“Oh--mama, I quite forgot to tell you before----”
The casual note in Jennie’s voice was overdone to an extent that must
have awakened suspicion even in a listener far less acute than was
Lydia.
“Well?”
“He said he’d like to stop here, just on his way back, next week.”
“He--who?”
Lydia did not make this inquiry for the sake of obtaining information.
She had no doubt whatever as to the identity of the forthcoming
visitor, but Jennie was making her thoroughly uneasy, and she wished to
test the grounds for the vexed anxiety that had now been with her for
nearly a week.
“Oh, didn’t I say?” said Jennie, more elaborately casual than ever,
and, picking up the kitten, began to try and make it bite its own tail.
“I meant Billy’s friend, the one who had the aeroplane.”
Lydia’s mind automatically registered her daughter’s avoidance of Mr.
Roland Valentine’s name.
“Do you mean he wants to go to Quintmere again? I’m not at all sure
that grandmama would care to have him. He’s not quite--well, not
exactly a gentleman, is he?”
“Oh, Pussy-kitten, you’ve _scratched_ me!” cried Jennie, in tones of
reproach. “Not Quintmere, but here. He’s going back to London, and
he thought of getting out of the train at Clyst Milton Junction and
walking here, and then he could go on by the three-thirty from Ashlew.”
“But he could go straight on to Exeter, like anyone else does. What
does he want to stop here for?”
“To--to break the journey,” suggested Jennie feebly. “He’s leaving the
aeroplane at Plymouth.”
There was a silence, during which the kitten, inwardly approved by
Lydia, made its escape.
Deprived of this defence, Jennie lifted a very pink face and faced
her mother. There was something at once defiant and childlike in her
expression that secretly rather touched Lydia.
“He really wants to see _me_, mama, and I--I didn’t think you’d mind,
and when he suggested coming, I asked him to have lunch. You always say
you like me to have my friends here. Mama, you don’t mind, do you?”
“I don’t mind anything so long as you’re open with me, darling,” said
Lydia, making use of an unwonted term of endearment. “But I don’t know
that I altogether understand how you and this youth could have made
friends in such a very short time.”
“Don’t you?” said Jennie vaguely.
She appeared to think that the conversation was ended.
Lydia wished, as she had wished at ever-shortening intervals since
Jennie’s ninth year, that her daughter would confide in her, appeal to
her. The protective instinct surged within her strongly.
“Tell me, Jennie dear--I’ll help you as much as I can.”
“There isn’t anything to tell,” said Jennie, in the same vague,
unsatisfactory manner. “He’ll turn up on Tuesday, I should think.”
“Ask Billy to come over, if you like.”
“Oh, he’ll be gone away by then, don’t you remember?” said Jennie
quickly.
Lydia said nothing more.
She was conscious of preoccupation during the rest of the week, and
noticed for the first time that signs of care were beginning to show in
her face, round her eyes and mouth.
Several times she went with Jennie to the Madges’ untidy cottage,
although the girl made no attempt to conceal the fact that she would
have much preferred to make her visits there unaccompanied. Lydia
listened with a little, kindly smile to Mrs. Madge’s incoherent
declarations that Jackie was never so good with anybody as with the
young lady, and quietly gave Mrs. Madge several hints from her own
experience as to the management of children. She also provided an
occasional milk-pudding or custard, and presently shared with her
daughter in the voluble, incoherent gratitude of the slovenly woman.
She also said to Jennie that it was a great pity that Jennie’s old toys
and picture-books had been so maltreated and destroyed by a tomboyish
owner that none of them could serve to cheer poor little Jackie’s
idleness now. There really was so very little to amuse a sick child.
Lydia herself went and read stories aloud to the little boy from time
to time--a kindness entirely beyond the compass of Jennie, who hated
books, mispronounced many of her words in slipshod fashion, and gabbled
like a schoolgirl.
“I don’t believe I’m good for anything, except perhaps gardening,” said
Jennie, in cross, resentful accents.
“You would be good for a great deal, if you would only take pains and
let yourself be taught,” said Lydia serenely.
She was far from disapproving of this most unwonted mood in her usually
self-assertive daughter.
It was quite true that Jennie was in no danger of displaying the
efficiency that had been Lydia’s at nineteen. She was very clumsy with
her fingers, except when dealing with either plants or animals, and
although she was not stupid, a certain slowness of development and
inability to express herself very often made her appear so. She could
neither sew nor write with any facility, nor did she show any signs of
having inherited her mother’s business aptitude. These deficiencies
should have made her very dependent upon Lydia, and the services that
Lydia was only too ready to devote to her, but, then, Jennie did not
like being served, although she would not take the steps towards
learning such independence as might be conceded to a daughter in her
mother’s house.
Perhaps she had not learnt these things young enough.
A French governess had given her lessons, and had taught her French far
superior to the unsatisfactory amount assimilated by Lydia long ago at
Miss Glover’s school, but French was not in request at Clyst Milton or
Ashlew, and Jennie’s proficiency was wasted after Mademoiselle left.
She was unmusical, she could not draw. On the rare occasions when
Jennie lamented her lack of accomplishments, Lydia consolingly reminded
her:
“You have a faculty for arithmetic. It’s not often found in women--the
mathematical mind--as an old friend of Uncle George’s used to tell me
when I was a girl. You’ve inherited the mathematical mind from me.”
Lydia refused to see that the last words always made Jennie scowl
furiously.
On Sunday they went to church at Ashlew, and to lunch at Quintmere
afterwards, after a fashion that had grown to seem almost immemorial.
Lydia never discussed Jennie with Joyce Damerel, whose trenchant
judgments, always abruptly and unhesitatingly spoken, seldom coincided
with her own. But she had decided to mention the affair of Mr. Roland
Valentine to old Lady Lucy, whom she suspected of appraising the young
airman at much the same valuation as she did herself.
Lydia had no definite intention of breaking her old rule, and of
talking about herself--but her mother-in-law would hardly fail to
notice the unwonted expression of fatigue that worry had given to her
face.
The day was an unusually hot one, and the slight fatigue engendered by
the walk across the field, and by a lengthy and rather tedious sermon,
had not detracted, Lydia felt, from her already strained appearance.
Outside the church Lady Lucy made her usual pause at the twin adjacent
stones consecrated to the memory of William and of Clement Damerel, and
the older monument to their father.
Joyce never stood beside her there, but Lydia joined her mother-in-law
for a few moments.
Lady Lucy spent a briefer time than usual at the graves.
She turned, unfurling her shabby black silk parasol, and Lydia moved
away beside her.
“Oh, my dear,” said Lady Lucy in distressed accents--and Lydia turned
her encircled eyes full upon her--“have you heard what they seem to
be saying in London? Billy is full of it. There is to be war between
Germany and France, and they say that England can’t honourably keep out
of it.”
Lydia was confounded.
All through luncheon Lady Lucy would talk of nothing else.
Joyce Damerel was sturdily optimistic, and said that there would be no
war. The Germans were too civilized. Billy predicted war in a week--a
war that would be ended by the British Navy in three months.
“And the aeroplanes!” cried Jennie. “Oh, Billy, it’ll be a chance for
the aeroplanes at last.”
“Of course,” said Billy loftily.
He was very much excited, and was going up to London that night.
They talked about the chances for and against a European war all the
afternoon, and Lady Lucy sent Jennie to find maps, and then pored over
them tremulously, appealing very often to her grandson.
Billy, the only man present, was uplifted and instructive, and Lydia
was rather surprised at the deference which his mother and grandmother
accorded to what they apparently considered to be his superior
knowledge.
She said to Joyce quietly:
“Why, Billy can’t even remember the Boer War. You and I can, of course;
but these children, who are so excited--they don’t know what war means.
_We_ do.”
Joyce looked at her strangely.
“Don’t you understand, Lydia, that if there’s a war, it won’t be
ours?--_it’ll be the children’s_. Our generation won’t count at
all--it’s Billy and Jennie that’ll count now--the boys of Billy’s age.”
“England won’t go to war,” said Lydia sharply.
She intensely disliked to hear the anguished note that had suddenly
come into Joyce Damerel’s voice, as she looked at her only son.
If England went to war, Joyce would see Billy go away to fight.
Lydia had only a girl--there would be no supreme sacrifice for her to
make.
Joyce had said that only the children would count now, but Lydia
thought that the mothers and wives who gave of their nearest would be
held to count too.
Those who could not go themselves, and who had no one to send, would be
the ones that would not count.
The thought roused in Lydia a deep and impassioned resentment, that she
did not attempt to analyze.
She put the thought of war from her as far as possible, but Jennie
would talk of nothing else, betraying a childish eagerness and
excitement that almost made it seem as though she would be disappointed
if nothing happened after all.
“Couldn’t I go as a Red Cross nurse?” she asked babyishly, and Lydia
patiently explained that entire lack of training would make such a
thing impossible.
In her heart she thought that, even if Jennie did attend the Red Cross
lectures that Nathalie Kennedy was organizing, she was much too young
for her services to be accepted in any serious emergency.
But she engaged that both Jennie and herself should attend the classes.
On Tuesday Mr. Roland Valentine came.
“No one will think of anything but this war now,” Lydia warned her
daughter, not without a certain inward satisfaction in making the
prediction. “Very likely Mr. Valentine won’t turn up--one can be
surprised at nothing, and a young man of that sort might be very
useful, with his aeroplane.”
“Of course,” said Jennie, and her voice held no clue as to whether
she were acquiescing in the former or the latter half of her mother’s
dictum.
Soon after twelve o’clock, however, Lydia made the unwelcome discovery
that Jennie was gone out. Gone out, without any hint as to her
intentions, and, as Lydia felt no doubt whatever, for the express
purpose of meeting Mr. Valentine on his way to the house!
Nothing was to be done, except to await luncheon-time and to hope,
in the interests of maidenly discipline, that Jennie would presently
return crestfallen without the Canadian.
Just before one o’clock, however, they came in together.
At first Lydia’s discouraging prediction to her daughter seemed about
to be fulfilled.
They talked only about the war.
Mr. Valentine was decided in his expressions. He believed in a short
but terrible war--perhaps three months, perhaps longer. The war would
be fought in the air. Not on land and not on sea, although there might
be an immense naval battle, in which the German fleet, seeking to
invade England, would certainly be crushed.
But everything would really be settled in the air.
He was on his way to London to offer his aeroplane and his own
services to the War Office Authorities. He already held a pilot’s
certificate--they would certainly send him to the Front, with other
aeroplanes and other airmen, as soon as an Expeditionary Force was
organized. That, said Mr. Valentine, might take a week, might take a
fortnight--impossible to tell. Every hour must count, and no doubt the
authorities would act as rapidly as possible.
“Then you think war is certain?”
“Absolutely certain,” Roland Valentine declared.
“Oh,” said Jennie suddenly, “we can’t stay down here, where we hear
nothing and know nothing. Mama, we must go to London.”
“Can you speak French?” Mr. Valentine abruptly asked Jennie.
“Yes, yes.”
“They’ll want women in Belgium--nurses, you know.”
“I’d go,” Jennie said, with shining eyes.
“She has no training, and is too young. I don’t suppose they would
accept her,” said Lydia calmly.
“Dr. West said I was a born nurse!” Jennie cried. “Only the other day
he said that. A born nurse!”
And Mr. Roland Valentine--who could know nothing whatever about
it--looked across the table, and said with emphasis and conviction:
“I’ll bet you are!”
“Will you have some cherry-tart, Mr. Valentine?” said Lydia
prosaically. “And some of our Devonshire dish--junket?”
She herself had never taken kindly to the Devonshire junkets, and,
disliking stewed fruit, sat with an empty plate before her.
“I’m not going to be alone, surely?” said the Canadian bluntly.
“Oh, no! This is Jennie’s favourite pudding--that’s why I ordered it,”
said Lydia, smiling.
“I wish you wouldn’t!” burst childishly from Jennie. “It’s horrid
to see you eating nothing, while I’m stuffing! Why didn’t you order
something we _both_ like?”
“My dear child!”
Lydia’s tone conveyed a half-humorous rebuke for Jennie’s exaggerated
vehemence.
“Well,” said the child pettishly, “I can’t bear people to sacrifice
themselves for me. It makes one feel beastly. Doesn’t it, Mr.
Valentine?” she applied to him boldly.
“Why, yes--that is so,” agreed the youth heartily. “When my young
sister first went out to dances I used to take her, my mother being a
bit of an invalid. But the dear old lady would insist on sitting up for
us, and heating milk on a spirit-lamp for Dorothy, and truck of that
sort.”
“Oh!” cried Jennie, glancing at her mother. Roland Valentine glanced at
her too, with impudent laughter in his eyes, and yet a hint of apology
in his voice.
“Of course, you know, it was kind of rotten for Dorothy. It simply
spoilt all her fun for the whole evening.”
“But why?” Lydia said. “I should have thought she would have been
grateful, I must say.”
“_But gratitude is such a beastly feeling!_” cried young Valentine in
candid dismay.
Jennie burst out laughing, half nervously.
“Oh, mama, isn’t that what I’m always saying? One would so much rather
be a little bit uncomfortable, or tired, or hungry--even a _lot_
uncomfortable--than feel that somebody else was just sitting there all
the time, sacrificing themselves for one.”
Lydia remained silent, almost surprised at the acuteness with which
their youthful crudities could vex her.
“I must say,” Jennie added to Valentine, as though she disliked the
silence following on her outburst, “I do thoroughly sympathize with
your sister. Did your mother always go on sitting up for her?”
“Oh, by Jove, no!” said Valentine cheerfully. “My mother’s a dear,
really, and we made her understand that really and truly that sort of
thing is only a form of self-indulgence. Just keeping herself out of
bed for nothing in the world except to make poor Dorothy feel herself
the worst kind of selfish pig whenever she went out to a party and
came in late. The old lady quite saw it after a bit, and just left the
spirit-lamp and the milk and things in the hall, and toddled off to bed
herself at ten o’clock or so.”
Every word that the bold, self-assured young voice was uttering jarred
upon Lydia, and his phraseology, no less than his sentiments, struck
her as being in the worst possible taste.
And oh! _how_ bad for Jennie to hear!
That was what really perturbed Lydia most.
The spirit that Roland Valentine had epitomized in slangy, spontaneous
speech, “gratitude is such a beastly feeling,” might have been latent
since babyhood in the modern, essentially unsubtle, Jennie; but Lydia
knew very well that the very circumstances of her upbringing had
precluded the possibility of her child’s ever formulating definitely
such dicta as those so unsparingly delivered by the young man who sat
there calmly eating Lydia’s cherry pie and cream and junket.
She decided that they had better not be left alone together after lunch.
“What time would you like me to order the pony-cart, Mr. Valentine? We
can easily drive you to the station. I think my daughter told me that
you wanted to catch the three-thirty from Ashlew?”
“Thanks very much. I wish I could have stayed around a bit
longer--there’s quite a good train at six--but everything is so
dislocated one daren’t risk it, and I must get to London before
to-night. Look here, I’ll send you a wire to say how things are up
there.”
“Oh, yes, _do_! Oh, thank you!” said Jennie ardently.
Evidently gratitude was no longer an intolerable sensation when applied
to a contemporary, reflected Lydia, not without humour.
A rather strained quarter of an hour ensued in the shade of the small,
pleasant garden.
Conversation reverted to the war.
“Has anything been heard of your young cousin, Billy Damerel?”
“His mother may have had a letter this morning.”
“I shall see him to-night, I expect. Only son, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” said Lydia briefly.
“Of course, he’ll join the army at once,” said Jennie excitedly. “Would
they send them out to Belgium immediately, do you suppose?”
“Just as quick as they can get them across, I should imagine.”
Silence fell again and Lydia felt both constraint and a certain
hostility vibrating in the atmosphere. She had not any doubt now that
Jennie, and Jennie’s barefaced admirer, resented her presence. But what
in Heaven’s name could he want to say to the child--they had only met
twice!
Lydia did not waste wonder over Jennie’s only too evident predilection
for common, good-looking Mr. Valentine.
He was that romantic and mysterious being, a flying-man--he might
be sent to his death within the next week--he gazed at Jennie with
boldly-admiring blue eyes--and he was young.
That, in Lydia’s opinion, was enough for any girl. She could remember
that in her own girlhood the few attractions that she had felt had
primarily been based upon grounds no more solid. Even her first
inclination towards Clement Damerel had been merely an instinctive
conviction that here was breeding superior to anything that she had as
yet known, and a candid admiration for his good looks.
In common with many women of her nationality, her class, and her
passionless temperament, Lydia honestly believed that love should come
after marriage if it were to be enduring.
Quite lately, vague suspicions of other and more volcanic forces latent
in Jennie had begun to render her uneasy.
“Please, ma’am, Miss Quinch is here, and says you wanted to speak to
her, ma’am.”
“Oh!” Lydia was momentarily startled. She had quite forgotten her
summons to the little village dressmaker.
“I must see her a minute--I’ll come, Susan.”
Roland Valentine and Jennie had both risen almost before Lydia had
stirred from her chair. Jennie was looking down at the ground, but
Valentine’s face showed an almost blatant triumph, and there was no
longer constraint in the air.
“I shan’t be a moment,” Lydia repeated, and was unable to resist
adding: “It’s about your new frock, Jennie. You said you wanted Miss
Quinch to make it, and I’ve got the stuff you liked. Do you want to see
it?”
“No, thank you, mama--I saw the pattern, I--I’d rather you arranged it
all with Miss Quinch.”
Lydia’s smile was finely ironical as she turned into the house.
Miss Quinch was slow and also talkative, and it took time to dispose of
her.
When Lydia came back to the lawn at last she was vexed, but scarcely
surprised, to find the encampment of deck-chairs deserted. Exactly what
she should have expected--not only from young Valentine’s off-hand lack
of manners, but from Jennie’s schoolgirl love of an escapade.
Lydia looked at her watch.
In less than half an hour’s time the pony-cart--in reality a hired
jingle from the village that always served them when required--would
arrive in order to convey Mr. Valentine to the station.
Not very much could be said or done inside half an hour by two young
people who knew one another so slightly, surely, Lydia endeavoured
to assure herself, without much conviction. However, it would be
altogether too undignified to go in search of them, and might encourage
Jennie’s foolish and youthful tendency to look upon her mother, in
reality her best friend, as an unreasonable tyrant, to be outwitted
whenever possible.
Heaven knew, Lydia reflected sadly, she had sympathy enough, and to
spare, for Jennie’s youth. Had she not striven to shelter and protect
and save Jennie as she herself during her girlhood had never been
sheltered and protected and saved?
Nor would she refuse to let the child try her own wings some
day--though Lydia was conscious that therein lay the effort, as the
thought brought its accustomed pang.
But when Jennie should love and marry, her choice must fall upon such a
man as her father had been, such a man as the Damerels had mated with
from time immemorial.
Lydia’s inward insistence on the point dated from Jennie’s birth, and
before, and was the stronger in its intensity from her own never-spoken
but never-forgotten realization of the strange and intangible gulf that
had been crossed when Clement Damerel had married Lydia Raymond.
It was a pity that Jennie and Billy Damerel were first cousins.
A clock struck in the little drawing-room, the chimes audible through
the open window, and Lydia looked again at her watch.
In ten minutes the jingle would come.
Was there, or was there not, a faint, occasional murmur of voices
somewhere within the house?
It might be Susan and Miss Quinch in the tiny sewing-room that was
only an offshoot of the kitchen--or it might be another conversation
proceeding from the old school-room upstairs.
But what in the world could they be doing there? Lydia would not look
up at the window, knowing, moreover, that a curtain of ivy and climbing
roses would probably make it impossible for her to see inside the room
even if she did so.
But in another few minutes she went into the house and upstairs to her
own room, to put on her hat and gloves preparatory for driving.
If Jennie should resent the enforced chaperonage, as she certainly
would, Lydia sincerely regretted it--but there must be no more
_tête-à-têtes_ with third-rate young men from Canada. Lydia suspected
that there had been too many such already. From her room she heard the
jingle’s arrival at the front door.
“Jennie!”
Lydia stood on the stairs, her shady mushroom hat already on her head,
drawing on a pair of brown gauntlet gloves.
“Jennie!” she called in reasonable and moderate summons.
Susan appeared in the hall below.
“The pony is at the door, ma’am.”
“Thank you, Susan. Do you know where Miss Jennie is?”
The door of the old school-room, one flight of stairs higher than that
upon which Lydia stood, was wrenched open with an effect of violence.
“I’m here, mama,” said Jennie. “Is it time to go?”
“Quite time, if you don’t take more than a minute to put on your hat.
Is Mr. Valentine there?”
Jennie turned round to the school-room again. In the shaded gloom of
the narrow staircase Lydia had been unable, peering upwards, to see her
face distinctly.
She wondered if she should go up herself.
“I do hope I haven’t kept you waiting,” said the voice of Mr. Roland
Valentine, suave and yet indescribably casual. “I’m awfully sorry.”
He came downstairs two steps at a time.
“You mustn’t miss your train,” said Lydia coldly.
She walked downstairs, followed by the young man.
“Be quick, Jennie.”
Jennie hung over the banisters.
“I don’t think I’m coming, mama.”
Her voice sounded rather uncertain, and Lydia was for a moment entirely
nonplussed.
Was it a childish display of pique provoked by Lydia’s intention of
accompanying the expedition? Or had Mr. Valentine made some ill-bred
demonstrations of admiration that had offended and perhaps frightened
Jennie?
Lydia felt a certain relief as the idea crossed her mind. In any event,
the point could not be debated now.
“My daughter has a good many little jobs in the garden and the village
that take up her time,” she said in smiling but purposely formal
apology for Jennie’s capriciousness.
“It’s very good of you to drive me yourself, Mrs. Damerel,” said
Valentine, and they got into the jingle and Lydia took up the reins.