Lydia was not destined ever to forget that expedition to Ashlew Station
in the jingle, nor the sense of shock with which she heard Mr. Roland
Valentine’s first level pronouncement, delivered before they were out
of the short, steep approach that led into the lane outside:
“I suppose you’ve realized, Mrs. Damerel, that I was clean bowled over
at very first sight.”
So much astonished was Lydia at the rapidity with which had come a
crisis that she had as yet barely foreshadowed even to herself that she
could only gaze at the young man beside her in silent dismay.
He seemed heated, but not at all discomposed.
“Do you mean--Jennie?” said Lydia at last.
“I do. From the very first minute I saw her,” repeated Mr. Valentine
emphatically, “I knew that there was the only girl I should ever marry.
The only question was whether she’d see it too.”
“That is very far from being the only question----” Lydia began
severely, but the young man went on unheeding:
“However, it’s all right, thank God. You may say that with the country
on the eve of the most appalling war that this world has ever seen,
it’s no moment to think of such things. But, on the other hand, it’s
every man’s instinct to get _what_ he can, _while_ he can--and the
opportunities of the younger generation will be curtailed a bit from
now on, I fancy. It’s just a case of cramming into a few weeks--or
days maybe--what you older folk have had all your lifetime to enjoy.”
Lydia, beyond a sense of indignation at the youth’s assumption of his
ability to enlighten her knowledge as though she were already outside
the full current of life, hardly heard his earnestly spoken speech. She
was aware of only one preoccupation.
“You haven’t said anything to my daughter yet, surely?”
“Why, yes, Mrs. Damerel. That’s the very thing I came down to do,
though I don’t say I should have had the nerve if it hadn’t been for
this war-news. But it’s every man’s duty now, in my opinion, to fix
himself up, and the duty of every healthy young woman to help carry on
the race. I didn’t put it that way to your daughter,” Mr. Valentine
admitted, “but I guess there wasn’t any need for arguments. She and I
understand one another, Mrs. Damerel.”
“After meeting three times--or is it twice?” said Lydia ironically. “I
assure you, Mr. Valentine, that things are not done like that in this
country, whatever they may be in Canada. I don’t at all understand your
having spoken to Jennie, who is a very young and inexperienced girl,
without first obtaining my leave to do so; but in any case, you must
see that I can’t discuss the matter with you until I’ve spoken to her.”
“She thought you might say something like that,” observed Valentine
thoughtfully.
“What do you mean? Why didn’t she speak to me herself, if she had
anything to tell me?”
Mr. Valentine looked straight in front of him.
“You see, you’ve made Jennie a good deal afraid of you, Mrs. Damerel.”
The pang of grief and mortification and anger that shook Lydia from
head to foot kept her silent from its very intensity. Her shaking hands
gripped one another.
“I saw that, of course, the very first evening I met you together at
Quintmere,” went on the calmly judicial young voice. “And I’ve had some
talk with Jennie since, you know.”
“I can’t discuss with you either Jennie or my relations with Jennie,
Mr. Valentine. You seem to forget that you are practically a stranger
to us both.”
The young man turned and looked at her with something that was almost
compassion.
“I suppose it must seem that way to you. But I’d like you to realize,”
he said gently, “that Jennie and I really do mean to get married. Now,
don’t say anything for a minute or two. Just let me put a few facts
before you. I know I must seem almost like an adventurer to you folks
down here, tearing about the country on a crazy flying-machine, and
talking with what you probably take for an accent. But that isn’t so.
You ask young Billy Damerel, who brought me down here, anyway. He’ll
put you on to the track of quite a lot of Oxford people who can tell
you about me, and I’ve a respectable old aunt up there, too, a sister
of my dead father’s. _She’s_ all right--born in England, married an
Englishman, never left England in her life. Now I’m quite aware that
you’ll want to ask a lot of questions about me, and I’m willing to
answer you, or anyone you may appoint to ask them for you. But time
is short, Mrs. Damerel, and may get much shorter. I don’t know what
they’ll do with me up there”--he jerked his thumb in a direction that
vaguely indicated London and the War Office--“but I don’t suppose,
anyway, it’ll be so very long before I’m over at the front. If England
won’t send me, then France will. And I want to get this business fixed
up right away if it can be done.”
“But it can’t be done, Mr. Valentine.”
Lydia rallied the courage that, after all, she had never lacked in all
her life. “Even if I, who am Jennie’s sole guardian, were to consent
to a provisional engagement between you--which would depend entirely
on the result of those inquiries which, as you rightly say, must be
made--even then I should be doing quite wrong in allowing my child to
marry yet. You must remember that I know Jennie through and through.
She is quite undeveloped in every way, and even supposing that her
first love-affair has taken her fancy, that would be no reason for
letting her rush into matrimony before she’s ready for it.”
“Marriage is nature,” said Mr. Valentine bluntly. “Why shouldn’t a
healthy girl of eighteen be ready for it when she cares for the man who
offers it to her? I shouldn’t take Jennie to poverty, Mrs. Damerel.
Of course, I quite understand that any assertion I make must be
verified--and you’ll find that’s easily done--but I may tell you, right
here and now, that I have a small private income, about four hundred
a year, left to me by the old man. My mother is not dependent on me,
and my sister--there are only the two of us--is married and provided
for. And besides that, I have the offer of a job as Chief Assistant
Engineer in the experimental department of Messrs. Gledhill and Swan,
the big engineering firm in Toronto. This war may scotch that for the
time being, but I don’t think I should have any difficulty in finding
something else of the same sort after the war. And if Jennie didn’t
like the idea of Canada, I’d be willing to stick to England; but I
think personally she’d love the life out there, and just do fine in it.”
“But I thought you wanted to go to Belgium with your aeroplane,” Lydia
said quickly, as though convicting the young man of idle boasting.
“Why, yes, that’s quite right. So I do, and so I mean to. So you see,
if Jennie marries me, and then I get a German bullet through me, she’ll
be left provided for under my will, and probably receive a pension as
well, as my widow.”
Thus cheerfully did Mr. Valentine dispose of Lydia’s challenge.
They drew up before the small station and Lydia fastened the pony’s
head to the painted white rails after the country fashion.
“I hope the train hasn’t gone.”
But the train was not even signalled.
“She’ll be forty minutes late,” said the porter with gloomy importance.
“’Tis the same all along the line. Mis’ Damerel. Do ’ee sit down in the
shade and have patience, now. ’Tis this war, as they say we’m coming
to.”
Lydia and Mr. Valentine looked at one another.
“That philosopher is just about right, I guess,” said the young man.
“If you needn’t hurry back, we can sit here and finish our talk.”
Lydia assented.
She felt that in the first moment of shock she had probably failed to
express herself with sufficient decision. Mr. Roland Valentine should
return to London under no misapprehension.
“There really is very little more to be said, Mr. Valentine. Apart
from everything else, this is not a time for insisting upon one’s
small personal affairs. If England really is going into this war, no
one knows what may happen. Values will be all turned upside down, and
nothing will ever be the same again. Why, the country might even be
invaded, as poor Belgium has been. It doesn’t bear thinking of ... you
can see for yourself that this is no time to take risks.”
“Now, why do you say that? I’m quite sure that you took risks in your
time. Why do you grudge Jennie the experience of taking hers?”
The question made Lydia very angry.
“Do you realize that you’re adopting a most offensive attitude in
speaking as though I was Jennie’s enemy--as though I were anything
but the best friend she has in the world? You said just now that I’d
made her afraid of me. If Jennie has said or implied that to you, then
it shows most heartless ingratitude. But I can’t believe it. Bitter
though it is to me to own it, she and I have not always lived at peace
together--but Jennie has never heard a harsh or unkind word from me
since she was born.”
Lydia could hardly go on speaking for a moment. Her passionate
self-justification, made almost as much to herself as to Roland
Valentine, was vibrant with intense sincerity.
It seemed to her that she was at last putting into words her own inner
knowledge, the knowledge that loyalty to her disloyal child and the old
habit of reticence had never before allowed her to formulate.
“Jennie was nine years old when her father died. I was a young woman,
but I lived quietly in the country for the child’s sake. I devoted
myself to her. You understand that I’m not saying this as though I were
boasting of it, but your attitude forces me to put the facts before you
in so many words. I watched over her health, I worked for her, mended
for her, did everything for her. And now I’m told, by a stranger who
hasn’t known my child a fortnight, that I’ve made her afraid of me!”
“Well, that is so.” Mr. Valentine’s tone was impersonal, although he
poked with his stick at the soft red gravel beneath the bench on which
they sat, as though he wished to look at that, and not at Lydia.
“Jennie is very young, and perhaps undeveloped, as you say, Mrs.
Damerel, but you don’t need me to tell you that she has a very strong
individuality. And that’s just what the trouble is. She’s afraid all
the time, whether she knows it or not, of your swamping that. Jennie
very much resents your working for her, and mending for her, and doing
everything for her, the way you say you always have. I guess she feels
it just about time she shouldered some responsibility for herself.”
“But she’s not fitted for it! You don’t understand. Jennie can’t do the
simplest practical thing for herself--she _couldn’t_ undertake any real
responsibility yet.”
“Why, she knows that right enough. And, you see, it makes her feel
that the sooner she buys her experience and learns, the better. It’s
just your care and your protection that’s she afraid of, Mrs. Damerel.
And because she’s just a child, and undisciplined, her instincts for
asserting her own individuality take an ungracious form, that’s all.
She hasn’t analyzed her own feelings the way I’m analyzing them now,
because she isn’t the introspective kind. She just feels she’s up
against it, and doesn’t quite know why.”
“No, she doesn’t,” said Lydia bitterly, “and I may add that, in my
opinion, neither do you. Do you quite realize, I wonder, Mr. Valentine,
the absurdity of this--that you--a very young man, and practically a
stranger to both of us--should be endeavouring to explain to me my own
child, whom I’ve been studying ever since she was born?”
“As to that,” said Mr. Valentine, still without heat, “your studying
hasn’t led to any very great success, if I may point that out. It
looks as though the result had only been to make you and Jennie fret
one another considerably, and make Jennie think herself a wicked,
ungrateful girl, when she’s only a perfectly natural one put into a
false position. Now in Canada, a girl like Jennie would have been
independent, if she’d wanted to be, some time ago. She’d have gone to
school, for one thing, and she’d have been helping in the household
work for another, and taking her due share of responsibility all the
time. That’s the privilege as well as the duty, after all, of every
human being, isn’t it? And she might have taken up school-teaching, or
worked as a stenographer or a secretary in some business in the city,
and just been home for her vacations. I guess if that had been so over
here, she’d have been glad enough to be waited on and made a fuss of
when she _did_ come back to you in holiday time. But as things are, it
just seems as though you were refusing her the natural right of the
individual--the right of experience.”
“And these are the thanks that I get for sacrificing myself for my
child!” cried Lydia, almost involuntarily letting the words break from
the sharpest pain that she had ever known.
“Well, it’s only another kind of sacrifice that’s wanted, that’s all,”
said Mr. Valentine calmly. “If you want to sacrifice yourself some more
for Jennie, Mrs. Damerel, it seems to me the way you can do it best
is just the way that’ll hurt you most. Let her take her own risks and
shoulder her own responsibilities.”
“It’s the lot of parents, I suppose, to watch the children, for whom
they would lay down their lives, spurn the help and tenderness that
sheltered their childhood, and rush ignorantly and foolhardily to try
their own wings.”
“See here,” said the young man earnestly. “Jennie isn’t going to be
alone. Jennie’s going to marry me. I don’t say much about that side of
the question, because I feel I’ve kind of butted in too much already,
and you’d most likely rather not hear any more about me for quite a
while--or, at any rate, until you’ve heard what Jennie has to say. But
I’ll make her a good husband, Mrs. Damerel, as God Almighty hears me
say it now.”
He bared his head for a moment with a curious, reverent simplicity.
“I’m not the romantic sort, and Jennie isn’t either. But I kind of knew
right away that she and I are just meant for one another, and I’ve
never felt that way before, although in Canada we’ve a great deal more
freedom than boys and girls over here, and get to know one another
pretty intimately.”
Lydia’s strained mind turned instinctively to what already seemed to
have become a side-issue.
“Do you mean that you have already asked Jennie to marry you?”
“That’s what I came down to do. I’d have asked her that evening at
Quintmere--that wonderful evening when she came to the field to look
at my old machine under its tarpaulin--only I was kind of afraid it
might scare her if I was too quick. Somehow,” said Valentine, with a
slightly apologetic laugh, “that old house, and the old lady there, and
all the old servants that seemed to have grown up there, made me feel
like a sort of mushroom sprung up in the night. But Jennie didn’t seem
part of it altogether--not the way that young Billy does, who’ll own it
all some day, I suppose. Jennie’s outgrown it all, Mrs. Damerel. She’s
just crying out for the new order of things--and I’m going to see that
she gets it.”
As though to enhance the effect of ultimatum with which the words were
spoken, a sudden stir traversed the sleepy little station. The porter
came up again to Lydia.
“Signalled now, Mis’ Damerel. She’ll be in directly.”
Lydia and Roland Valentine both rose.
She looked at him with challenging eyes.
“I shall write to you, Mr. Valentine, when I have heard what Jennie
has to say. And don’t consider, please, that I can give you any
encouragement whatever. The very way in which you have precipitated
things shows a want of real respect for my daughter.”
“I guess the war isn’t going to wait for any of us,” said Mr.
Valentine. “This card has my address--the club will always find me. But
it’s only fair to tell you that Jennie has it too, and I’m expecting
her to make use of it. I’m sorry things have happened this way, Mrs.
Damerel, and I wish I had more time to try and put my view-point before
you. But if I can fix things up in London the way I expect, and get
leave to come down and fetch my machine away from Plymouth, you’ll be
seeing me around again very shortly. Meanwhile, good-bye and thank you.”
The train came in to the station, and Mr. Valentine, unhampered by
luggage, gravely raised his cap to Lydia in salutation and got inside.
Neither made any movement towards shaking hands.
Lydia turned away with the despairing sense that she did not know what
to do next.
She felt unable to face Jennie--Jennie, who had given her no
confidences, who had told the stranger with whom she thought herself
to be in love, that she was “afraid” of her mother! Lydia thought that
later on perhaps she might be able to talk to Jennie. For the moment
she wanted only to assuage her own desperate pain.
As she turned out of the station, she came face to face with Nathalie’s
husband, Colonel Kennedy. For an instant her first fear was lest he
should notice the misery in her face and ask her what had happened.
But the Colonel only said abruptly:
“London papers not come. I suppose you came on the same errand, Mrs.
Damerel? But what’s the use--we shall be kept without news till
to-morrow now, I suppose. My boy has promised to telegraph from
Greenwich. You know his brother has had to rejoin his ship?”
“Aleck?”
“Telegraphed for. We don’t even know where he is.”
“He seems so young,” sighed Lydia. “Well, anyhow, your little Charlie
is all right. He’ll be out of it all at his age.”
“He’s only thirteen,” said the Colonel gruffly. “They’ll rush ’em
through like anything, though. I’m glad now that they neither of them
had a fancy for soldiering, and chose the Navy instead. They can be
made use of right away, young as they are, if they’re wanted.”
Lydia looked at him with involuntary admiration.
“How’s Nathalie?”
“Come along and see her,” said Colonel Kennedy.
Lydia accepted with a certain relief. She wanted to postpone her return
home, hardly able to bear the thought of speaking to Jennie, and
reflecting also that delay would give her daughter time for thought.
She felt, too, with a sudden and most unwonted sense of dependence,
that Nathalie was her earliest friend, one of her own time and
generation, who would assuredly understand and comfort her.
For the first time she consciously felt need of that quiet, stable
affection and friendship of Nathalie’s that had always been there,
waiting, in the background of Lydia’s whole existence.
She raised her tired eyes.
“I’ll come with you now,” she said to the Colonel. “Poor Nathalie! She
must be frightfully anxious, and though one can’t do anything, it may
be a comfort to her to have someone to talk to.”
Involuntarily she put forward Nathalie’s possible need of her--not hers
of Nathalie.
“Thank you, yes,” said the Colonel.
And when he took Lydia into his wife’s drawing-room, Nathalie exclaimed
gratefully:
“Oh, Lydia, how dear and good of you to come! I knew I should see you
soon.”
Nathalie showed Lydia the telegram that had recalled their elder boy,
the sailor, and speculated vainly as to when they might hope to know
where he was, and she recapitulated, with a mixture of wistfulness and
pride, the chances that little Charlie, too, would be sent to sea
before the war was over; her husband, she said, would try to rejoin his
old regiment.
“Because of course it’s war, Lydia. Jack says the Germans have been
working for this all along--that they’re mad enough to _want_ to fight
us. Oh, doesn’t it all seem like a nightmare?--and a week ago we were
all so peaceful and happy! What is Billy Damerel going to do, Lydia?”
“He’s in London. He told Joyce that he should enlist the minute war is
declared--of course they’ll give him a commission.”
“Of course. His poor mother!”
Lydia let Nathalie go on talking, and listened almost as though she
were in a dream.
It seemed to her extraordinary that now, when she was suffering as
she had never in her life suffered before, this supreme preoccupation
should have come over the whole world, absorbing all attention, all
speculation.
It even struck her as remarkable that she should presently be having
tea with Nathalie in the small porch overlooking the garden, and that
Nathalie should still have made no reference to the topic that absorbed
her own thoughts.
But, of course, Nathalie knew nothing about it. If she were to know,
Lydia must tell her. It had never been Lydia’s way to make confidences
about her own affairs--Grandpapa’s lesson had been too well learned
for that--and she had preferred other people to guess or infer it
when trouble overtook her. She had often noticed, even whilst showing
herself sympathetic and interested, how very ready others were to talk
about themselves, and make their confidences--in curious contrast to
herself.
But Nathalie evidently had guessed nothing.
She talked on and on about the war, about her own two boys, and the
sons of the neighbouring families in the county. One or two young
soldiers she knew had already received peremptory orders to rejoin
their regiments.
“That young Scotsman the Bishop’s daughter is engaged to has had to go,
Lydia. They may even have to put off the wedding. I _do_ think it’s
hard on the girl. If I were her, I should get married as quickly as
possible, I think.”
“Why?” said Lydia sharply.
“They’ll have had something, anyhow, that way. If they were married,
she could be with him up to the last minute, and perhaps go and look
after him if he’s wounded later on. I’ve heard lots of people say that.
Oh, Lydia, it’s going to be dreadful for all these young people! Look
at your own Jennie--she’s not begun life yet, and there she is in the
midst of tragedy and horror--all the boys of her own age going off to
fight and be killed perhaps. She’s had none of the innocent enjoyment
that we had yet, and Heaven knows if they’ll any of them enjoy anything
any more now.”
“This nightmare won’t last--it _can’t_ last,” said Lydia. “They’re
young--they’ll recover from all this, and have their lives before them.
It’s we, who know what it all means, that are the worst sufferers,
I think. Look at you, Nathalie, having to let Aleck go, and perhaps
little Charlie!”
Nathalie shook her head. Her eyes were full of tears, and she did not
speak.
Presently her father came and joined them.
Mr. Palmer was a very old man, but he did not seem to Lydia to have
changed a great deal since the early days of her own married life,
when he had lived his gentle, unobtrusive life beside her and Clement
at the Rectory, and treated her now as though she were his daughter.
It was he who gazed at her with his mild, good blue eyes, that needed
no glasses yet, even though they had lost their brightness, and said
gently:
“You’ve come to share this anxiety with us, Lydia, my dear. That’s very
good of you. But you look tired and troubled. There is no fresh news,
is there?”
“Nothing that I know of.”
Lydia, overwrought and resentful of Nathalie’s blindness, could not
withstand the kind anxiety with which Mr. Palmer still looked at her.
“I _am_ worried--though I hardly know if I ought to say anything about
it to anyone yet. But I’m afraid little Jennie has been reckless and
silly--I’ve not been taking proper care of her.”
“Oh, Lydia! Jennie’s not ill, is she, poor child?” said Nathalie, her
voice all genuine concern at once.
“No, no. She’s embarked on a--a--I don’t know what to call it, except a
sort of flirtation--with that Canadian friend of Billy’s, the young man
who came down here in a flying-machine the other day.”
“I remember,” said Nathalie. “Isn’t he nice, Lydia?”
“Rather third-rate--and, besides, they don’t know each other. They just
met that once at Quintmere, when I’m sorry to say that I let Jennie
stay there without me, just for one night--and then they seem to have
arranged that he should call on us here on his way from Plymouth.”
“I remember, you told me,” said Nathalie. “Did he come?”
“He came to-day.”
Lydia paused, and her mouth tightened.
She could never bring herself to speak to anyone of the things, the
unpardonable things, that young Valentine had said to her. She did not
wish to recall them to her own mind, when they stabbed her afresh with
every involuntary recollection.
“Well,” said Nathalie placidly, “you’ll have heaps of things of that
sort to reckon with, Lydia, now that Jennie’s grown up. I’ve always
thought that girls must be more trouble than boys, especially if
they’re attractive. Jennie will marry young, I’m sure.”
“She won’t marry this young man,” said Lydia.
Nathalie said something about Canada being a long way off, and then her
face changed again.
“But poor little girls of this generation, there may not be anyone for
them to marry! Who knows what is going to happen?”
The Rector’s eyes had never left Lydia’s face.
“Is this young Canadian undesirable in any way, my dear?”
“His manners are not good,” Lydia declared. “Really, I know very little
about him.”
Her tone was quite purposely light, as though by treating the subject
casually she were relegating Mr. Roland Valentine and his proposal to
the negligible value of a mere episode.
“And little Jennie is in love with him?”
“He is conceited enough to think so,” said Lydia. She even laughed,
with a curious sense of relief at being able thus trivially to present
the Canadian’s declared certainty that his love was returned. It was
as though, while convincing the Rector and Nathalie, she was also
convincing herself. “Jennie and I haven’t had our talk about it yet.
He stole a march on her when I drove him to the station this afternoon.”
“I should let them be engaged if I were you, Lydia,” Nathalie said
wearily. “If we’re all going to war, Heaven knows what will happen
to any of us, and she’ll, anyway, have a man to take care of her. I
suppose he’ll go back to Canada?”
“I suppose so. I don’t know,” said Lydia stiffly. She did not want to
proclaim the Canadian’s intention of taking his aeroplane into the zone
of war, aware that the knowledge would only strengthen Nathalie in her
unconsidered advice to let the young generation snatch at its desires
of the moment. “I must go, Nathalie. The child will be wondering what
has happened to me. If you get any news, you’ll let me know?”
“At once. Oh, Lydia, what shall we see in the papers to-morrow?”
Lydia went away with the speculation still ringing in her ears. She
felt unreasonably resentful that Nathalie had taken no serious interest
in the individual problem centring round Jennie and the decision of her
future that lay in Jennie’s mother’s hands. But she realized that the
resentment was unjust, and that she herself had purposely spoken as
though the affair were of no account.
How could she do otherwise, when the real hurt lay in those phrases
that Lydia so passionately denied and repudiated, in which young
Valentine had arrogantly taken upon himself to epitomize her mental and
moral attitude towards her child?