Chapter 17

Constance Bledlow stepped out of the Bletchley train into the crowded Oxford station. Annette was behind her. As they made their way towards the luggage van, Connie saw a beckoning hand and face. They belonged to Nora Hooper, and in another minute Connie found herself taken possession of by her cousin. Nora was deeply sunburnt. Her colour was more garishly red and brown, her manner more trenchant than ever. At sight of Connie her face flushed with a sudden smile, as though the owner of the face could not help it. Yet they had only been a few minutes together before Connie had discovered that, beneath the sunburn, there was a look of tension and distress, and that the young brown eyes, usually so bright and bold, were dulled with fatigue. But to notice such things in Nora was only to be scorned. Connie held her tongue.

“Can’t you leave Annette to bring the luggage, and let us walk up?” said Nora.

Connie assented, and the two girls were soon in the long and generally crowded street leading to the Cornmarket. Nora gave rapidly a little necessary information. Term had just begun, and Oxford was “dreadfully full.” She had got another job of copying work at the Bodleian, for which she was being paid by the University Press, and what with that and the work for her coming exam, she was “pretty driven.” But that was what suited her. Alice and her mother were “all right.”

“And Uncle Ewen?” said Connie.

Nora paused a moment.

“Well, you won’t think he looks any the better for his holiday,” she said at last, with an attempt at a laugh. “And of course he’s doing ten times too much work. Hang work! I loathe work: I want to ‘do nothing forever and ever.’”

“Why don’t you set about it then?” laughed Connie.

“Because—” Nora began impetuously; and then shut her lips. She diverged to the subject of Mr. Pryce. They had not seen or heard anything of him for weeks, she said, till he had paid them an evening call, the night before, the first evening of the new term.

Connie interrupted.

“Oh, but that reminds me,” she said eagerly, “I’ve got an awfully nice letter—to-day—from Lord Glaramara. Mr. Pryce is to go up and see him.”

Nora whistled.

“You have! Well, that settles it. He’ll now graciously allow himself to propose. And then we shall all pretend to be greatly astonished. Alice will cry, and mother will say she ‘never expected to lose her daughter so soon.’ What a humbug everybody is!” said the child, bitterly, with more emphasis than grammar.

“But suppose he doesn’t get anything!” cried Connie, alarmed at such a sudden jump from the possible to the certain.

“Oh, but he will! He’s the kind of person that gets things,” said Nora contemptuously. “Well, we wanted a bit of good news!”

Connie jumped at the opening.

“Dear Nora!—have things been going wrong? You look awfully tired. Do tell me!”

Nora checked herself at once. “Oh, not much more than usual,” she said repellently. “And what about you, Connie? Aren’t you very bored to be coming back here, after all your grand times?”

They had emerged into the Corn. Before them, was the old Church of St. Mary Magdalen, and the modern pile of Balliol. In the distance stretched the Broad, over which the October evening was darkening fast; the Sheldonian in the far distance, with its statued railing; and the gates of Trinity on the left. The air was full of bells, and the streets of undergraduates; a stream of young men taking fresh possession, as it were, of the grey city, which was their own as soon as they chose to come back to it. The Oxford damp, the Oxford mist, was everywhere, pierced by lamps, and window-lights, and the last red of a stormy sunset.

Connie drew in her breath.

“No, I am not sorry, I am very glad to be back—though my aunts have been great dears to me.”

“I’ll bet anything Annette isn’t glad to be back—after the Langmoors!” said Nora grimly.

Connie laughed.

“She’ll soon settle in. What do you think?” She slipped her arm into her cousin’s. “I’m coming down to breakfast!”

“You’re not! I never heard such nonsense! Why should you?”

Connie sighed.

“I think I must begin to do something.”

“Do something! For goodness’ sake, don’t!” Nora’s voice was fierce. “I did think you might be trusted!”

“To carry out your ideals? So kind of you!”

“If you take to muddling about with books and lectures and wearing ugly clothes, I give you up,” said Nora firmly.

“Nora, dear, I’m the most shocking ignoramus. Mayn’t I learn something?”

“Mr. Sorell may teach you Greek. I don’t mind that.”

Connie sighed again, and Nora stole a look at the small pale face under the sailor hat. It seemed to her that her cousin had somehow grown beautiful in these months of absence. On her arrival in May, Connie’s good looks had been a freakish and variable thing, which could be often and easily disputed. She could always make a certain brilliant or bizarre effect, by virtue of her mere slenderness and delicacy, combined with the startling beauty of her eyes and hair. But the touch of sarcasm, of a half-hostile remoteness, in her look and manner, were often enough to belie the otherwise delightful impression of first youth, to suggest something older and sharper than her twenty years had any right to be. It meant that she had been brought up in a world of elder people, sharing from her teens in its half-amused, half-sceptical judgments of men and things. Nothing was to be seen of it in her roused moments of pleasure or enthusiasm; at other times it jarred, as though one caught a glimpse of autumn in the spring.

But since she and Nora had last met, something had happened. Some heat of feeling or of sympathy had fused in her the elements of being; so that a more human richness and warmth, a deeper and tenderer charm breathed from her whole aspect. Nora, though so much the younger, had hitherto been the comforter and sustainer of Connie; now for the first time, the tired girl felt an impulse—firmly held back—to throw her arms round Connie’s neck and tell her own troubles.

She did not betray it, however. There were so many things she wanted to know. First—how was it that Connie had come back so soon? Nora understood there were invitations to the Tamworths and others. Mr. Sorell had reported that the Langmoors wished to carry their niece with them on a round of country-house visits in the autumn, and that Connie had firmly stuck to it that she was due at Oxford for the beginning of term.

“Why didn’t you go,” said Nora, half scoffing—“with all those frocks wasting in the drawers?”

Connie retorted that, as for parties, Oxford, had seemed to her in the summer term the most gay and giddy place she had ever been in, and that she had always understood that in the October and Lent terms people dined out every night.

“But all the same—one can think a little here,” she said slowly.

“You didn’t care a bit about that when you first came!” cried Nora. “You despised us because we weren’t soldiers, or diplomats, or politicians. You thought we were a little priggish, provincial world where nothing mattered. You were sorry for us because we had only books and ideas!”

“I wasn’t!” said Connie indignantly. “Only I didn’t think Oxford was everything—and it isn’t! Nora!”—she looked round the Oxford street with a sudden ardour, her eyes running over the groups of undergraduates hurrying back to hall—“do you think these English boys could ever—well, fight—and die—for what you call ideas—for their country—as Otto Radowitz could die for Poland?”

“Try them!” The reply rang out defiantly. Connie laughed.

“They’ll never have the chance. Who’ll ever attack England? If we had only something—something splendid, and not too far away!—to look back upon, as the Italians look back on Garibaldi—or to long and to suffer for, as the Poles long and suffer for Poland!”

“We shall some day!” said Nora hopefully. “Mr. Sorell says every nation gets its turn to fight for its life. I suppose Otto Radowitz has been talking Poland to you?”

“He talks it—and he lives it,” said Connie, with emphasis. “It’s marvellous!—it shames one.”

Nora shrugged her shoulders.

“But what can he do—with his poor hand! You know Mr. Sorell has taken a cottage for him at Boar’s Hill—above Hinksey?”

Yes, Connie knew. She seemed suddenly on her guard.

“But he can’t live alone?” said Nora. “Who on earth’s going to look after him?”

Connie hesitated. Down a side street she perceived the stately front of Marmion, and at the same moment a tall man emerging from the dusk crossed the street and entered the Marmion gate. Her heart leapt. No! Absurd! He and Otto had not arrived yet. But already the Oxford dark, and the beautiful Oxford distances were peopled for her with visions and prophecies of hope. The old and famous city, that had seen so much youth bloom and pass, spoke magic things to her with its wise, friendly voice.

Aloud, she said—

“You haven’t heard? Mr. Falloden’s going to live with him.”

Nora stopped in stupefaction.

“_What?_”

Connie repeated the information—adding—

“I dare say Mr. Sorell didn’t speak of it to you, because—he hates it.”

“I suppose it’s just a theatrical _coup_,” said Nora, passionately, as they walked on—“to impress the public.”

“It isn’t!—it isn’t anything of the kind. And Otto had only to say no.”

“It’s ridiculous!—preposterous! They’ll clash all day long.”

Connie replied with difficulty, as though she had so pondered and discussed this matter with herself that every opinion about it seemed equally reasonable.

“I don’t think so. Otto wishes it.”

“But why—but _why_?” insisted Nora. “Oh, Connie!—as if Douglas Falloden could look after anybody but himself!”

Then she repented a little. Connie smiled, rather coldly.

“He looked after his father,” she said quietly. “I told you all that in my letters. And you forget how it was—that he and Otto came across each other again.”

Nora warmly declared that she had not forgotten it, but that it did not seem to her to have anything to do with the extraordinary proposal that the man more responsible than any one else for the maiming—possibly for the death—of Otto Radowitz, if all one heard about him were true, should be now installed as his companion and guardian during these critical months.

She talked with obvious and rather angry common sense, as one who had not passed her eighteenth birthday for nothing.

But Connie fell silent. She would not discuss it, and Nora was obliged to let the subject drop.

Mrs. Hooper, whose pinched face had grown visibly older, received her husband’s niece with an evident wish to be kind. Alice, too, was almost affectionate, and Uncle Ewen came hurrying out of his study to greet her. But Connie had not been an hour in the house before she had perceived that everybody in it was preoccupied and unhappy; unless, indeed, it were Alice, who had evidently private thoughts of her own, which, to a certain extent, released her from the family worries.

What was the matter? She was determined to know.

It happened that she and Alice went up to bed together. Nora had been closeted with her father in the little schoolroom on the ground floor, since nine o’clock, and when Connie proposed to look in and wish them good night, Alice said uncomfortably—

“Better not. They’re—they’re very busy.”

Connie ruminated. At the top of the stairs, she turned—

“Look here—do come in to me, and have a talk!”

Alice agreed, after a moment’s hesitation. There had never been any beginnings of intimacy between her and Connie, and she took Connie’s advance awkwardly.

The two girls were however soon seated in Connie’s room, where a blazing fire defied the sudden cold of a raw and bleak October. The light danced on Alice’s beady black eyes, and arched brows, on her thin but very red lips, on the bright patch of colour in each cheek. She was more than ever like a Watteau sketch in black chalk, heightened with red, and the dress she wore, cut after the pattern of an eighteenth-century sacque, according to an Oxford fashion of that day, fell in admirably with the natural effect. Connie had very soon taken off her tea-gown, loosened and shaken out her hair, and put on a white garment in which she felt at ease. Alice noticed, as Nora had done, that Connie was fast becoming a beauty; but whether the indisputable fact was to be welcomed or resented had still to be decided.

Connie had no sooner settled herself on the small sofa she had managed to fit into her room than she sprang up again.

“Stupid!—where are those letters!” She rummaged in various drawers and bags, hit upon what she wanted, after an impetuous hunt, and returned to the fire.

“Do you know I think Mr. Pryce has a good chance of that post? I got this to-day.”

She held out a letter, smiling. Alice flushed and took it. It was from Lord Glaramara, and it concerned that same post in the Conservative Central Office on which Herbert Pryce had had his eyes for some time. The man holding it had been “going” for months, but was now, at last, gone. The post was vacant, and Connie, who had a pretty natural turn for wire-pulling, fostered by her Italian bringing up, had been trying her hand, both with the Chancellor and her Uncle Langmoor.

“You little intriguer!” wrote Lord Glaramara—“I will do what I can. Your man sounds very suitable. If he isn’t, I can tell you plainly he won’t get the post. Neither political party can afford to employ fools just now. But if he is what you say—well, we shall see! Send him up to see me, at the House of Lords, almost any evening next week. He’ll have to take his chance, of course, of finding me free. If I cotton to him, I’ll send him on to somebody else. And—_don’t talk about it!_ Your letter was just like your mother. She had an art of doing these things!”

Alice read and reread the note. When she looked up from it, it was with a rather flustered face.

“Awfully good of you, Connie! May I show it—to Mr. Pryce?”

“Yes—but get it back. Tell him to write to Lord Glaramara to-morrow. Well, now then”—Connie discovered and lit a cigarette, the sight of which stirred in Alice a kind of fascinated disapproval,—“now then, tell me what’s the matter!—why Uncle Ewen looks as if he hadn’t had a day’s rest since last term, and Nora’s so glum—and why he and she go sitting up at night together when they ought to be in their beds?”

Connie’s little woman-of-the-world air—very evident in this speech—which had always provoked Alice in their earlier acquaintance, passed now unnoticed. Miss Hooper sat perplexed and hesitating, staring into the fire. But with that note in her pocket, Alice felt herself at once in a new and detached position towards her family.

“It’s money, of course,” she said at last, her white brow puckering. “It’s not only bills—they’re dreadfully worrying!—we seem never to get free from them, but it’s something else—something quite new—which has only happened, lately. There is an old loan from the bank that has been going on for years. Father had almost forgotten it, and now they’re pressing him. It’s dreadful. They know we’re so hard up.”

Connie in her turn looked perplexed. It was always difficult for her to realise financial trouble on a small scale. Ruin on the Falloden scale was intelligible to one who had heard much talk of the bankruptcies of some of the great Roman families. But the carking care that may come from lack of a few hundred pounds, this the Risboroughs’ daughter had to learn; and she put her mind to it eagerly.

She propped her small chin on her hands, while Alice told her tale. Apparently the improvement in the family finance, caused by Connie’s three hundred, had been the merest temporary thing. The Reader’s creditors had been held off for a few months; but the rain of tradesmen’s letters had been lately incessant. And the situation had been greatly worsened by a blow which had fallen just before the opening of term.

In a former crisis, five years before this date, a compassionate cousin, one of the few well-to-do relations that Mrs. Hooper possessed, had come to the rescue, and had given his name to the Hoopers’ bankers as guarantee for a loan of £500. The loan was to have been repaid by yearly instalments. But the instalments had not been paid, and the cousin had most unexpectedly died of apoplexy during September, after three days’ illness. His heir would have nothing to say to the guarantee, and the bank was pressing for repayment, in terms made all the harsher by the existence of an overdraft, which the local manager knew in his financial conscience ought not to have been allowed. His letters were now so many sword-thrusts; and post-time was a time of terror.

“Father doesn’t know what to do,” said Alice despondently. “He and Nora spend all their time trying to think of some way out. Father got his salary the other day, and never put it into the bank at all. We must have something to live on. None”—she hesitated—“none of the tradesmen will give us any credit.” She flushed deeply over the confession.

“Goodness!” said Connie, opening her eyes still wider.

“But if Nora knows that I’ve been telling you”—cried Alice—“she’ll never forgive me. She made me promise I wouldn’t tell you. But how can you help knowing? If father’s made a bankrupt, it wouldn’t be very nice for you! How could you go on living with us? Nora thinks she’s going to earn money—that father can sell two wretched little books—and we can go and live in a tiny house on the Cowley Road—and—and—all sorts of absurd things!”

“But Why is it Nora that has to settle all these things?” asked Connie in bewilderment. “Why doesn’t your mother—”

“Oh, because mother doesn’t know anything about the bills,” interrupted Alice. “She never can do a sum—or add up anything—and I’m no use at it either. Nora took it all over last year, and she won’t let even me help her. She makes out the most wonderful statements—she made out a fresh one to-day—that’s why she had a headache when she came to meet you. But what’s the good of statements? They won’t pay the bank.”

“But why—why—” repeated Connie, and then stopped, lest she should hurt Alice’s feelings.

“Why did we get into debt? I’m sure I don’t know!” Alice shook her head helplessly. “We never seemed to have anything extravagant.”

These things were beyond Connie’s understanding. She gave it up. But her mind impetuously ran forward.

“How much is wanted altogether?”

Alice, reluctantly, named a sum not much short of a thousand pounds.

“Isn’t it awful?”

She sighed deeply. Yet already she seemed to be talking of other people’s affairs!

“We can’t ever do it. It’s hopeless. Papa’s taken two little school-books to do. They’ll kill him with work, and will hardly bring in anything. And he’s full up with horrid exams and lectures. He’ll break down, and it all makes him so miserable, because he can’t really do the work the University pays him to do. And he’s never been abroad—even to Rome. And as to Greece! It’s dreadful!” she repeated mechanically.

Connie sprang up and began to pace the little room. The firelight played on her mop of brown hair, bringing out its golden shades, and on the charming pensiveness of her face. Alice watched her, thinking “She could do it all, if she chose!” But she didn’t dare to say anything, for fear of Nora.

Presently Connie gave a great stretch.

“It’s damnable!” she said, with energy.

Alice’s instinct recoiled from the strong word. It wasn’t the least necessary, she thought, to talk in that way.

Connie made a good many more enquiries—elicited a good many more facts. Then suddenly she brought her pacing to a stop.

“Look here—we must go to bed!—or Nora will be after us.”

Alice went obediently. As soon as the door had shut upon her, Connie went to a drawer in her writing table, and took out her bank-book. It had returned that morning and she had not troubled to look at it. There was always enough for what she wanted.

Heavens!—what a balance. She had quite forgotten a wind-fall which had come lately—some complicated transaction relating to a great industrial company in which she had shares and which had lately been giving birth to other subsidiary companies, and somehow the original shareholders, of whom Lord Risborough had been one, or their heirs and representatives, had profited greatly by the business. It had all been managed for her by her father’s lawyer, and of course by Uncle Ewen. The money had been paid temporarily in to her own account, till the lawyer could make some enquiries about a fresh investment.

But it was her own money. She was entitled to—under the terms of her father’s letter to Uncle Ewen—to do what she liked with it. And even without it, there was enough in the bank. Enough for this—and for another purpose also, which lay even closer to her heart.

“I don’t want any more new gowns for six months,” she decided peremptorily. “It’s disgusting to be so well off. Well, now,—I wonder—I wonder where Nora keeps those statements that Alice talks about?”

In the schoolroom of course. But not under lock and key. Nobody ever locked drawers in that house. It was part of the general happy-go-luckishness of the family.

Connie made up the fire, and sat over it, thinking hard. A new cheque-book, too, had arrived with the bank-book. That was useful.

She waited till she heard the schoolroom door open, and Nora come upstairs, followed soon by the slow and weary step of Uncle Ewen. Connie had already lowered her gas before Nora reached the top landing.

The house was very soon silent. Connie turned her light on again, and waited. By the time Big Ben had struck one o’clock, she thought it would be safe to venture.

She opened her door with trembling, careful fingers, slipped off her shoes, took a candle and stole downstairs. The schoolroom door creaked odiously. But soon she was inside and looking about her.

There was Nora’s table, piled high with the books and note-books of her English literature work. Everything else had been put away. But the top drawer of the table was unlocked. There was a key in it, but it would not turn, being out of repair, like so much else in the house.

Connie, full of qualms, slowly opened the drawer. It was horrid—horrid—to do such things!—but what other way was there? Nora must be presented with the _fait accompli_, otherwise she would upset everything—poor old darling!

Some loose sheets lay on the top of the papers in the drawer. The first was covered with figures and calculations that told nothing. Connie lifted it, and there, beneath, lay Nora’s latest “statement,” at which she and her father had no doubt been working that very night. It was headed “List of Liabilities,” and in it every debt, headed by the bank claim which had broken the family back, was accurately and clearly stated in Nora’s best hand. The total at the foot evoked a low whistle from Connie. How had it come about? In spite of her luxurious bringing up, there was a shrewd element—an element of competence—in the girl’s developing character, which was inclined to suggest that there need be no more difficulty in living on seven hundred a year than seven thousand, if you knew you had to do it. Then she rebuked herself fiercely for a prig—“You just try it!—you Pharisee, you!” And she thought of her own dressmakers’ and milliners’ bills, and became in the end quite pitiful over Aunt Ellen’s moderation. After all it might have been two thousand instead of one! Of course it was all Aunt Ellen’s muddling, and Uncle Ewen’s absent-mindedness.

She shaded her candle, and in a guilty hurry copied down the total on a slip of paper lying on the table, and took the address of Uncle Ewen’s bank from the outside of the pass-book lying beside the bills. Having done that, she Closed the drawer again, and crept upstairs like the criminal she felt herself. Her small feet in their thin stockings seemed to her excited ears to be making the most hideous and unnatural noise on every step. If Nora heard!

At last she was safe in her own room again. The door was locked, and the more agreeable part of the crime began. She drew out the new cheque-book lying in her own drawer, and very slowly and deliberately wrote a cheque. Then she put it up, with a few covering words—anxiously considered—and addressed the envelope to the Oxford branch of a well-known banking firm, her father’s bankers, to which her own account had been transferred on her arrival at Oxford. Ewen Hooper had scrupulously refrained from recommending his own bank, lest he should profit indirectly by his niece’s wealth.

“Annette shall take it,” she thought, “first thing. Oh, what a row there’ll be!”

And then, uneasily pleased with her performance, she went to bed.

And she had soon forgotten all about her raid upon Uncle Ewen’s affairs. Her thoughts floated to a little cottage on the hills, and its two coming inhabitants. And in her dream she seemed to hear herself say—“I oughtn’t to be meddling with other people’s lives like this. I don’t know enough. I’m too young! I want somebody to show me—I do!”

The following day passed heavily in the Hooper household. Nora and her father were closeted together all the morning; and there was a sense of brooding calamity in the air. Alice and Connie avoided each other, and Connie asked no questions. After luncheon Sorell called. He found Connie in the drawing-room alone, and gave her the news she was pining for. As Nora had reported, a cottage on Boar’s Hill had been taken. It belonged to the head of an Oxford college, who had spent the preceding winter there for his health, but had now been ordered abroad. It was very small, pleasantly furnished, and had a glorious view over Oxford in the hollow, the wooded lines of Garsington and Nuneham, and the distant ridges of the Chilterns. Radowitz was expected the following day, and his old college servant, with a woman to cook and do housework, had been found to look after him. He was working hard, at his symphony, and was on the whole much the same in health—very frail and often extremely irritable; with alternations of cheerfulness and depression.

“And Mr. Falloden?” Connie ventured.

“He’s coming soon—I didn’t ask,” said Sorell shortly. “That arrangement won’t last long.”

Connie hesitated.

“But don’t wish it to fail!” she said piteously.

“I think the sooner it is over the better,” said Sorell, with rather stern decision. “Falloden ought never to have made the proposal, and it was mere caprice in Otto to accept it. But you know what I think. I shall watch the whole thing very anxiously; and try to have some one ready to put into Falloden’s place—when it breaks down. Mrs. Mulholland and I have it in hand. She’ll take Otto up to the cottage to-morrow, and means to mother Radowitz as much as he’ll let her. Now then”—he changed the subject with a smile—“are you going to enjoy your winter term?”

His dark eyes, as she met them, were full of an anxious affection.

“I have forgotten all my Greek!”

“Oh no—not in a month. Prepare me a hundred lines of the ‘Odyssey,’