§
Meanwhile, at Almond Tree Cottage, Jocelyn’s mother had become Margery
to Mr. Thorpe, and he to her was Edgar.
The idea she had played with, the possibility she had smiled at, was now
fact. She had reacted to Jocelyn’s marriage by getting involved,
immediately and profoundly, in Mr. Thorpe. Without quite knowing how,
with hardly a recollection of when, she had become engaged to him. He
had caught her at the one moment in which, blind with shock, she would
have clung to anything that offered support.
How could she face South Winch without support? For there was not only
her inward humiliation to be dealt with, the ruin of her love and pride
and the wreck of those bright ambitious dreams--surely of all ambitious
dreams the most natural and creditable, the dreams of a mother for the
future greatness of her son,--there was the pity of South Winch. No, she
couldn’t stand pity; and pity because of Jocelyn, of all people! Of him
who had been her second, more glorious self, of him who was to have been
all she would have been if she could have been. South Winch couldn’t
pity her if she married its richest man. There was something about
wealth, when present in sufficient quantities, that silenced even
culture; and everybody knew about Mr. Thorpe’s house, and grounds, and
cars, and conservatories. She therefore dropped like a fruit that no
longer has enough life to hold on, into the outstretched hands of Mr.
Thorpe.
Jocelyn didn’t want her; Mr. Thorpe did. It was a deplorable thing, she
thought, for she could still at intervals, in spite of her confusion and
distress, think intelligently, that a woman couldn’t be happy, couldn’t
be at peace, unless there existed somebody who wanted her, and wanted
her exclusively; but there it was. Deplorable indeed, for it now flung
her into Mr. Thorpe’s arms prematurely, without her having had time
properly to think it out. No doubt she would have got into them in the
end, but not yet, not for years and years. Now she tumbled in from a
sheer instinct of self-preservation. She had to hold on to some one. She
was giddy and staggering from the blow that had cut through her life.
Jocelyn, her boy, her wonderful, darling boy, in whose career she had so
passionately merged herself, doing everything, even the smallest thing,
only with reference to him, wanted her so little that he could throw her
aside, thrust her away without an instant’s hesitation, and with her his
whole future, the future he and she had been working at with utter
concentration for years, for the sake of a girl he had only known a
fortnight. He said so in the letter. He said it was only a fortnight.
One single fortnight, as against those twenty-two consecrated years.
Who was this girl, who was this person for whom he gave up everything at
a moment’s notice? Mrs. Luke, shuddering, hid in Mr. Thorpe’s arms; for
the things that Jocelyn hadn’t said in that letter on the eve of his
marriage were more terrible almost to her than those he had said,--the
ominous non-reference to the girl’s family, to her upbringing, to her
circumstances. Hardly had he mentioned her name. At the end, in a
postcript, as if in his heart he were ashamed, he had said it was
Salvatia--Salvatia!--and her father’s name was Pinner, but that he
really didn’t know that it mattered, and he wouldn’t have cared, and
neither would anybody else who saw her care, if she hadn’t had fifty
names. And then he had added the strange words, ominously defiant,
unnecessarily coarse, that he would have taken her, and so would any one
else who saw her, in her shift; and then still further, and still more
strangely and coarsely, he had scribbled in a shaky hand, as though he
had torn open the letter again and stuck it in in a kind of frenzy of
passion, ‘My God--her shift!’
Mrs. Luke hid in Mr. Thorpe’s arms. Coarseness had never yet got into
Almond Tree Cottage, except the coarseness consecrated by time, which it
was a sign of intelligence not to mind, the coarseness, for instance, of
those marvellous Elizabethans. But coarseness from Jocelyn? Oh, blind
and mad, blind and mad. Where had her boy got it from, this capacity for
sudden, violent, ruinous behaviour? Not from her, very certainly. It
must be some of the thick, sinister blood filtered down into him from
the Spanish woman her husband’s great-grandfather--Mrs. Luke had been
pleased with this great-grandfather up to then, because in her own
family, where there should have been four, there hadn’t been any--had
married against his parents’ wishes. She hid in Mr. Thorpe’s arms.
But--‘This in exchange for Jocelyn?’ she couldn’t help repeating to
herself that first day, trying to shut her eyes, spiritually as well as
physically, trying to withdraw her attention, as even in this crisis
she remembered Dr. Johnson had done in unpleasant circumstances, from
Mr. Thorpe’s betrothal caresses.
Mr. Thorpe was clean and healthy; for that she was thankful. Still, she
suffered a good deal that first day. Then, imperceptibly, she got used
to him. Surprising how soon one gets used to a man, she thought, on whom
this one’s substantial shape had made a distinctly disagreeable
impression the first week she found herself up against it. By the end of
a week she no longer noticed the curious springy solidity of Mr.
Thorpe’s figure, which had seemed to her when he first embraced her,
used as she was to the lean fragility of her late husband, so
unpleasantly much. And besides, the flood of his riches began to flow
over her immediately, and it was a warm flood. She hadn’t known how
agreeable such a flood could be. She hadn’t had an idea of the way it
could bring comfort into one’s every corner--yes, even into one’s mind
when one’s mind was sore and unhappy. Riches, she had always held, were
vulgar; but she now obscurely recognised that they were only vulgar if
they were somebody else’s. One’s own--why, to what noble ends could not
riches be directed in the hands of those who refused to use them
vulgarly? Married to Mr. Thorpe, she would make of them as beautiful and
graceful a thing as she had made of her poverty. And it did soothe Mrs.
Luke, it did help her a great deal during these days of wreckage, that
her life, which had been so spare and bony, was now becoming hourly, in
every sort of pleasant way, more and more padded, more and more soft and
luscious with fat.
For, if no longer precious to Jocelyn, she was precious to Mr. Thorpe,
and it was his pride to pad out the meagreness of her surroundings; and
though she cried herself to sleep each night because of Jocelyn, she
awoke each morning comforted because of Mr. Thorpe. After twelve hours
of not seeing Mr. Thorpe she could clearly perceive, what was less
evident at the end of a long evening with him, her immense good fortune
in having got him. A decent, honourable man. Not every woman in the
forties finds at the precise right moment a decent, honourable man, who
is also rich. Where would she have been now without Mr. Thorpe? He was
her rock, her refuge; he was the plaster to her wounded pride, the
restorer of her self-respect.
‘I can _rely_ on him,’ she said to herself while she sat in front of her
glass in the morning, brushing her thick, black hair--in the evening
when she brushed it she didn’t say anything. ‘I can entirely _trust_
him. What, after all, is education? What has education done for Jocelyn?
The one thing that matters is character.’
And she would come down to find her breakfast-table strewn with fresh
evidences of Mr. Thorpe’s hot-houses and love.
§
Not a word from Jocelyn all this time, not a sign. He might be dead, she
thought; and it would have hurt her less if he had been. For dead he
would have been for ever hers; nobody then could touch him, take him
away. Crushed and bitter, she crept yet closer to Mr. Thorpe. He liked
it. He liked being crept close to. He was thoroughly pleased with what
in his business-like mind he referred to as his bargain.
She never mentioned Jocelyn to him, and he liked that too. ‘Young fool,’
he said, when he came round unexpectedly early one evening, and found
her crying. ‘No use worrying about a fool.’
And Mrs. Luke, still further crushed by hearing Jocelyn called a fool,
and therefore being forced to the deduction that she had produced
one--yes, and it was true, too, in spite of his brains--could only hang
on to Mr. Thorpe, and say nothing.
He liked that. He liked to be hung on to, and he had no objection to a
certain amount of saying nothing in a woman. Her late husband, could he
now have seen her who was once his wife, would have been surprised, for
in his day she had never hung on, and had been particularly good at
conversation. But there was that about Mr. Thorpe which quenched
conversation. Even before her engagement, in the days of his preliminary
assiduities after his wife’s death, she had found it difficult, when he
came round, to keep what she understood was sometimes described as the
ball rolling; and she was completely in command of herself then, in the
full flood of her happiness and satisfaction. Conversation with him, the
kind she and South Winch knew and practised, was out of the question.
There was no exchange of opinions possible with Mr. Thorpe, because he
never exchanged his, he merely emitted them and stuck to them. And they
came out clothed in so very few words that they seemed to Mrs. Luke,
watching him with quizzical, amused eyes--ah, those detached days, when
one looked on and wasn’t involved!--almost indecently bare. Now she
drooped. She bowed her head.
Mr. Thorpe liked that. He liked a woman to bow her head. Gentleness in a
woman was what he liked: gentleness, and softness, and roundness.
Margery was gentle all right, and soft enough in places--anyhow of
speech; but she wasn’t round. Not yet. Later, of course, after the cook
at Abergeldie--his house was called Abergeldie--had had a go at her, she
wouldn’t know herself again. And meanwhile, to put an immediate stop to
all this underfeeding, a stream of nourishment--oysters, lobsters,
plovers’ eggs, his own pineapples, his own forced strawberries, his own
butter and fresh eggs, and, once, a sucking pig--thickly flowed across
the daisied meadow dividing Abergeldie from Almond Tree Cottage.
The little maid turned yellow, and began to get up at night and be sick.
Mrs. Luke, feeling it was both wrong and grotesque to bury lobsters in
the back garden, and unable either to stop the stream or deal with it
herself, was forced to send most of the stuff round to her friends; and
so South Winch became aware of what had happened, for nobody except Mr.
Thorpe grew pineapples and bought plovers’ eggs, and nobody gave such
quantities of them to a woman without being going to marry her
afterwards.
Well, it was as good a way as any other of letting people know, thought
Mrs. Luke, sitting in silence with Mr. Thorpe’s arm round her waist,
while every now and then he furtively felt to see whether she wasn’t
beginning anywhere to curve. Instead of sending round _billets de faire
part_ she sent lobsters. Rather original, she thought, with a slight
return to her detached and amused earlier self. ‘Does he really think I
can eat them all?’ she wondered.
And the little maid, in whose kitchen much, even so, remained, fell from
one bilious paroxysm into another.
§
She was warmly congratulated. It soothed her afresh, this new importance
with which she was instantly clothed. Money--she sighed, but faced
it--money, even in that place where people really did try to keep their
eyes well turned to the light, was a great, perhaps the greatest, power.
She sighed. It oughtn’t to be so; but if it was so? And who would not be
grateful, really deeply grateful, to Edgar, and put up with all his
little ways, when he was so generous, so kind, and so completely
devoted? Besides, his little ways would, she was sure, later on become
much modified. A wife could do so much. A well-bred, intelligent
wife--it was simply silly not to admit plain facts--could do everything.
When she was married....
And then she found herself shrinking from the thought of when she was
married. She could restrain his affection now; it was her privilege. But
when she was married, it would be his privilege not to be able to be
restrained. And there appeared to be no age limit to a man’s
affectionateness. Here was Edgar, well over sixty and still
affectionate. Really, really, thought Mrs. Luke, who even in her most
ardent days had loved only with her mind.
And then one evening, nearly three weeks after the arrival of that
letter of Jocelyn’s that had brought all this about, Mr. Thorpe said,
‘When’s it going to be?’
‘When is what going to be?’ she asked, starting.
To this he only replied, ‘Coy, eh?’ and sat staring at her proudly and
affectionately, a hand on each knee.
Pierced by the word, Mrs. Luke hastened to say in her most level voice,
‘You mean our marriage? Surely there’s plenty of time.’
‘Time, eh? You bet there isn’t. Not for you and me. We’re no chickens,
either of us.’
Mrs. Luke winced. She had never at any time tried, or wished, or
pretended to be a chicken, yet to be told she wasn’t one was strangely
ruffling. If it were a question of chickens, compared with Edgar she
certainly was one. These things were relative. But what a way of....
And then, as before, the little maid came in with a letter, and Mr.
Thorpe, vexed as before by the interruption (why that servant--well, one
could hardly call a thing that size a servant; that aproned spot,
then--couldn’t leave letters outside till they were wanted ...), said,
curbing himself, ‘Letter, eh?’
‘From Jocelyn,’ said Mrs. Luke, who had flushed a bright flame-colour,
and whose hands, as they held the letter, were shaking.
‘Thought so,’ said Mr. Thorpe in disgust.
§
He learned with profound disapproval that Jocelyn was bringing his bride
to Almond Tree Cottage. He didn’t want brides about--none, that is,
except his own; and he feared this precious son of hers, who had behaved
to her about as badly as a son could behave, would distract Margery’s
attention from her own affairs, and make her even more coy about fixing
the date of her wedding than she already was.
‘Going to sponge on you,’ was his comment.
She shrank from the word.
‘Jocelyn isn’t like that,’ she said quickly.
‘Pooh,’ said Mr. Thorpe.
She shrank from this word too. Edgar was, as she well knew and quite
accepted, a plain man and a rough diamond, but a man shouldn’t be too
plain, a diamond shouldn’t be too rough. Besides, surely the expression
was obsolete.
‘My dear Edgar,’ she protested gently.
Mr. Thorpe persisted. ‘It’s pooh all right,’ he said. ‘Young men with
wives in their shifts’--he remembered every word of that first
letter--‘and only five hundred a year to keep them on, always sponge. Or
try to,’ he said, instinctively closing his hands over his pockets. ‘Got
to live, you know. Must stay somewhere.’
‘He is going to live in London,’ said Mrs. Luke. ‘You remember he said
so in his first letter. Live there and do--do literary work.’
‘Bunkum,’ said Mr. Thorpe.
And this word seemed to her even more obsolete, if possible, than pooh.
But there was no time to worry about words. What was she going to do?
Where was she going to put Jocelyn and his wife? How was she going to
receive them? Had she better pretend to South Winch that she had known
nothing about it till they had appeared on her doorstep and overwhelmed
her with the news? Had she better pretend that Jocelyn had given up
Cambridge because he had been offered a position in London too good to
refuse? Or had she better hide them indoors till they had found rooms in
London, and could be got away again without having been seen, and
meanwhile go on behaving as if nothing had happened?
She lost her head. Standing there, with the letter in her shaking hands
and Mr. Thorpe, who wouldn’t go away, squarely in front of her, she
lost her practical, cool head, and simply couldn’t think what to do. One
thing alone was clear--she was going to suffer. And presently another
thing emerged into clearness, an absurd thing, but curiously difficult
and unpleasant,--she had no spare-room, and in Jocelyn’s room was only
the little camp bed it had pleased him (and her too, who liked to think
of him as Spartan), to sleep in. This was no house for more than just
herself and Jocelyn. Oh, why hadn’t she married Mr. Thorpe at once? Then
she would have been established at Abergeldie by now, and able to let
the pair have Almond Tree Cottage to themselves.
Abergeldie. The word brought light into her confusion. Of course. That
was where they must go. Abergeldie, majestic in the size and number of
its unused spare-rooms, magnificent in its conveniences, its baths, its
staff of servants. She had been taken over it, as was fitting; had waded
across the thickness of its carpets, admired its carved wardrobes,
marble-topped washstands and immense beds, gazed from its numerous
windows at its many views, wilted through its hot-houses, ached along
its lawns, and knew all about it. The very place. And, given courage by
the knowledge of the impossibility of housing more than one person
beside herself in her own house, urged on by the picture in her mind of
that tiny room upstairs and its narrow bed, she made her suggestion to
Mr. Thorpe.
Nervously she made it, fearing that the reason for it, fearing that the
merest most passing mention of such a thing as a bed, would bring out
the side of him which she was forced to recognise as ribald. And it did.
He said all the things she was so sorry to have been obliged to expect
he would. But he was good-natured; he liked to feel he was helping
Margery out of a fix. Also, the young fool would be away from his mother
then, and perhaps some sense could be got into his head, and at the same
time as sense was got in nonsense would be got out,--the nonsense, for
instance, of no doubt supposing that he, Edgar Thorpe, was the sort of
man who could be sponged upon beyond, say, a couple of days. Besides, he
was proud of Abergeldie, and hardly anybody, what with first Annie’s
being alive and then with her not being alive, had ever seen it.
So it was settled, and he went away earlier than usual to give his
orders to the housekeeper; and Mrs. Luke, creeping into bed with a
splitting headache, lay for hours staring at nothing, and trying to
forget Mr. Thorpe’s last words.
For, after he had most affectionately embraced her, so affectionately
that she was sure one of her tendons had snapped, he had said: ‘No good
his trying to milk _me_, you know.’
Milk him?
She lay staring into the dark. Was character, after all, better than
education?
§
The Canon said it was, and so did his wife. In fact at tea next day in
Mrs. Luke’s little garden, on that bit of lawn round the cedar, near the
low fence across which grazed Mr. Thorpe’s Jersey cows, they all three
were unanimous that it was. Wonderful how daylight, ordinary things,
meals, tea-cups, callers, dispelled doubts.
‘Better to have both, of course,’ said the Canon, eating Mr. Thorpe’s
forced strawberries after covering them with the cream that had been,
twenty-four hours earlier, inside those very cows, ‘but if that’s not
possible, give me character. It’s what _tells_. It’s the only thing that
in the long run _tells_.’
‘Oh, well--one isn’t seriously disputing it,’ said Mrs. Luke. ‘Only
these theories, if one presses them----’
She paused, and poured out more tea for Mrs. Walker.
‘For instance,’ she went on, ‘suppose a man had a cook of a completely
admirable nature. If he married her, could he be happy? I mean, an
educated man. Let us say a very _well_ educated man.’
‘Certainly, if she cooked nicely,’ said the Canon, who thought he
scented rather than saw the form of Mr. Thorpe lurking somewhere at the
back of his delightful parishioner’s remarks, and wasn’t going to be
caught.
He knew the importance of turning away seriousness, when it cropped up
at the wrong moment, with a laugh. A man as valuably rich as Mr. Thorpe
shouldn’t be taken too seriously, shouldn’t be examined and pulled
about. His texture simply wouldn’t stand it. He should be said grace
over, thought the Canon, who fully realised what a precious addition Mr.
Thorpe’s wealth in Mrs. Luke’s hands was going to be to South Winch, and
gobbled up thankfully. Gobbled up; not turned over first on the plate.
Mrs. Luke hadn’t invited the Walkers to tea. On the contrary, when first
they appeared at the back door, ushered through it by the little maid
who each time she saw the Canon’s gaiters was thrown by them into a
fresh convulsion of respectfulness, she had been annoyed. Because all
day long she had been vainly trying to collect and arrange her thoughts,
soothe her nerves, prepare her mind for the evening, when Jocelyn had
said he would arrive--to supper, he wrote, somewhere round eight
o’clock,--and define what her attitude was going to be both to him and
to the girl with the utterly ridiculous Christian name; and not having
one bit succeeded, and impelled by some vague hope that out of doors she
might find quiet, that in Nature she might find tranquillity and
composure, had said she would have tea in the garden.
_Nature never did betray the heart that loved her...._
Some idea like that, though she wasn’t at all a Wordsworthian and
regarded him at best with indulgence, drove her out to what her corner
of South Winch held of Nature,--the bit of lawn, the cedar, the Kerria
japonica against the wall by the kitchen window, the meadow across the
railing, full of daisies and cows, and, on that fine spring afternoon of
swift shadows and sunshine, the wind, fresh and sweet with the scent of
young leaves.
But once the Walkers were there she found they did her good. They
distracted her. And they liked her so much. It was always pleasant and
restoring to be with people who liked one. The Canon made her feel she
was good-looking and important, and his wife made her feel she was
important. Also, they helped with the strawberries, from which, after a
fortnight of them at every meal, she had for some time turned away her
eyes. Later on, when she was alone again, there would still be at least
a couple of hours to decide in what sort of a way she would meet
Jocelyn; quite long enough, seeing how she couldn’t, whenever she
thought of the meeting, stop herself from trembling.
Oh, he had behaved outrageously to her--to her, his mother, who had
given up her life to him. There had been men in past years she might
have married, men of her own age and class, by whom she might have had
other children and with whom she might have been happy all this time;
and she had turned them down, dismissed them ruthlessly because of
Jocelyn, because only Jocelyn, and his gifts and career, were to have
her love and devotion. Wasn’t it a shame, wasn’t it a shame to treat her
so? To behave to her as though she were his enemy, the kill-joy who
mustn’t be told and mustn’t be consulted, who must be kept in the dark,
shut out? And why, because he had gone mad about a girl, must he go
still more mad, and ruin himself by throwing up Cambridge?
A wave of fresh misery swept over her. ‘Go on talking--_please_,’ she
said quickly, when the Walkers, replete, fell momentarily silent.
They looked up surprised; and they were still more surprised when they
saw that her face, usually delicately pale, was quite red, and her eyes
full of tears.
The Canon was affectionately concerned, and his wife was concerned.
‘Are you not well, dear Mrs. Luke?’ she inquired.
‘My _dear_ friend,’ said the Canon, setting down his cup, tidying his
mouth, and taking her hand. ‘My dear, _dear_ friend--what is it?’
Then, impulsively, she told them. ‘It’s Jocelyn,’ she said. ‘He’s
married, and given up Cambridge.’
And all her mortification and bitter unhappiness engulfed her, and she
began helplessly to cry.
‘Dear, dear. Dear me. Dear, dear me,’ said the Canon.
‘Dear Mrs. Luke----’ said his wife.
They sat impotently looking on. Such excessive weeping from the poised,
the unemotional, the serene Mrs. Luke, was most disconcerting. One
shouldn’t expose oneself like that, however unhappy one was, thought the
Canon’s wife, feeling terribly uncomfortable; and even the Canon had a
sensation he didn’t like, as of fig-leaves being wrenched off and flung
aside.
Well, having behaved like this--really her nerves had completely
gone--there was nothing left but to explain further, and after a few
painful moments of trying to gulp herself quiet she told them all about
it.
They were horrified. Jocelyn’s behaviour, to the Walkers who had
ripening sons of their own, seemed to the last degree disgraceful. That
the girl was some one to be ashamed of was very plain, or why should he
have come down voluntarily from Cambridge? Marriage by itself didn’t
stop a student from continuing there. He was ruined. He would never be
anything now. And as representing South Winch, which had not yet in its
history produced a distinguished man, the Canon felt this blighting of
its hopes that some day it would be celebrated as the early home of Sir
Jocelyn Luke, perhaps of Lord Luke--why not? hadn’t there been
Kelvin?--very keenly.
Poor mother. Poor, poor mother.
The Canon took her hand, and, raising it reverently to his lips, kissed
it. His wife didn’t mind this, because in sorrow, as in sickness, there
is no sex. Nobody enjoys kissing the hand of the sick. She minded
nothing the Canon did so long as he didn’t enjoy it.
‘Yes--and he’s bringing her here to-night,’ gasped Mrs. Luke, struggling
to keep down a fresh outburst.
‘Here? Bringing her here? Without first asking your permission and
forgiveness?’ cried the Canon. ‘Disgraceful. Outrageous. Unpardonable.’
‘Oh, _isn’t_ it, _isn’t_ it----’ wept Mrs. Luke into her handkerchief.
Never, never could she forgive Jocelyn. No, she never, never would. Let
him manage for himself now. Let him lie as best he could on the
miserable bed he had made. She would tell him so plainly, and though she
couldn’t help his coming there that night she would insist that he
should go away again next morning and never, never come back....
And then, over the top of her handkerchief, she saw him standing there,
standing in the back-door looking at her: Jocelyn; the light of her
eyes; the only thing really in her life.
‘Jocelyn--oh, _Jocelyn_!’
She gave a kind of sobbing sigh; she struggled to her feet; she stood,
swaying a moment, holding on to the table; and then simply ran to him.
§
‘Mother----’
‘Oh--_Jocelyn_!’
He hugged her tighter than he had ever hugged her. He was raised quite
outside his ordinary self, in this joy of getting back to her. And that
she should run into his arms--she who never ran, who never showed
emotion!
‘You’re not angry, Mother?’ he asked, looking down at her upturned face,
still wet and red from her recent weeping.
‘Dreadfully,’ she said, smiling up at him, the strangest transfigured,
watery smile.
‘Oh, Mother--I knew you wouldn’t fail me!’ he cried, infinitely
relieved, infinitely melted and grateful.
‘Fail you?’
‘Oh, Mother----’
And they hugged again. His mother’s love was a miracle. Her voice was an
enchantment. Just to hear the words, the precious right words, said in
the precious right voice....
At the tea-table the Canon and his wife, who carefully didn’t look but
yet saw, were much shocked. This surely amounted to having duped them as
to her real feelings, to having got their sympathy and concern on false
pretences.
‘Hadn’t we better go home, John?’ Mrs. Walker inquired of her husband.
‘Much better,’ said the Canon, who didn’t see how to do it.
He looked about for a way of escape.
There wasn’t one, except by climbing over to the cows, and that would
involve them in trespass. Besides, retreat should be dignified.
‘But where----?’ Mrs. Luke was whispering, her cheek against Jocelyn’s,
while with one hand she still clung hold of his neck. ‘Salvatia----?’
‘In the sitting-room,’ whispered Jocelyn. ‘I put her there. I wanted to
see you first alone. Why on earth those Walkers are here to-day of all
days----’
He glanced at the scene on the lawn, where the Canon and his wife,
marooned at the untidy tea-table, were trying to seem absorbed in
something that wasn’t happening up above their heads in the branches of
the cedar.
‘You said supper-time----’
‘But I scorched to get to you quickly----’
‘Then you wanted me?’
‘Oh, Mother!’
And he hugged her again, and the Walkers looked about again for a way of
escape, and again found none.
Sweet, sweet, delicious beyond dreams, was this restoration to all, to
far more than all that had been apparent before, of her boy’s need of
her, and of his love. If this was the effect being married had on him,
then she was glad he had married. How could she be angry with a wife who
brought him closer than ever, more utterly than ever, back to his
mother? So, she thought, must the Prodigal Son’s father have felt about
the swine his boy had had such a dose of. He wouldn’t have resented
them; he must have quite liked them.
‘You’ll try and love her, won’t you, Mother?’ said Jocelyn. ‘She
is--very lovable.’
And taking his mother by the hand, he led her to the sitting-room.
§
There stood the exquisite Sally; stood, because she was afraid to sit.
Round her slender body she held tightly the new wrap Jocelyn, among
other things, had bought her on their way through London and had
instructed her to keep on till he told her to take it off. It was grey,
so as to make her as invisible as possible, and was of the kind that has
neither sleeves nor fastenings; and Sally, who had never been inside a
thing like that before, clutched it with anxious obedience about her
with both hands.
Extravagantly slender in this garment, which took on as if by magic the
most delicious folds directly it got hold of Sally, and too lovely to be
credible, she stood there, her lips parted in fright, and her eyes fixed
on the entering Mrs. Luke.
‘_Oh_----’ said Mrs. Luke, catching her breath, who had read poetry,
who had heard music, who knew what April mornings in the woods are like,
when the sun shines through windflowers and the birds are wild with
young delight.
Sally’s knees shook. She clutched the grey wrap tighter still about her.
Mr. Luke’s mother was so terribly like Mr. Luke. Two of them. She hadn’t
bargained for two of them. And she was worse than he was, because she
was a lady. Gentlemen were difficult enough, but they did every now and
then cast themselves at one’s feet and make one feel one could do what
one liked for a bit, but a lady wouldn’t; a lady would always stay a
lady.
The word struck cold on Sally’s heart. What did one do with a lady? And
a lady, too, who seemed hardly older than her son, and as wide-awake and
sharp as you please, Sally was sure. She had been imagining Jocelyn’s
mother old and stout and whitehaired, and perhaps not able to see or
hear very well, and therefore comfortingly slow to mark what was done
amiss. And here was this thin, quick, almost young lady. No flies on
_her_ for dead certain, thought Sally, clutching her wrap.
Her heart, which felt as if it had already sunk as far as it could go,
contrived to sink still farther. She stared at Mrs. Luke with the
fascinated fear of a rabbit confronted by a snake; but her stare, which
felt inside just as ugly and scared as that, was outside the most
beautiful little look of gracious shyness, and Mrs. Luke, staring back,
was for a moment quite unable to speak.
Who was this? Had Jocelyn caught and married some marvellous daughter of
a patrician house? Had he been up to Olympus, and netted the young
Aphrodite as, on that morning of roses, she stepped ashore from her
shell?
She flushed scarlet. The perfect grace and youth, the dream-like
loveliness....
‘Why,’ she murmured under her breath, ‘how _beautiful_----’ and took a
step forward, and held out both her hands.
‘Are you really my new daughter?’ she said in a low voice. ‘You?’
With a great effort Sally managed to stand her ground, and not shrink
away backwards before this alarming figure. She didn’t know what to do
about the held out hands, because if she let go of the wrap so as to
shake them it would fall off, and Jocelyn had said she was on no account
to let it do that.
She therefore stood motionless, and her tongue clove to the roof of her
mouth.
Mrs. Luke came close. ‘You wonderful child--_you’re_ Salvatia?’ she
murmured.
With a great effort Sally continued to hold her ground; with a great
effort she unclove her tongue.
‘That’s right,’ she said, clutching her grey wrap.
Two words; but enough. How many times had not Jocelyn told her not to
say That’s right? But he had told her not to say nearly everything; she
couldn’t possibly remember all the things she wasn’t to say, however
hard she tried. Indeed, Sally in her flustered soul was thinking what a
mercy it was she hadn’t added ‘mum.’ It had been on the tip of her
tongue, faced by a lady, and she had hung on to it just in time.
Mrs. Luke, startled, was arrested for an instant in her advance. Then,
not after all quite certain that she had heard what she had heard--it
seemed impossible that she should have--she went close up to Sally and
kissed her. She had to reach up to her for Sally was half a head the
taller, besides being rigid with fright.
‘Sally, kiss my mother and make friends,’ said Jocelyn.
‘Yes, Mr. Luke----’ said Sally, making a quick downward lunge of her
head.
‘Now, Sally----_please_,’ protested Jocelyn. ‘She can’t,’ he added,
turning to his mother, ‘get used to calling me by my Christian name.’
‘Sorry,’ said Sally; and felt so very warm that she had a queer
conviction that even her stomach must be blushing.
Mrs. Luke stood looking at her, trying to smile. She now knew
everything. No need for words from Jocelyn, for explanations. She knew,
and she understood. Up to her to behave well; up to her to behave
wonderfully, and make him more than ever certain there was no one in the
whole world like his mother.
‘She’ll learn,’ she said, smiling as best she could. ‘Won’t
you--Salvatia?’
If only, thought Sally, she were back at Woodles; if only, only she were
back safe and quiet with her father at Woodles.
‘It was inevitable,’ said Mrs. Luke, turning to Jocelyn. ‘Absolutely
inevitable.’
He caught hold of his mother’s hands. That she should see that, that she
should instantly understand....
‘And I congratulate you with all my heart, my dear son, and my dear
daughter,’ Mrs. Luke went on, continuing to be wonderful. ‘You are both
my dear, my very dear, children.’
And Jocelyn bent his head over her hand, and kissed it in a fervour of
gratitude and relief.
And Sally, looking on at Usband in this new light, thought, ‘Well, I’m
blest.’