Part 16

She seemed to wait for him to speak first. He could tell nothing by her manner, which was smiling and self-possessed, though her self-possession was not more than is becoming to a young girl, secure in her youth and charm.

"I suppose you know that Harry has left home to enlist in the army," he said.

Her colour deepened a little upon the mention of her lover's name, but she did not shrink from his gaze, and the faint smile was still on her lips as she said: "I thought that he might, although he didn't say he would." So of course she knew, and had been prepared for the question.

"Probably he had not quite made up his mind by the time you left Royd," he said.

She did not reply to this, and he thought he could see that she had decided not to admit anything, probably under Harry's directions. Again there came to him the sense of dislike at interfering with what Harry had decided. He could not fence with her to make her say what Harry didn't want her to say, or force her to say that she could not answer his questions. She was frank and innocent. It would seem an impertinence to put her into the position of defending a reticence.

"We have been very anxious about him at home," he said. "We are anxious still--not to get him to come back, but that he should not cut himself off from us. I've come up to London on purpose to get a message to him if I can. I didn't tell Lady Brent I should come here, or say anything about you. She thinks I have only come to see Mr. Gulliver, the family solicitor, and ask him to find out, if he can, where Harry is. His mother can hardly bear the thought of not hearing from him for months, and not knowing where he is. Lady Brent was not altogether unprepared for his enlisting. She couldn't have been a party to it, as he's not even of an age to enlist yet, and I suppose he's had to represent himself as older than he is in order to get taken. But she told me herself that she was proud of him for doing it, and she certainly wouldn't do anything to interfere with him, now he's taken the matter into his own hands. If he knew that----"

He did not finish his sentence, which was on the note of appeal to her. Nor did he look at her.

There was a pause. Then she said, "I haven't seen Harry, you know, Mr. Wilbraham."

He looked at her then, and saw that there were tears in her eyes. So his appeal had not been without its effect.

"I think his mother ought to know," she said, "and that he ought to write to her."

In a flash of understanding, he saw that he had got all that he had come for, and that he would get no more. Or at least that he must not exercise pressure to get more, or put her in the position of refusing to give it. She would tell Harry what he had told her, and she would tell him that she thought he ought to write to his mother. Of Lady Brent she had said nothing. It was probable that Lady Brent appeared in her eyes in a different light from that in which Wilbraham saw her.

As for everything else--it was their secret, to be treated by him with respect. He would probe into it no further; and indeed it was better that he should not know more than he knew already of how it was between them. There was quite enough on his mind that he had kept from Lady Brent.

"Yes, I think he should write," he said. "I shall see Mr. Gulliver to-morrow."

The two statements had no apparent bearing upon one another, but Viola seemed to accept them with relief, and was beginning to talk to him pleasantly, but with no reference to Harry, when Bastian came in.

He was nearly half an hour earlier than his usual time, it appeared, and Wilbraham was inclined to be disappointed at having his talk with Viola cut short. Whenever he was with her he felt himself almost violently in sympathy with Harry in his love for her. He was observing her all the time, and there was nothing that she said or did that did not deepen his first impression of her. He wanted to feel like that about her, for Harry's sake; championship of her as one who was in all essentials fit to mate with him, might stand Harry in good stead later on.

But she would show herself, perhaps with less need for carefulness in what she said, with her father there as without him. Bastian gave him a cordial welcome. He was again, in appearance, a gentleman, merely indifferent to the shabbiness of his attire, but the younger healthier look he had had during the latter part of his stay at Royd no longer marked him. Wilbraham thought he had been drinking, but he was not drunk, or anything near it, and it seemed probable that he kept his habits in check in the home that he must have valued. He drank tea, rather copiously, at the meal which soon followed his entrance, and there was no preparation apparent for anything stronger to be drunk later on.

It was not long before Wilbraham became as anxious to be alone with Bastian as he had before wished to be alone with Viola. Bastian knew, and Viola was distressed at the signs he showed of wishing to talk about what he knew.

It became plain to Wilbraham now that the poor child was not unaffected by her father's intemperance. If the worst of it was kept from her, and he had the self-command not to soil the home in which she lived with it, still there were times when she saw him not quite himself.

This was one of them. Wilbraham saw the suspicion and then the certainty dawn upon her, with a droop, and a shadow on her brightness, and a stiffening of manner that was not quite displeasure, but yet something near it. She had enough influence over him, apparently, to be able to prevent his saying what she did not want said, but his hints and smiles made Wilbraham as uncomfortable as they evidently made her. Immediately the meal was over she said good-bye to Wilbraham and went out of the room. Perhaps this was her usual way of dealing with these lapses. Her father expostulated, but she took no notice, except by saying as she went out: "I'll tell Mrs. Clark not to clear away just yet."

"She's a dear child, Viola--but she's difficult sometimes," said Bastian. "I hope she hasn't taken a dislike to you."

"I don't think so," said Wilbraham, shortly. "What she obviously does dislike is having her secrets talked about before a comparative stranger. I should have thought you might have seen that."

Bastian threw a look at him as he went to the side table to take up a pipe. Wilbraham's tone seemed to surprise him, but it did not subdue the agreeable humour in which he found himself. "We don't look on you as a stranger," he said, "and if there's a secret, you're in it. I think you want mellowing, my dear Wilbraham. I don't keep anything to drink here, but if you'd like something I can send out for it."

"You seem to forget what I told you about myself," said Wilbraham. "I can't drink without losing control of myself. You seem to be in much the same case. I think it's a damned shame to show it before that child."

This brought Bastian up short. He frowned in offence, but apparently he was one of those people whom a rebuke moves more to sorrow than to anger, for he said: "That's a hard thing to say to a man, Wilbraham. I do drink more than's good for me sometimes, I know; but if there's one thing I've always been careful about all my life it is not to let it affect Viola."

"Well, it does affect her," said Wilbraham. "You'd have seen how it affected her just now, if you hadn't been drinking. It's not for me to preach, God knows. But if you're able to control it at all, you've got something to be very thankful for, and you ought to control it absolutely as far as she's concerned."

"I've had very little to drink to-day, as a matter of fact," said Bastian, rather sulkily, "and I don't want to be lectured about it, Wilbraham. Sit down and have a talk. You won't find my powers of expression affected by the little I have had."

He ended on a smile. He was an attractive creature, Wilbraham thought, in spite of his culpable weakness. Most men would have quarrelled with him for what he had said, if they had been in Bastian's state. But the extent to which he was affected by drink was a puzzle. As he talked Wilbraham could mark no signs of it, though they had seemed so evident up to this time. There was an absence of cautiousness in what he said, but that was native to him. It may have been slightly enhanced now, but Wilbraham would not have put it down to the loosening of tongue brought about by liquor if they had started with this conversation. His own irritation subsided. He had said his say. He sat down in Viola's chair, opposite to Bastian, and lit his cigarette, taking rather a long time to do so, in order to leave the opening with Bastian, who was not slow to take it.

"It wouldn't do for my little failing to become known, would it?" he said with a smile. "If I can't do without alcohol altogether--and I don't see why I should--I shall have to keep in the background."

Wilbraham was conscious of a return of irritation. He disliked this half-jocular allusion to a subject of such serious importance. "Oh, don't talk of it like that," he said, impatiently. "I suppose you know that Harry Brent and Viola have met and have fallen in love with one another. Nobody else knows it but me, and perhaps it's important that nobody else should. At any rate you can talk quite straight about it to me."

Bastian received this with a change of manner. "All right," he said, "I will talk straight. Viola's a girl in a thousand--in a million. I'd trust her anywhere. But for a young man to be meeting her again and again, and keeping it secret--! Well, you see my point, I suppose."

It was quite a new point to Wilbraham, as far as he did see it. But his brain, edged by his long struggle with himself, and now again working with its normal quickness, seized upon its essential insincerity at once. There was a barely perceptible pause before he said: "If you mean that Harry has done anything that you can take exception to why have you been smiling and hinting about it up till now?"

Perhaps Bastian did not quite take this in. "Oh, I don't mean to say that there has been anything wrong," he said. "As I say, I trust Viola--absolutely. If _she's_ satisfied with herself, as she is, that's enough for me."

"Very well," said Wilbraham, keeping command. "Then that applies to Harry too. You don't know him. I do. I found it out by chance, and he made no attempt to persuade me to keep it secret. He left it to me, and I decided to do so. If he wanted it kept secret, so did she; and they both wanted it for the same reasons, whatever they were. If she was right, he was right, and----"

"Yes, that's all very well----," said Bastian, but Wilbraham over-rode his interruption. "I suppose you didn't know of it till after you'd come to London. How did you know of it?"

Bastian allowed himself to be diverted. "I found it out on the last night," he said. "I went out to look for her, and she came in crying, poor child! Something suddenly struck me. She had been out such a lot alone, and she hadn't done that before when we'd been away together--at least not so much. And she'd been different somehow. I hadn't thought about it before, but it came to me suddenly all together. And she wouldn't have been crying like that just because we were going home. There was something--somebody. I dare say I should have got at it by thinking it over; but she told me. I love her, and she loves me, and knows that she can tell me anything. That's how it was, Wilbraham. You're not a father, but you can imagine, perhaps, what a father feels about these things, when his daughter is the chief thing in the world to him."

"I suppose I can," said Wilbraham. "But all the same you're not treating her in the way you boast of if you're not prepared to look upon Harry in the same light. You'll agree that on the outside of things they're not equal--those two."

"I don't agree to that," said Bastian, dogmatically.

"I said on the outside of things," Wilbraham persisted. "You've been where he belongs, and you know what sort of position he's in. You may have belonged to the same sort of thing once. I don't know. You've never told me who your people were. But you say yourself that you've come down in the world, and it's pretty obvious that you're not in anything like the position the Brents are now. So you can see how it would have been likely to strike me when I first found it out. But Harry is what he is. I trusted him, just as you trusted Viola. And afterwards I saw Viola. If I can think of her as I do, you ought to be able to think of Harry in the same way, though you haven't seen him."

"Very well, then," said Bastian. "Let's take it that, leaving out things that don't matter, they're to be looked at in the same way. Of course I know, really, that he's something quite out of the common. I've heard the people there talk about him. If I hadn't thought there was no harm in it--for Viola--I shouldn't have treated it as I have. But you see, Wilbraham, as a father I've got to look a little farther ahead than you do. I suppose to you it's just a boy and girl falling in love with one another in all their innocence, and if nothing comes of it no harm will be done. Well, it wouldn't to him. But it's rather different with her, isn't it?"

Wilbraham was silent. That was exactly as he had looked at it, on Harry's behalf. And it would be different for Viola.

"If he's what you say he is," said Bastian, pursuing his advantage, "he won't want to throw her off when he gets older. But his people will want him to, and when they know they'll try to bring it about. Harry and Viola! Yes. But it's me and Lady Brent, you see, as well--as she seems to be the one that counts most. I don't know anything about the boy's mother; they don't talk about her much down there. It's his grandmother who seems to count for everything. Who was his mother, by the by?"

Wilbraham had forgotten until that moment the photograph on the mantelpiece. He awoke to its realization with a mental start. If Bastian had not shown himself ignorant of Mrs. Brent's origin he might have succumbed to the instinct for the dramatic and surprised him by pointing her out in reply to his question. But when the question came he had just received the impression of loyalty on the part of Mrs. Ivimey, or anybody else to whom Bastian may have talked about "the family." They had not given Mrs. Brent away. He wouldn't either, at least at this stage.

"Nobody in particular," he said with a half truth. "They were only married for a few weeks. Lady Brent is Harry's guardian, and of course she's had most to do with bringing him up more or less in seclusion at Royd. I suppose you know that he has gone off to enlist."

"Yes, and I suppose you've come here to find out from Viola where he is, and haul him back again."

Wilbraham told him why he had come up. "I shall go and see Gulliver to-morrow," he said, "and get him to make inquiries. Then I hope in a few days Harry will write. She'll be satisfied with that, and whether Gulliver finds him or not she won't make any attempt to get him back."

"Well, you're a funny crew altogether," said Bastian, after they had talked a little longer. "As far as I'm concerned, Wilbraham, I'm going to keep my eyes open. You needn't look to me to back up your ideas, if it doesn't suit me to do so. Better have all your cards on the table. They're both much too young yet to think about anything further, and I suppose he'll be too young for another few years. You can hug your secret for the present."

*CHAPTER XX*

*WAITING*

Autumn gave place to winter and winter to spring. Another summer came, and people began to resign themselves to the hitherto almost incredible idea of the war lasting over another winter. That winter passed away and the interminable struggle went on.

But even after two years the texture of life had not very greatly altered in England. Conscription had not yet come in; there was no food control; motor cars could be used for purposes of pleasure or convenience; the chief opportunities for the work of women in connection with the war were in nursing, and for girls in government clerkships. It was not for another full year that country life in England seemed quite a different thing from what it had been before the war. The change had come by degrees and its last stages were passed through much more quickly than the first. In the summer of 1916 it was still possible to live in a country house without being much affected by the war.

Lady Brent lived on at Royd Castle to all outward appearances in much the same way as she had lived there since her widowhood. There came to be fewer servants, and her work in connection with the estate increased, for her bailiff had joined up, and she had not tried to replace him. She did much of his work herself, with the help of the estate staff, and perhaps welcomed the increased responsibility, for her life during those two first years was sad enough, with all that she had lived for taken from her just at the time when the hopes of years were to have been put to the test.

Harry had written to his mother within a few days of Wilbraham's return from London, and again from time to time to her and to his grandmother and to Wilbraham; also to the children. But his letters contained very little news about himself. They were posted in London and gave no address to which answers could be sent. After some months there was a long silence, and then he wrote from Egypt, where his regiment had been sent. After that he wrote mostly to his mother. He told her more about his life, but never anything that would identify him.

The letters sent from Egypt were subject to censorship, but they arrived at Royd in envelopes bearing a London postmark and with no label or stamp on them. Yet they were addressed in Harry's writing. He must have left a supply of them behind him.

The clue to all this was no doubt a strong and considered determination to carry out his plan without risk of interference. The message carried to him by Viola had brought letters from him, but that was as far as he would go; and perhaps he would have written in any case. After the first one had been received Lady Brent wrote to Mr. Gulliver and told him not to pursue his inquiries. Harry must have his own way. As he had written, after it had seemed that he had made up his mind not even to do that, so perhaps he would some day relent and let them write to him. But nearly two years went by and he had not done so.

In the long sad conversations they had about him at Royd during the early months, they arrived at some sort of conclusions, helped by an occasional expression in his letters. He had gone out of his own world, and as long as his time of probation lasted he would keep out of it. He was not likely to think himself degraded by serving in the ranks, but they came to understand that he was keeping his actual condition hidden. There was nothing in his letters, which would be read by his superior officers, to indicate it, and before he left England they were more about Royd than about himself. There was never very much about himself. Every time he wrote he said he was well and happy; but it peeped through that the change in his life was not without its effect upon him. How could it be otherwise, brought up as he had been? He was learning in a hard school; but he was learning, and flashes of his old boyish brightness broke through the reticence which he seemed to have imposed upon himself. They came to look upon it as a time of probation for him, and to believe that so he looked upon it himself. Sometimes they thought they saw signs of expectation. He was working for and looking forward to something. Viola, said Wilbraham to himself. His commission to be won in the field, said Lady Brent. He wanted no help towards it, as might have been given by finding him out, which should not have been difficult after he had left England, and pulling strings. When he had gained his commission, by his own unaided effort, and by no reliance upon his place in the world outside the army, then he would come back to them. It was hard on Lady Brent to wait, and to lift no finger, and harder still on his mother. But he must be trusted. They had directed him through his childhood, and youth, and now he would brook no direction. The only consolation they had was that his upbringing had not taken from him a man's initiative and determination. The experiment seemed to have been justified; but with a greater knowledge of the world beforehand he might not have thought it necessary so to cut his life in two. They were paying a heavy price.

Wilbraham, who had more of a clue to Harry's actions than the others, was not without irritation against what at times he set down as mere hard undutifulness. He had great sympathy with Lady Brent, who had so wonderfully sunk her own feelings in acquiescing in the boy's unreasonable determination. She could almost certainly have traced him had she wished to do so. And Wilbraham, at least, knew that he must have been told at the very beginning that he would not be interfered with. Why could he not then have softened the hardship to those who loved him? Granted that the new love that had come into his life was so much more to him than the old; but it was not like him to throw over the old altogether, and indeed his letters showed that he had not done so.

After a time his irritation died away. It could not be so distressing to Harry to be cut off from Royd as it was to them to be cut off from him, but his letters showed that he felt it, and especially the few letters that he wrote to little Jane, in which he seemed to be reaching out after the untroubled innocent happiness of his youth, and the beauty and freedom that had lain all about it. It was the old Harry that appeared in those letters, and here and there in others; the new Harry became more and more evident otherwise--a man doing a man's hard work in hard and uncongenial surroundings, much older than his years, where in some ways he had been so much younger.

He was hard on himself as well as hard upon them. They had given him happiness in his sheltered youth, but the plunge he had taken into a life different from any that could have been anticipated for him can have been none the easier on that account. The ugliness and crudity that other boys might in some measure have been prepared for would bear very hardly upon him, and he would have to fight through it alone. Wilbraham came to see that he might shrink from mixing it up with his home life. Perhaps he was afraid that he might weaken in it if he was subject to any pressure. It would surely have been open to him to have had at least a few days at home before he went abroad; but he had not taken the opportunity.