refuse it,
though he said that it was many years since he had stayed in a country
house, and he didn't think he should remember the rules.
Lady Brent told Wilbraham about him afterwards, what his family was and
where they came from, which was near her own girlhood's home. "I must
say that I am relieved," she said. "On her father's side her birth to
all intents and purposes is as good as Harry's, and on her mother's it
is no worse. It counts for something. I married before Michael--that is
his real name, and I suppose suggested the Angelo to his freakish
imagination--before he grew up, but I was always hearing stories of his
wildness and extravagance afterwards. There was never much real harm in
him, and there were some very good qualities to balance what harm there
was. His parents were over-strict with him, but they were fond of him,
and I think if he hadn't taken offence at their attitude towards his
marriage, in which of course they were amply justified, they would have
come round in time."
"It may have been better for him that they didn't," said Wilbraham.
"He's had to make his own living, which has probably been salutary for
him, and his responsibility to Viola has kept him fairly straight. I
wish he didn't drink quite so much whisky or smoke such vile tobacco,
but drink hasn't taken hold of him so much as I thought it had at one
time. If he had been anything like what you'd call a drunkard it would
have affected Viola more. What do you think of Viola?"
"I'm glad she came to Royd, and that Harry met her," she said.
*CHAPTER XXVIII*
*IN THE BALANCE*
So far Harry had been brought in his life's story.
The gods had showered their gifts upon him. They had given him strength
and beauty; a mind quick to receive their messages and eager to
interpret them; a heart that went out to others and drew others to it;
largesse of temporal favours, which they scatter here and there but are
apt to withhold from those whom they endow with their choicest gifts.
His manhood had been tried in a hard school, had been established and
wrought to finer issues by it. He had known great happiness, and also
suffering both of mind and body, without which happiness itself is but a
monochrome. He had entered the high courts of love, and worshipped in
them devoutly.
For what had they prepared him, on whom they had smiled, not so
uniformly as to soften his fine fibre, but as if they would have
cherished so rare an example of their handiwork, and led it towards
still higher desert of their bounties? Would they not watch over him
and preserve him from the ultimate dangers which youth was plunging to
meet at this point in the world's long history? Or is the world's
history itself a mere point in time, as it unrolls itself before their
unwearying eyes, so that it matters not what destruction may be wrought
in it, since there is infinity in which to forge new combinations of
flesh and brain and fortune?
To the women on the edge of the vortex in which manhood was fiercely
involved, but striving by prayers and tears to weigh down the balance of
life and death in favour of the men they loved, the gods may well have
appeared contemptuously indifferent. The very interests towards which
they had seemed to be working, the values they had impressed upon those
to whom they had given enlightenment to understand them, what were they
in the balance? It was impossible for mothers to look upon a life of no
more than twenty years as rounded and complete, however they might have
laboured to perfect it; or for young wives to balance the bliss of early
married love against a life-time of companionship and the sweet joint
care of children, and cry quits on the bargain. To them the happiness
of youth is an earnest of still still greater happiness to come; a youth
cut short is a youth wasted, however it may have fulfilled itself.
To Lady Brent, watching the news from the battlefields of the Somme, day
after day, week after weary week, it seemed as if all young life hung by
the balance of a hair. She felt the weight of it far more than during
the previous years, in which Harry had been far removed, and the details
of the fighting had not been brought before her with this daily deadly
insistence. To her, more than to most whose hopes were dependent upon
the chances of battle, did youth appear as a period of preparation
rather than of fruition. Her one steady object during the last twenty
years had been to work with the high gods so as to fulfil their purpose;
and she seemed to herself to have been blest in her strivings in such a
way as to give her the right to believe that her object had also been
theirs.
She had had her grave doubts, but now the weight of them had been
removed from her. Surely that had been because she had not tarried to
accept the foiling of her own plans where they had not served the great
purpose! The love that had come to Harry was, on the face of it, just
the kind of love from which she had most desired to preserve him. Now
she saw it as the crown of his happy youth, but still more as the gift
that was to bless his manhood to come. The plunging of him into crude
and unfamiliar life, which had still lain on his spirit at his first
homecoming, and had brought her such trouble of mind on his behalf--he
had come through that fire. It was, as Wilbraham had said, the
tempering of the steel in him. He would not have been of the fine metal
that he was if he had not felt its rigour; and, having gone through it,
he would not be what it had made of him if his spirit were not now freed
from it. Every letter that he wrote showed him free and untroubled in
the life he was living and the work he was doing. He wrote happily and
gaily, and as if there was not a care on his mind. They all seemed to
take it like that--the boys who were out there, snapping their fingers
in the face of Death, who was gibbering at them from every corner and
trying to frighten them into respect for his menace. Harry had never
feared death, and now he no longer feared life in any of its unfamiliar
aspects, but embraced it with all the ardour of his youth, and with it
the happiness it had in store for him when the great confusion should be
smoothed out.
Surely he must be spared, for whom life held so much! It could not be
squared with any theory of directing and guiding providence that one who
had been dowered with the gifts of life so much above others, and was so
much in accord with the higher purposes of life as they had been slowly
and sometimes painfully revealed to her, should be denied his full
inheritance of life.
But so much high promise had been cut down and gathered in to the
dreadful harvest. Day after day those long lists came out. Names,
names, columns and pages long, and each one of them to some, perhaps to
many, so much more than a name. She could only wait and tremble for the
tilt of the scales. He had been in the thick of it and was untouched so
far, though so many of those who had been fighting around him had
fallen. A charmed life? By all the theories to which she wrested her
mind she ought to have believed so, as the weeks went by and his letters
came. But the dread only increased.
She showed little of it. Jane was her frequent companion, and though
they never spoke of the dread, each divined much of what the other was
thinking.
Half child, half woman, Jane hovered strangely between fear and
fatalism. She loved Harry, but if there had been any budding of a
woman's love in her it had been nipped by the revelation of his love for
Viola and flowed again only in the channels of her childish devotion.
There was something of the woman in the way she regarded him in
connection with Viola. One man for one woman to love and cherish. He
was hers when he had fallen captive to her; others only had that share
in him which she might grant to them. Jane had accepted Sidney as a
possible mate for Harry, and now she accepted Viola, whom she also loved
since she had come to Royd. There was no jealousy in her. Harry loved
her as he had always loved her; and Viola loved her. She felt almost as
if she had brought them together.
But in Jane's childish view the recognition of this kind of love was the
closing of youth's manuscript. She was uplifted by the idea of having a
pair of intimate married friends; but it would be different. She did
not ask herself in what way. It might be even more agreeable than
having two separate friends, but it would be different. So her view of
Harry was a backward one. She talked chiefly of him as he had been, and
Lady Brent, somewhat to her comfort, learnt to look upon Harry's youth
also as a chapter in some sense closed, and as a very perfect chapter.
Whatever might happen, he had had that. And she had been instrumental
in fashioning his youth--a jewel to hang upon the neck of memory, whole
and flawless.
She would not disturb Jane with her fears, but the child divined them
and was often struck by foreboding, which she resisted with all her
might. In this also she gave comfort. Her optimism, fitting to her
youth and inexperience, was insistent, and would not be denied. Nothing
could happen to Harry worse than what had happened already.
Nothing--she seemed to frame her creed--could happen to one who was so
loved.
The gods held the scales--life whole or life disabled on the one side,
death on the other. They dipped now this way, now that. What was it
that they threw into them? Was there any weight in the strong urgings
of those who thought they had learnt from them that they would incline
their ears to such utterances? Was there anything that might incline
them to spare one to whom they had shown their favours until now? Was
he not nearer to them in the tested quality of his manhood than the
generality of beings whom they sent to represent their godhead on earth?
Had they not fashioned him to shine in years to come as an example of
the kind of human stuff they could produce from their workshops? Had
they no further use for him in a world so largely populated with their
failures? Or were the tokens they threw into the scales nothing at all
but just the chances of time and space, so that this man's righteousness
and that man's worthlessness were of no account against the tick of a
watch or the ruled immutable path of a shard of iron?
Did they even hesitate? Was it destined from the beginning of time that
just at that moment in a sodden desolate winter's dawn, by just that
naked riven tree, the life they had given and so richly endowed should
be battered out of the young eager body in which they had set it, with
nothing in it left that could any more upon earth give or receive love?
So it happened. The day of blood dawned, and waxed and waned and ended.
Many were killed in it, many lived to remember it as no more terrible
than other days. But Harry died in it. The last boon they gave him was
that he died very quickly.
*CHAPTER XXIX*
*LOVE*