Part 22

"Something had happened to Harry. I think I must have guessed it the very first time he met her, or at least when he found out he loved her, and I think that must have been the first time he met her, or why shouldn't he have told us? I was always on the lookout for changes in him, and you see I knew the signs of this change. Harry is much more like my dear husband was, when he was young, than he is like his father. It was only that kind of love that could have made him so happy and so silent and so absorbed. Oh, I knew very soon, and of course I put two and two together, and knew who it was. Afterwards, little pieces of evidence came to me, but I didn't try to seek them, and I didn't need them. Nobody guessed they had met. Nobody knew at Royd, except me--and you."

He laughed ruefully, and told her how and when he had found out. "Perhaps you guessed even before I did," he said. "Were you annoyed with me for keeping it to myself?"

"I knew that you would have told me, if I had given you any encouragement. I didn't want you to tell me. I knew too that you had seen her and must have thought of her as I think now. If you hadn't I think you would have told me anyhow."

He breathed a sigh of relief. "That's off my mind then," he said. "I didn't like keeping anything from you. And I've told Harry more than once that he had nothing to fear from you."

"He couldn't believe that, I suppose. He might have thought that I would behave as Charlotte--that light fool--has behaved."

"You had Harry's letter before you saw her?"

"Yes, but the post is very late at Poldaven. I went home at once, and saw her. On my way to Royd I thought how I could bring some of the truth home to her. I think I made an impression."

Her voice was as quiet as before, but something in its tone caused him to look up. "You didn't spare her, I suppose," he said.

"No, I didn't spare her. I think I was cruel. I know I meant to be. But she's not worth troubling oneself about. Anger is a debasing passion, and I'm not sure that mine was altogether righteous anger. I wanted to make an end of her. I hope for the future I shall need to see very little of her."

He looked grave. "Can't you forgive her, if things go right now?" he asked.

"Oh, forgive her! If I know anything of her--and I ought to by this time--she'll never forgive me. She'll hate me to her dying day, and I care no more than if she loved me. What is the love of a poor thing like that worth? She loved Harry, and what does that amount to?"

"She did love him, though. She did give her life up to him, in the only way she could have done. It wasn't in her to make herself happy living as she did--as we all did--at Royd. But she stuck to it for nearly twenty years."

"Oh, yes. I kept her to that. I was fair to her; I gave her her chance. It would have been an immense relief if she had gone away. If I hadn't been fair to her I could have got rid of her easily enough. She would have gone, and she would never have known that she hadn't gone of her own accord."

He laughed at that. "I think there were times when you nearly allowed yourself to drive her away," he said. "Of course I don't defend what she did. She had a great chance with Harry, and she lost it. But it is hard, I suppose, for mothers to lose their sons after they have been so much to them. There is some excuse for her."

"I don't think there's any," she replied at once. "And as for its being hard on mothers, it's only that kind of mother--foolish and sentimental and selfish--who puts herself into rivalry with the other kind of love, when the time comes for it. The love of a child is very sweet, but it can't last like that much beyond childhood. She'd had it all. She's had it to the full. Nobody tried to deprive her of it, though of course she accuses me of trying to do so. I might have done. I shouldn't have wearied Harry with my love as she has wearied him. I should have been less exigent, less selfish, controlled myself more. She doesn't know, even now, and I shan't take the trouble to tell her, that she doesn't love him nearly as much as she thinks she does. If it weren't for her jealousy she would be quite content to live her own life chiefly apart from him, now he is grown up, and no longer a child to be petted, and to return petting. She has lived her foolish shallow life apart for the last two years, and she has let it be known that she thinks herself raised in living it. Oh, you needn't worry yourself about Charlotte. She hasn't got the depth to feel anything for long."

*CHAPTER XXVII*

*LADY BRENT AND VIOLA*

Lady Brent wondered, when Mrs. Clark opened the door to her at Bastian's lodgings, how much was known at Royd of what had already happened in this house. If Mrs. Clark had not discovered who Harry was, which seemed unlikely, and had not seen Mrs. Brent, she knew well enough whom she was admitting now. It was not made plain that she expected the visit, but she expressed no surprise at it, and evidently expected to be recognized. Lady Brent said a few words to her about her sister at Royd, as she was being conducted up the stairs. Everything would come into the light now, and it was much better so.

Viola was alone in the sitting-room. It had been made very tidy, and was filled with flowers. The great red roses might have been Harry's gift to her. The little row of vellum-bound books above the table in her corner certainly were, for Wilbraham had procured them to his order.

Viola stood by the middle table as they entered. She looked very young and very beautiful--all the more beautiful because of the colour that was flooding her delicate skin, and the half-alarmed look in her dark eyes.

Lady Brent waited until the door was shut behind her, searching her with her eyes, and then went forward and kissed her. Viola did not seem to have expected this. She was confused, and there was moisture in her eyes as she greeted Wilbraham, though she smiled at him.

Wilbraham spoke first. "You've had Lady Brent's telegram," he said. "And now she's come herself. Everything is all right, Viola."

Her tears fell. "If Harry loves you, my dear, that's enough for me," said Lady Brent, taking her hand.

"And you can hardly be blamed for loving him," said Wilbraham. "We all love him. I don't know why, but we do."

She laughed, as she was meant to do, and dried her tears. "I've had a telegram from him," she said. "He sent you his dear love."

Lady Brent showed her pleasure. "I wish he'd told me sooner," she said. "You might have been with him at Royd."

"We've all been making a mistake, Viola," said Wilbraham. "I suppose I'm most to blame, because I've had this lady under observation for a good many years, and might have known that nothing so important as you could have escaped her."

He wanted to keep the interview on a light key, at least until talk should flow between them. They had both been through a good deal during the last few days, but the trouble was ended now, and the sooner it could be forgotten the better.

Lady Brent and Viola were sitting side by side on the sofa. Lady Brent was not quite ready for the lighter note. "You know that Harry's bringing up was different from that of other boys," she said. "It was owing to me that it was so, and though I tried to avoid the appearance of dominating him, I could hardly escape being looked upon as a person who might take a decisive line either with him or against him. But I can say very truly that my guiding rule was love for him. I love Harry very much, and I have trusted him too. I wouldn't have stood out against him in anything that he had a right to decide for himself."

"I'm afraid it was I at first who wanted to keep our secret to ourselves," Viola said. "Or at least perhaps not quite at first, for then we didn't think about it; but when we first found out that we loved one another. I think he would have told you then, but I knew more about the world than he did, and I didn't think that you would want us to go on loving one another. Afterwards I did what he wanted."

"We all do what Harry wants," said Wilbraham. "He has that sort of way with him. I've done it myself, when I ought to have stood out."

"Harry is very happy now," said Viola. "He sent me a long telegram. Would you like to see it?"

"No," said Lady Brent, marking the motion she made with her hand, which showed the warm nest in which Harry's telegram was reposing. "Keep it for yourself. I want to ask you if you'd like to come down to Royd now, or wait till Harry can bring you. You will have a warm welcome whichever you like to do. He might like to know you are there."

"I expect the claims of the government service will have to come first, unreasonable as it may appear," said Wilbraham, marking her slight hesitation. "I know they have to with me."

"I couldn't get away just now," she said. "And in August I was going away for a fortnight with father--if Harry is all right."

That was what lay like a shadow over the brightness brought by the recognition of her. The war was to be finished by that hoarded effort for which those who knew were breathlessly waiting. But the hoard was chiefly of men, and much of it must be scattered if success was to be gained by it.

Lady Brent made no pretence of taking it anything but seriously. "I have friends at the War Office," she said. "We should get news at Royd as soon as in London, perhaps sooner." She made no allusion to the other reason that Viola had given. How did Harry regard Bastian? She had talked that over with Wilbraham. They did not know even if he had met him. He was not to be asked to Royd until Harry gave the word.

Viola still seemed to be hesitating, and Lady Brent took her hesitation to mean that she would rather not come to Royd without Harry, and accepted it at once. She talked to her about Harry, and presently Viola was talking about him too, filling her hungry ears with news of the times at which she had missed him.

Viola knew that he had been wounded, though he had kept it from her at the time. "He was very ill after the second wound," she said. "A man who was with him wrote to me when he couldn't, and I got a telegram to say he was better before I got the letter, so I wasn't so unhappy as I might have been. I don't think he would have got through that if he hadn't been so splendidly strong and young, and hadn't been so devotedly nursed. All the men he was with loved him, and this one never left him."

Lady Brent would not let it be seen how much this news of his past danger moved her. Here was a thing for which none of her searching thoughts had prepared her. "He has told us scarcely anything of what has been happening to him," she said. "It seemed to lie upon him heavily."

"It doesn't now," said Viola. "Being at Royd has brought him back. He has told me all about Jane and Sidney. Do you think I might write to Jane now, and tell her about us?"

Lady Brent was struck by her entire absence of jealousy. She might have felt sad that the healing process had not been all her own work. It showed how unselfishly she loved him, and how sure she was of him.

"Jane is a loyal little soul," she said. "She will be very pleased to hear from you, I know." She smiled at Viola. "The one thing I never quite gauged at its proper value was the companionship of young people. I think now that he ought to have had more of it. But he seemed so happy, with all his own pursuits."

"Oh, he was happy, I know," she said, eagerly. "It is wonderful to hear him talk of his life at Royd. Perhaps I'm not altogether sorry I was nearly the first, because I got it all. Harry isn't like anybody else that ever lived. He's wonderful. He couldn't have been quite the same if he hadn't been brought up always in that beautiful place, and left a great deal to himself and the woods and the hills and the sea."

"I am glad you think of it like that," said Lady Brent. "But I have been troubled by something he said to me when he first came home. His upbringing has made him what he is, but there are many things it didn't prepare him for. I think he was dreading going out again, as an officer. He doesn't know other young men of his class. He is so different from them, and they want everybody to be alike. With the men of simpler lives that he has lived with and fought with he would have made his way more easily."

"Yes," said Viola. "I was very sad at first to think of him thrown into that rough hard life, but I needn't have been. And I think now he is happier about the other."

She looked at Wilbraham, who said: "We've had it out, we three together. It's not as serious as you have been thinking. You must remember that he hasn't been with young men of his own sort at all; and in the ranks of course he'd look at them from another angle altogether; and perhaps he wouldn't like everything he saw about them--his officers, I mean. That's all it is, really--a diffidence about how he's going to fit in with them. But of course he'll make his way, with the other subalterns and people, just as he did with the men. There's so much character in him, as well as everything that young men do value in each other. I think we persuaded him that he'd be a good deal better off than he has been, didn't we, Viola?"

"Oh, he didn't want very much persuasion. He said he had been worrying himself about things that didn't really matter. But he was so much happier about everything when he came back from Royd. I don't think even I could have done that--not alone. It would just have been we two, keeping out of the world together. And poor Harry is in the world now."

"Yes," said Wilbraham, "and well fitted to cope with it. Of course it came as a shock to him at first. It would have done that anyhow, and he would have had to square his accounts with it by himself, before he could have felt himself at his ease. We couldn't have helped him. If you're still troubling yourself about having made mistakes, dear lady, I don't think you need. You made very few. You forged the good steel in him, but it had to be tempered."

This view of it comforted her. "We shall all be very happy now," she said.

When they had talked a little longer, Bastian came in.

Lady Brent rose from the sofa, and they stood looking at one another for an instant before Bastian shook hands with her, with a laugh. "I wasn't prepared for this," he said. "Have you known who I was?"

"No," she said. "Your people thought you were on the other side of the world."

"I meant them to," he said. "I'd no use for my people, after the way they behaved to me. I took rather an absurd name, which was the last they would recognize me under if they ever came across it, which seemed unlikely."

Viola and Wilbraham were in bewilderment. "Lady Brent and I used to know one another in the old days," Bastian said to Viola. "It shows how I've cut myself off from that world that I didn't even know she was Lady Brent." He turned to Lady Brent. "It did once occur to me, after we'd been to Royd, to go to a Public Library and find out who you were, from a book. But I forgot all about it. I'm a thorough Bohemian you see, and more comfortable so."

His light tone did not please her. "If I had known who you were," she said, "when you came to Royd, we should have met, and I should have known Viola before."

His face changed as he looked quickly from her to Viola. "I'm glad you've made friends now," he said. "All the same, I doubt if you would have taken to her two years ago. I've got too far away from what I was when you knew me."

"Well, it wouldn't have been you so much that we should have thought about," said Wilbraham.

Bastian laughed. "You needn't worry about me now," he said to Lady Brent. "I'll own that I have had ideas of fighting you when the time came. I should rather have enjoyed it. I think quite as highly of Viola as you do of your grandson, and I was going to tell you so. But--well, I'm glad to know there's no necessity. I think you've behaved well; but I remember that you always had the reputation of behaving well. You'll get some reward for it in this instance, for you know without my having to take the trouble to prove it to you that Viola's birth is as good as her manners, and as for me I shall not intrude upon you with my debased habits when I've once handed Viola over."

"I used to like you as a little boy," said Lady Brent, calmly. "You were mischievous and perverse, and afterwards gave a great deal of trouble to your parents, who had not deserved it; but I don't suppose your habits are so debased as you pretend they are. I shall be very glad if you will bring Viola down to Royd when you take your holiday, if she cares to come. I think Harry would like to know that she is there."

Then Viola accepted the invitation, and Bastian did not refuse it, though he said that it was many years since he had stayed in a country house, and he didn't think he should remember the rules.

Lady Brent told Wilbraham about him afterwards, what his family was and where they came from, which was near her own girlhood's home. "I must say that I am relieved," she said. "On her father's side her birth to all intents and purposes is as good as Harry's, and on her mother's it is no worse. It counts for something. I married before Michael--that is his real name, and I suppose suggested the Angelo to his freakish imagination--before he grew up, but I was always hearing stories of his wildness and extravagance afterwards. There was never much real harm in him, and there were some very good qualities to balance what harm there was. His parents were over-strict with him, but they were fond of him, and I think if he hadn't taken offence at their attitude towards his marriage, in which of course they were amply justified, they would have come round in time."

"It may have been better for him that they didn't," said Wilbraham. "He's had to make his own living, which has probably been salutary for him, and his responsibility to Viola has kept him fairly straight. I wish he didn't drink quite so much whisky or smoke such vile tobacco, but drink hasn't taken hold of him so much as I thought it had at one time. If he had been anything like what you'd call a drunkard it would have affected Viola more. What do you think of Viola?"

"I'm glad she came to Royd, and that Harry met her," she said.

*CHAPTER XXVIII*

*IN THE BALANCE*

So far Harry had been brought in his life's story.

The gods had showered their gifts upon him. They had given him strength and beauty; a mind quick to receive their messages and eager to interpret them; a heart that went out to others and drew others to it; largesse of temporal favours, which they scatter here and there but are apt to withhold from those whom they endow with their choicest gifts. His manhood had been tried in a hard school, had been established and wrought to finer issues by it. He had known great happiness, and also suffering both of mind and body, without which happiness itself is but a monochrome. He had entered the high courts of love, and worshipped in them devoutly.

For what had they prepared him, on whom they had smiled, not so uniformly as to soften his fine fibre, but as if they would have cherished so rare an example of their handiwork, and led it towards still higher desert of their bounties? Would they not watch over him and preserve him from the ultimate dangers which youth was plunging to meet at this point in the world's long history? Or is the world's history itself a mere point in time, as it unrolls itself before their unwearying eyes, so that it matters not what destruction may be wrought in it, since there is infinity in which to forge new combinations of flesh and brain and fortune?

To the women on the edge of the vortex in which manhood was fiercely involved, but striving by prayers and tears to weigh down the balance of life and death in favour of the men they loved, the gods may well have appeared contemptuously indifferent. The very interests towards which they had seemed to be working, the values they had impressed upon those to whom they had given enlightenment to understand them, what were they in the balance? It was impossible for mothers to look upon a life of no more than twenty years as rounded and complete, however they might have laboured to perfect it; or for young wives to balance the bliss of early married love against a life-time of companionship and the sweet joint care of children, and cry quits on the bargain. To them the happiness of youth is an earnest of still still greater happiness to come; a youth cut short is a youth wasted, however it may have fulfilled itself.

To Lady Brent, watching the news from the battlefields of the Somme, day after day, week after weary week, it seemed as if all young life hung by the balance of a hair. She felt the weight of it far more than during the previous years, in which Harry had been far removed, and the details of the fighting had not been brought before her with this daily deadly insistence. To her, more than to most whose hopes were dependent upon the chances of battle, did youth appear as a period of preparation rather than of fruition. Her one steady object during the last twenty years had been to work with the high gods so as to fulfil their purpose; and she seemed to herself to have been blest in her strivings in such a way as to give her the right to believe that her object had also been theirs.

She had had her grave doubts, but now the weight of them had been removed from her. Surely that had been because she had not tarried to accept the foiling of her own plans where they had not served the great purpose! The love that had come to Harry was, on the face of it, just the kind of love from which she had most desired to preserve him. Now she saw it as the crown of his happy youth, but still more as the gift that was to bless his manhood to come. The plunging of him into crude and unfamiliar life, which had still lain on his spirit at his first homecoming, and had brought her such trouble of mind on his behalf--he had come through that fire. It was, as Wilbraham had said, the tempering of the steel in him. He would not have been of the fine metal that he was if he had not felt its rigour; and, having gone through it, he would not be what it had made of him if his spirit were not now freed from it. Every letter that he wrote showed him free and untroubled in the life he was living and the work he was doing. He wrote happily and gaily, and as if there was not a care on his mind. They all seemed to take it like that--the boys who were out there, snapping their fingers in the face of Death, who was gibbering at them from every corner and trying to frighten them into respect for his menace. Harry had never feared death, and now he no longer feared life in any of its unfamiliar aspects, but embraced it with all the ardour of his youth, and with it the happiness it had in store for him when the great confusion should be smoothed out.

Surely he must be spared, for whom life held so much! It could not be squared with any theory of directing and guiding providence that one who had been dowered with the gifts of life so much above others, and was so much in accord with the higher purposes of life as they had been slowly and sometimes painfully revealed to her, should be denied his full inheritance of life.