Of the forces arrayed against Rose--and she found them many--the most
potent was the strong desire for school that they had implanted in
little Cecil himself.
He was always begging to go to Hurst.
“Don’t you want me to be friends with Lord Charlesbury’s little boy,
Mummie?”
“Yes. Of course I do.”
“Well, he’s at Hurst. He’s in the Eleven there.”
“I know.”
“Shouldn’t I be in the Eleven, too?”
“No. You don’t play nearly well enough yet, darling.”
Cecil flushed and then said defiantly: “Diana thinks I would be, and
she knows more about cricket than you do, Mummie--you said yourself
that she does. She said--she said----”
“What did she say?”
Diana Grierson-Amberly was surely not prone to the paying of unmerited
compliments, and Rose felt curious.
“She said I ought to be at Hurst and that I bowled better than that
other little boy, Hugh. She did, Mummie.”
“Ces!” said Rose warningly.
“Yes, she did. That was because I bowled her out first ball, just as
easy as anything. And the bails stayed on, Mummie, and only the middle
stump went down, really and truly.”
She knew, necessarily, that he must be boasting, and the circumstantial
details with which he amplified his story made her, from previous
experience, forlornly certain that he knew himself to be inventing.
“When did this happen?”
“Last night, when we played on the lawn after tea.”
“Well, I know you did play on the lawn with Uncle Ford and Diana and
Miss Wade. But she didn’t really say you bowled better than Hugh
Charlesbury, now did she, Ces? You only said that for fun, didn’t you?”
Her coaxing voice pleaded with him for the admission.
“I can’t help it if you won’t believe me, Mummie,” said Cecil with
dignity, “but it’s perfectly true all the same.”
Miss Wade descended upon them with her usual air of timorous
determination.
“Come along, Cecil dear, it’s time to go out. You’d like me to bowl to
you, wouldn’t you? Remember what Miss Grierson-Amberly said to us last
night!”
“What?” Rose asked almost involuntarily.
“She said Cecil would never get into the Hurst Cricket Eleven unless he
practised really hard. And she told us about Lord Charlesbury’s little
boy--didn’t she, Cecil?--who bowled some other boy out first ball, and
the middle stump actually went flying, although the bails stopped on.”
“I see,” said Rose dully.
Not for the world would she have exposed Cecil in Miss Wade’s
presence. She would not even look at him.
“Come along,” said Miss Wade, in her voice of manufactured brightness.
Cecil had rapidly turned from white to scarlet, but when he saw that
his mother had no intention of humiliating him by any spoken comment,
his face cleared. He ran up to her and kissed her, and said “Good-bye,
Mummie,” quite cheerfully before he went away with Miss Wade.
She felt that he would easily succeed in putting the whole incident
quite out of his thoughts.
“But why--why does he do it?” reflected Rose miserably.
She was incapable of searching out the basic foundations for Cecil’s
perversion of the truth. The crux of the matter, to her, lay in
the bald fact that he told lies; not at all in the existence of a
fundamental self-distrust and craving for the reassurance of praise and
approval that provided a motive for the lies.
“I can’t make him good,” said Rose to herself desperately.
She was too unsure of the orthodoxy of her own beliefs to have made out
of religion an instrument for the chastisement of Cecil’s spirit, and
when he had informed her that Miss Wade said all story-tellers went to
hell, she had heatedly replied: “Bosh! don’t think about hell. Think
about heaven instead.”
Lady Aviolet, she knew, had suggested once or twice to Cecil, with
characteristic reticence of expression, that his besetting sin should
be made the subject of nightly intercession in his prayers. But Rose
herself, and, she felt certain, Cecil with her, had looked upon the
mechanical petitions, “Help me always to speak the truth, for Christ’s
sake, Amen,” as the merest shelving of responsibility. Religious
susceptibilities were no more apparent in Cecil than in herself, and
Rose instinctively mistrusted resolutions rooted rather in a supine
faith in Divine omnipotence than in a personal will to achieve.
A sense of utter frustration assailed her after the expenditure of
nervous energy that she had flung into her “scene” on the previous
evening. It had been of no use. The old people had not understood;
their stupidity was as impenetrable as their good breeding. Ford,
who might have interpreted her ill-chosen words to them, had chosen,
malignantly, to play a little comedy of obtuseness that was never meant
to deceive Rose, but only to make her angrier and more incoherent.
Thinking it all over, the tears burned in her eyes and she clenched her
teeth. It seemed incredible to her that so much vehemence should have
proved so completely impotent.
The conviction of defeat was ready to invade her, but her indomitable
sense of the issue at stake refused to let her be overwhelmed.
“He shan’t go--he shan’t go----” she repeated to herself, half sobbing.
“I know he isn’t fit for school.”
She slowly prepared to put in action a plan that she had evolved in the
course of a sleepless hour of the night.
She wrote a letter.
This was to Rose a laborious undertaking at all times, since she
disliked letter-writing and had had very little occasion to practise
it. Her handwriting, that had an inappropriate appearance on the
stamped blue notepaper of Squires, was large and painstaking, and very
legible.
My dear Uncle Alfred,
It seems a long time since I wrote to you after poor Jim’s death, and
I daresay you will be interested to hear that Cecil and myself are now
with Jim’s people at the above address. Well, Uncle, this is to say
that things are not going as I should wish with regards to Cecil, and
they want very much to send him to a Preparatory School and then to a
Public School. This I do not want, because it would be bad for Cecil,
and _I know what I am talking about_. Well, Uncle, I cannot make them
see this here, and so I write to you. Will you have Ces and me up at
your place for a bit if this is not too inconvenient? I could help
in the business like Mother used to, and have a talk with you about
Cecil. He’s a lovely little boy, really, and I do want to do the best
possible for him.