“Poor child--poor, dear child!” said the Rector.
“I’m so miserable!” cried Lydia, like an unhappy child.
“Yes--yes. Is it about little Jennie?”
She answered brokenly and with incoherent vehemence, the accumulated
suffering of the past months finding vent in disconnected words, and
sobbing, elliptical phrases.
She scarcely knew what she said.
Jennie was going away from her--marrying a man who hated her mother,
and who thought, and was teaching Jennie to think, that all her life
she had been tyrannized over. Roland Valentine had said outright that
Lydia had made Jennie afraid of her.
Joyce had been cruel, too. She had accused Lydia of not knowing what
love meant--of having disappointed Clement, and done her best to spoil
Jennie’s life.
“No, no, my poor child!”
“She said I wanted the _beau rôle_ for myself always, that I would
only let Jennie have the little trivial things--that I grudged her the
experience of reality----”
Lydia broke off and gazed at the old man with terrified eyes, seeing no
protesting denial in his face.
“It’s the tendency of us all,” he said dreamily. “We grudge the young
folk the privilege of suffering and learning--we seek to shelter them,
for the sake of our own peace of mind, and call it devotion.”
“But--but,” stammered Lydia, “to love anyone is to want to protect
them--to save them from pain--to bear it instead. I _have_ loved
Jennie, God knows--I do love her. My care for her, and over-anxiety,
and perhaps over-solicitude, have all been love.”
“Love,” said the Rector in the same dreamy, monotonous voice, as of
one voicing a conviction too intimate for vehement upholding, “Love is
suffering. Whether it is love for man, or woman or child--for husband
or wife, little child or dear friend, always remember that, Lydia. Love
is suffering in this life. It is only afterwards, when we have mastered
that truth, and accepted all that it implies, that no doubt there is
some further stage, undreamed-of by poor humanity, when the suffering
is all transmuted, and love becomes joy.”
Slowly a dim understanding of the words seemed to come to Lydia.
Oddly, and not irrelevantly, she remembered once more the pronouncement
of the little girl who had worked with her in a London shop twenty
years earlier.
“You’ve never cared for anyone--when you do love somebody ... you won’t
know how to set about it....”
Was she learning now--for the first time?
No longer wrenched by the hard sobs of her despair, she continued to
gaze at the old, unlearned man, so much less well equipped for life
than she had seemed to herself to be.
“Do you know, my dear,” said the Rector in a tone of gentle narrative,
“what always strikes me as the most sublime illustration of the
true love that is suffering? One has seen it reproduced in Roman
Catholic churches, although I do not know if they give it any special
significance. It is generally only one of many little pictures placed
round the church, and it represents the Virgin Mary’s meeting with her
Son on His way to Mount Calvary.”
Lydia felt bewildered and almost disappointed. Did the consciousness of
his profession oblige the Rector to try and turn her thoughts thus?
Here was no revealing formula, such as she had half hoped might throw
a new light on all that perplexed and tortured her, but merely the old
allusion to the great Figure of Christianity that, for Lydia, held no
real relation to the problems of life.
“It isn’t religion I want,” she said dully. “I--I believe in it all, of
course, but it doesn’t seem to help me now in this.”
“Lydia, my dear child,” said the Rector, in a tone that seemed to
hold a little surprised admonition. “I am not in the pulpit. I am
not speaking as a priest, nor at this moment am I urging upon you
the consolations of religion. Later on, you will seek and find for
yourself, perhaps. I am not asking you to look at the Divine Lord, but
at the human Christ, and at His human Mother. Think of them as two
figures of mythology, if you will--or as two figures in some great
tragedy of which we have all read. And ask yourself if there could
have been such suffering without such love--such love without such
suffering.”
He looked at her fixedly for a moment, and then went on speaking very
slowly, as though giving her time to form to herself some mental image
from each of his halting phrases.
“Think of that meeting between Mary of Bethlehem and her Son. To her
He must have been still the little Child of Nazareth, for whom she
had no doubt done everything that other mothers do for their little
children--whom she had loved and guarded and cherished, whom she had
lain in the tiny, poor little manger at Bethlehem, whom she had carried
before her on the back of the ass during the flight into Egypt, safe
in her arms. During the three years of His ministry no doubt they were
much separated,” said the Rector in the same simple, narrative manner,
“but there must have been many times when He came back to her--for
instance, they were together for the festival at the marriage of Cana.
She knew about His work, and I feel sure that they talked about it all
together.
“Think, my dear, what it must have been to a mother to meet her
son like that. On His way to be tortured and put to death like a
malefactor, the blood and the sweat all streaming down His face, and
carrying on His shoulders that heavy Cross. She must have felt then
that it would be a million times easier to suffer it all herself, don’t
you think? It would have hurt her far less, surely.
“And she went up the hill, too, my dear, and stood by the Cross and
saw it all. And I have always thought to myself--I trust there is
nothing irreverent in the idea--that her suffering must have surpassed
Christ’s. One knows very well,” said the old Rector, “that it is less
painful to endure bodily anguish than to watch it endured by one’s
beloved.”
Lydia uttered a stifled, startled cry.
“But that _is_ love, to find it easier to endure oneself than to let
one’s beloved endure!”
“It is a stage of love,” the Rector acquiesced gently.
“And beyond that?” asked Lydia fearfully.
“Beyond that there is a greater immolation. That of relinquishing the
privilege of suffering to another, and accepting the pain of watching
that suffering.”
There is a certain strong sense of inner conviction that strikes,
with a pang as that of birth, through the very soul, and which is
experienced but once or twice in a lifetime.
Such a pang struck through Lydia now.
It was this, then, that they had all been trying, in their varying
degrees, to tell her.
Jennie, with her inarticulate, struggling rebelliousness, that held all
the blundering ungraciousness of a young, blind thing still unaware
of its own objective--Roland Valentine, with his strong, personal
resentment on behalf of his love, and his hard, new-world standards
of independence; Joyce Damerel, with her narrow, inflexible judgments
and personality antagonistic to Lydia’s; old Lady Lucy, with the
conventional shibboleths of her creed and her generation, that yet
stood for selflessness and high courage; Aunt Beryl, with her simple,
matter-of-fact statement of a truth evidently accepted by her without
question: “Jennie has to live her own life ... it’s more sacrificing
yourself that I meant--sacrificing your own feelings, like.”
They had all meant the same thing--even silly, ill-advised Aunt Evelyn,
grumbling at the tardy independence of her middle-aged daughter, and
yet acquiescing in it with the rueful finality: “We must just make
the best of our shelf now we’re on it.” Even, incredibly enough,
poor, forgotten, unaltered Maria Nettleship, with her uneloquently
expressed realization of having been spared the strange, paradoxical,
immeasurable suffering of love, that in the ultimate analysis meant the
relinquishment of suffering to the beloved.
“That is all, my dear,” said the Rector gently.
Lydia had heard nothing of what he had been saying, although she had
been aware of the kindly, monotonous old voice, talking on and on in
careful, halting sentences.
Her every faculty had been absorbed in the tardy revelation that was at
length hers.
As her mental equilibrium slowly swung back to its habitual poise once
more, the fundamentally practical outlook that would always be Lydia’s,
asserted itself.
“But it’s too late now. Jennie is going away from me to-morrow.”
“To-morrow,” repeated the Rector almost maunderingly.
Voices became audible in the hall outside, and Lydia knew that the
Kennedys had returned.
She could even conjecture, from the murmur of the maid Alice’s voice
that the Rector’s message had been given to them.
The sounds dispersed and ceased altogether.
“I must go,” said Lydia. “You’ve been so good to me--I was nearly mad
when I came, I think. I can be braver now--I can be brave to-morrow.”
“To-morrow,” said the Rector again. “Let to-morrow be Jennie’s day.”
Some glimmering of his meaning brought a flash of irrepressible
resentment into the inquiry of Lydia’s gaze.
“My dear child--my dear Lydia,” said the old man apologetically, “let
little Jennie have the foreground to-morrow. Let hers be the bravery,
and the sacrifice, and the sorrow, and the gladness. It need matter to
no one what anybody else feels, or has to undergo--it need distract no
attention from the child. Let it,” said the Rector pleadingly, “let it
all form a background.”
Lydia understood.
There was a conscious relinquishment, a displayed self-abnegation, that
would infallibly attract the sympathy and the compassion of all but the
ultra-critical, that might not be hers.
Very tentatively, perhaps guided more by instinct than by full
awareness, the Rector was pointing out to her the infinitely subtle
atonement that might yet be hers.
To-morrow--her wedding-day--to be solely Jennie’s. After all, Lydia
reflected, with that strange clarity of mind that sometimes follows
upon extreme physical exhaustion induced by violent and unaccustomed
emotion, those to-morrows when her daily life would be linked with
Jennie’s might be few indeed now. If the future was to hold crisis
again for Jennie--as who could doubt--it might well be that she would
choose to encounter her experiences alone.
Let to-morrow be Jennie’s, as nothing in her young life had yet been
hers.
And again, another echo of words long since uttered by a more cynical,
less kindly voice than that of the Rector, brought a shadowy smile that
held no mirth to Lydia’s lips as she walked home through the darkness.
Grandpapa, who knew, had called her “a situation-snatcher.”
Again and again, the strange expression, grotesque to the verge of
anti-climax, haunted Lydia.
She thought of it as she entered her own house, and heard the
exclamations of the servant Susan.
“Oh, ma’am, we’ve been wondering where you was! Miss Jennie’s been in
quite a way--it’s past dinner-time, and knowing you were walking----”
“I was detained at Mrs. Kennedy’s,” said Lydia briefly.
Jennie ran out of the drawing-room.
“Oh, mama! I’m glad you’ve come--I was getting so worried, thinking of
you out in the cold....”
Jennie stopped nervously, and Lydia knew intuitively that she was
remembering her mother’s old, implied claim to the sole prerogative for
all such expressions of concern.
“I stayed longer than I meant to with the Rector. He sent you his love.”
“Did he? Shall we have dinner now, mama, or are you going to change?”
“I’ll change,” said Lydia, and went slowly upstairs.
She carefully removed the traces of weeping from her face before she
came down again.
The short evening was a very quiet one. In the drawing-room Jennie sat
with her cheek resting upon her hand, gazing into the fire. Once she
said rather timidly:
“The packing is all finished. Susan and I put the things into my new
dressing-bag when I came in this afternoon.”
“It’s a beautiful bag,” said Lydia absently.
The dressing-bag had been Roland Valentine’s gift.
She remembered that she herself had been secretly disappointed, at
the time of her marriage, because no one had given her such a thing,
and she possessed only the plain, wooden hair brushes and clothes
brush, and the celluloid comb, that had figured upon her makeshift
dressing-table at Miss Nettleship’s boarding-house. And then Uncle
George had given her a cheque, privately and almost shamefacedly,
explaining that it had nothing whatever to do with the three-tiered
silver cake-stand that was to figure at the wedding as the joint
offering of himself and Aunt Beryl. It was merely a trifle, that he
could well afford, with which to supplement her trousseau.
And Lydia remembered that, in her estimation, the word “trousseau” had
immediately become stretched so as to include the smallest and neatest
of silver-fitted dressing-bags. The very next day she had successfully
found and purchased the treasure.
She generally had succeeded, Lydia reflected dispassionately. “There’s
no such thing as can’t” had been another of Grandpapa’s aphorisms, and
his descendant, for many years of her life, had triumphantly proved
the axiom in her own person. She had made people like and admire her,
she had profited to the full of educational advantages, she had found
work and successfully achieved it, had extricated herself unscarred and
unblemished from various minor encounters, had made a marriage such as
might well have seemed unattainable to Lydia Raymond, working in Madame
Elena’s shop, and, even greater achievement, had adequately filled the
place open to her by that marriage. The record was to end there, it
seemed.
Lydia felt as utterly incapable of envisaging the rest of her life, the
complete aloneness that seemed suddenly to have revealed itself to her,
as of speaking aloud her thoughts to Jennie, motionless beside her.
They talked very little, and, it seemed to Lydia, only of trivialities,
although it was evident that Jennie attached some importance to her
speculations as to the morrow’s weather, the seating capacity of the
little church, the extent to which choir and organist would do credit
to the parish.
“I do want it all to be perfect,” was Jennie’s candid aspiration.
“I hope it will be,” said Lydia tonelessly. “Are you very happy,
Jennie?”
“Yes,” said Jennie simply, her grey eyes ecstatic.
Then she looked at her mother, and added wistfully:
“I should be perfectly happy if--if only you were, too.”
Lydia smiled faintly.
She thought that she could appraise at its true value Jennie’s obvious
afterthought.
Her fatigue was almost overwhelming, and, to her own surprise, she
slept heavily all through the night.
Then it was Jennie’s wedding-day--a clear, grey day, without sunshine
and without wind.
Surprisingly enough, Lydia felt, one went through it with very little
feeling of any kind. The emotion that struck most sharply at her
consciousness was one of surprise that so long a waiting, so many
preparations, should have culminated only in so brief an apotheosis.
The wedding was over before she had adjusted herself to the expected
pang of it, and actually very little impression of it all remained with
her.
The odd epithet that had rung in her ears since the day before rang
there still, meaningless, and yet strangely expressive.
“_Situation-snatcher._”
It even mingled senselessly in the farewells that rang all round her,
when Jennie--Jennie Valentine--took her leave of them all with her
husband.
“Good-bye--good luck!”
“Good-bye, dear Aunt Joyce--Grandmama--everybody--I’ll see you all
again in a little while----”
“Good-bye, Roland. Take care of her.”
“I will, ma’am--you may be sure of that.”
Roland was bending over old Lady Lucy’s hand.
“Look here, dear, I don’t want to hurry you, but you’ve only just
time----”
Colonel Kennedy, of course--always a victim to “train-fever.”
“Oh!”
The bride flung her arms round her mother’s neck.
“It’s only for a week, mama,” she whispered, consolingly. “Thank you
for giving me such a _lovely_ wedding----”
The chauffeur started the engine of the waiting motor-car, and its
throbbing broke on the air and caused Jennie to detach her clasp from
her mother. But she still faced Lydia with a pleading, puzzled look,
her eyes tearful, but, lurking in their grey depths, an unconquerable
joyousness.
“I _must_ say something,” Lydia reflected desperately, dully astonished
at her sudden inability to find any words at all.
A situation-snatcher. No--no--the foolish term was an obsession; she
had not been that--not now----
She bent forward and kissed Jennie once more.
“Good-bye, my child. You’ll write....”
The chauffeur held the door of the car open, and Jennie’s foot was on
the step.
She was within it, and her husband was beside her. Leaning across him,
her fresh face at the lowered window, her bare hand, with the new
wedding-ring gleaming upon it, grasped the door.
A sense of wrenching open, as of vistas of finality, suddenly dispersed
Lydia’s apathy, and, at the agonizing glimpse of her own bereft and
isolated future, she found, as the car began to move slowly from the
door, the habitual, instinctive self-expression that alone could drug
her misery.
“Good-bye, Jennie! I’ll see to everything--don’t worry about letters or
packing--I’ll do it all for you whilst you’re away.”
“Jennie is still waving!” cried Joyce Damerel, and waved back again
vigorously.
But at the same instant Lady Lucy laid her tremulous old hand upon
Lydia’s, gazing at her compassionately, and Nathalie Kennedy exclaimed
aloud, turning towards her:
“Oh, poor Lydia!”
The scattered groups of relatives and friends coalesced, surrounding
her.