1
Only those who have tended their loved ones through long illnesses know
how at such times hour slides into hour, eventless save for the notches
on the temperature-chart, for the slight recoveries or the slight
relapses of the patient, for the doctor's cautious warnings or the
nurse's hopeful cheeriness; how wary nights are but the interludes
between weary days.
But night after night at Daffadillies, while her watchers slept,
unwearied and warier than they, Julia's brain clocked away its eventful
hours; and dawn after wakeful dawn her weary hands added their
carefully-hidden sheets to the pile of penciled manuscript in the
leather-lined basket.
"Nurse," she used to say of a morning, "I haven't slept quite as well as
usual. After I've had my breakfast I think a little doze would do me
good." After lunch, too, she liked to doze, and sometimes even after
tea. "It's the best thing for her," said nurse. "She's getting better.
Quite soon she'll be able to get up."
And indeed to all of them, not only to nurse, but to Smithers and Mrs.
Sanderson, to Aliette and to Ronnie, who came down every week-end with
better and better news of the work for which John Cartwright had briefed
him, it seemed as though eventually she must get well. Already she
talked of returning to Bruton Street for the autumn, of wintering on the
Riviera. "That hemorrhage," she pronounced, "was a blessing in disguise.
This rest is doing me the good in the world. I feel like a
two-year-old."
Her assumed high spirits deceived everybody. Even Sir Heron Baynet, who
motored down one evening, felt the slender chance possible. "Let her get
up," he told Aliette over dinner. "Let her come downstairs if she feels
like it."
But Julia, on that first visit, refused to get up. She and she alone at
Daffadillies knew, with that mysterious prescience of the doomed, that
death had only consented to stand off for a period; that only by
husbanding every ounce of her strength could she hope to run the full
race with him. So far, in that race, she was well ahead. But inevitably
there would be setbacks, stumbles and faintings, when death would close
up his distance.
It was a fascinating race, yet terrible--this secret course which she
and her pencil ran nightly, for her son's sake, against the ultimate
doom. Times came when she tasted the very foreknowledge of victory;
times when despondency took her by the shrunken throat, when it seemed
as though not even the supremest effort of her pencil could outrun those
cellules of consumption, those tiny implacable burrowers into the
shrinking lung-tissue, which spored with every breath she drew.
Once for twenty-four whole hours she relapsed into black despair. "Man's
Law"--so alive through so many wonderful nights--was dead in her brain.
Her body, too, was dying. She would perish, leaving her sword unforged,
Ronnie's Gordian knot unsevered.
Then, and then only, did Julia Cavendish decide to get up.
"I feel I need some distraction," she told Sir Heron on his next visit.
"A little literary work. It'll take my mind off things. Just a few rough
notes for a new book."
The physician, after much protest, yielded; and next afternoon Julia,
duly dressed by the adoring Smithers and helped to a cushioned chair at
the window by a proud nurse, sent for Aliette, who came bringing a great
armful of flowers from the garden, and--Aliette gone--for Mrs.
Sanderson, to whom, under pledge of secrecy and with the threat of
instant dismissal should the secret be revealed, she confided the
penciled contents of her manuscript-box.
2
May drifted into June. Forty miles away London seethed with strikes,
with rumors of a general election, and with Hector Brunton's viciously
victorious prosecution of three fraudulent bank directors. At
Daffadillies brooded peace.
Once more, typed, "Man's Law" grew alive. Once more, by daylight now,
Julia ran her race with death. From half-past ten to half-past one she
would sit at her desk by the open window--resentful of the faintest
noise, of the slightest interruption, resentful even of the medicines
which kept those tiny cellules at bay. At half-past one would come Mrs.
Sanderson, her face an unhappy mask; then lunch; and, lunch over, sleep.
Every afternoon nurse and Smithers would carry the invalid down the wide
staircase to take tea with Aliette and Ponto, either in the book-shelved
morning-room, or under the big cedar, whose branches just shadowed the
base-line of the tennis-court.
At those tea-parties Julia was curiously inquisitive. Habitually she
would steer conversation into personal channels, putting question after
question to Aliette--about her marriage with Hector, about her family,
about her elopement; till it seemed to the younger woman, shrinking from
the frankness of those questions, as though the elder were striving to
probe every secret of her life. But the probing was never unkindly; and
after Julia had retired to her room, Aliette, lonely in the hush of
Sussex sunsets that splashed warm gold on the gabled brown of the great
house, mused much for love of this marvelously valiant old lady whose
very valiance had beaten down death.
For actually, listening to the courage in Julia's voice, it was
impossible to imagine that voice forever silent. Even the second
hemorrhage, so slight that only the patient divined its full
significance, failed to dissipate Aliette's confidence.
Those nights, Hector's wife dreamed no more of Hector. Her dreams were
all of Ronnie; of Ronnie, solitary from Monday night to Friday in the
ridiculous flat where Caroline Staley still tended his sparse
requirements; of Ronnie, very loving, very confident of ultimate
success.
Latterly more than one important case--cases that brought publicity
rather than fees--had been put in Ronnie's way; and Julia, reading his
name in the papers, would gloat a little, seeing him already famous.
With her son, too, whenever he visited them, Julia had grown curiously
inquisitive, cross-examining him by the hour together about the work he
had done during the week, about the intricacies of the law, about
various prominent members of his profession. But when he grew
inquisitive about her work, Ronnie's mother always pleaded tiredness.
"I'm only playing at things," she used to say. "Don't worry me to tell
you about my scribbling."
3
The love of a man for a woman, and of a woman for her mate are very
blind, very selfish, when compared with the love of a mother for her
son. Every week, as June flamed into July, as her fears for Julia
subsided, as the fret of London dwindled into memory and the country
wove its soothing spells more and more surely about her consciousness;
every week-end when she drove to welcome her lover at the little wayside
station which served Daffadillies, Aliette grew more and more radiant,
more and more akin to the woman of a year ago, the woman whose kisses
had made paradise of Chilworth Cove.
Here, under the ramparting downs, even as then by the creaming beaches,
no harsh breeze from the outer world blew cold to wither the crimson
flowers of their lonely happiness. Even as at Chilworth, no strangers
came nigh them. Friends, acquaintances, her chagrined family--Julia
banned them all. The rare visitors from neighboring places had to
content their curiosity with leaving cards. The press, satisfied of
convalescence, left them undisturbed. Miraculously the telephone had
ceased to ring.
So while in the high rooms and on the smooth lawns of Daffadillies Julia
worked undistracted, glad that her loved ones, all unknowing what they
did, should make high holiday, Ronnie and Aliette, careless of Hector,
careless of scandal, careless of ostracism, played man and wife: until,
since no word, no thought, no living creature reminded them of reality,
their play grew truth and they forgot.
In this, their second honeymoon-time, their second oasis of make-believe
in the desert of unmarried life, Daffadillies became very "Joyous Gard,"
love's castle whence they rode out together--every week-end--on hired
nags--into fairyland. Southward to the downs or eastward into the weald
they rode; and wonderful it was once again to feel even hired horseflesh
under them, to recapture for ecstatic moments on swift scurries across
sheep-bitten turf the mad inexplicable bliss of their first meeting long
and long ago in the hunting-field.
"Man, if only hounds ran in summertime," Aliette would laugh, and crack
a playful whip at Ponto lolloping, stern high, beside them.
For if the man and the woman were happy, the huge hound was in his
seventh heaven. The great house suited him. His harlequin shape might
have been bred to match the gleam and shadows of those stone terraces
where--coat silken from the chamois-leather, slitty eyes somnolent yet
watchful--he basked in sunshine or bayed the moon till Aliette, fearful
for the invalid's comfort, drove him to the stables.
In "Joyous Gard" even Dennis and Etta were forgotten. How could Aliette
desire dream-children or any children so long as her present happiness
endured? To feel that Ronnie still cared, that the mere touch of her
hand could still kindle in him the flames of their early passion; to
realize herself responsible for his mother's comfort; to know that at
last she was being of real service to both of them--these things
sufficed the woman.
But the man, subconsciously, still yearned for material success, for the
prizes of his profession, for the fame and the emoluments of it. At the
woman's touch not only passion but ambition kindled him. If only once,
just once, he could meet and defeat, snatch a forensic victory from the
"hanging prosecutor."
4
Once again, as July sped, Julia Cavendish stumbled in her race with
death. The sustained effort of the past weeks had exhausted her
vitality. Her brain wearied of its weapon-forging; and for a week she
stayed it from the anvil.
But her brain, once released from its secret task, felt the impulse--as
is the habit of creative brains--to burden itself with other tasks. The
imaginative power, no longer under definite control, grew fearful,
painting devils on every wall. She summoned Sir Heron Baynet from
London, questioned and cross-questioned him about her disease. "You're a
mind-specialist, _inter alia_?" was one of her questions. "Tell me, do
you believe that a healthy mind can triumph over an unhealthy body?"
"It depends on the quality of the mind," Sir Heron humored her. "In your
own case, I should say that the sheer will to be cured has done more
than all my drugs. But don't overdo the work."
That--since all she now lived for was to bring her work to its
conclusion--frightened her but the more. Torn between the desire for
work and the fear lest, overworking, she should too soon pay the
inevitable penalty, she drove her brain once more to the
anvil--hammering, hammering, hammering at her sword of the written word
till even Mrs. Sanderson dared to protest with her.
"Your business is to type, not to argue," said Julia grimly; and once
again, openly this time, she began to work o' nights--so that it was a
novelist nearer than she had ever been to a nervous breakdown who said
to her "daughter-in-law" one afternoon as they took their tea in the
book-shelved morning-room overlooking the rain-dripped magnificence of
the herbaceous borders: "I wonder if I ought to have my family down.
They'll be a frightful nuisance, and I sha'n't be able to scribble while
they're here. All the same, one has one's duties----"
"I think your first duty is to get quite well," smiled the
"daughter-in-law.''
"Perhaps you're right, child." Nervously Julia's tired mind broached
another of its secret anxieties. "And _your_ family? Don't you ever feel
the need of them?"
"Mollie wrote last week," answered Aliette, burking the main question.
"Yes, but your father, your mother, that other sister of yours? Don't
you ever wish that they'd see reason; that they knew the exact truth;
that somebody could tell them the inside story of your married life?"
The questions came abruptly from the shawled figure in the easy chair.
"Sometimes. Not that the truth would influence mother. Mother was a
Roman Catholic, you know, before she married."
"Ah! I'd nearly forgotten that. It's important, very important,
because----" Julia, as though she had said too much, checked herself,
leaving the other rather mystified. "Still," she went on, "your mother
isn't a Roman Catholic now. She'd forgive you if there were a divorce,
if you married my son?"
"Yes. I suppose so." The younger woman brushed away the topic. "But
mother and I never cared for one another as you and Ronnie care. Mollie
and I were the pals in our family."
"Quite so." A sudden plan formulated itself in Julia's troubled brain.
"It must be lonely for you down here," she said after a pause. "Wouldn't
you like to have your sister Mollie to stay for a week?"
"But wouldn't she be a nuisance?"
"No. I like having young people about me, and besides, I've a
reason----"
Again, as though fearful of betraying herself, Julia checked speech. But
the next day and the next, work finished, her mind reverted to its plan.
"We might invite young Wilberforce, too," she suggested when Ronnie came
down on the Saturday. "That would make you four for tennis."
"And two for match-making," retorted Ronnie, entirely unsuspicious of
his mother's real motive.