Part 4

As Mary closed the door rather noisily, Sarah Greene's sensibilities shrank from such a robustly common-sensible point of view being applied to her romantic project. The idea of new life in Lynton house coinciding with so much vigorous new life in Lynton gardens was compensation to her for her own death. It struck the right balance; more, it pleased her always fastidious sense of the fitness of things, that she, an old woman, should die before the turn of the year when sap springs in the bough, and that her grandnephew should be born in her house at the time when apple trees blossom and lambs play in the field.

This pastoral conception sustained a rude shock when Mary translated it into terms of dust and domestics.

Mary is a genuinely good capable girl, she told herself, not imaginative, perhaps, but with courage and intelligence, and most of the qualities that Roger needs in a wife. Even so, it was difficult to see Mary at Lynton, ordering the household, planning new effects for the misty herbaceous border, lavishly stocking the formal beds, attentive to the diurnal duties towards flowers and trees and shrubs.

Sarah Greene thought of her other young relations: Lavinia, mondaine, vivid, with a delicate certainty of touch that enabled her to cover her essential sophistication with a delightful veneer of country simplicity.

Lavinia in green linen stooping over the rose beds in the sunlight was perfect; Lavinia in scarlet silk stepping out of the French window to the moonlit terrace was perfect; her clothes for a country weekend were admirable. But Lavinia waking day after day to the sound of steady rain, was unimaginable. She would find herself without interests and without resources.

Mrs. Greene decided quite firmly that Lavinia would not do for Lynton.

Helen and Geoffrey were not more promising candidates. Geoffrey's manifest uneasiness in tweeds, his distaste for country pursuits no less than Helen's restlessness and impatience, rendered them ineligible.

Helen really paints well, thought Mrs. Greene. It's a pity she so seldom finishes anything, and that when she does, she just tosses it aside and begins at once on something new.

A vision of Helen frenziedly digging up week-old bulbs to see if they had sprouted crossed Mrs. Greene's mind and she smiled.

Only Hugh and Jessica remained. But Jessica, the youngest Mrs. Greene, with her small creamy face, her cool incisiveness to the world and her passionate gentleness to Hugh could never belong to Lynton. She was too slight and too brittle. At moments she seemed as vibrant as spun glass, at moments she dimmed into a moony vagueness. There was no stability about her; she would never move with Lynton through the steady roll of the seasons, taking note of the almost imperceptible signs that herald growth and decay.

Thinking it over, Mary was really much the most suitable. There was something slow-moving and deep-rooted about her; she, was practical but not trivial; she did not spend herself on details but she never ignored them, and she could take a long view of things. She was free from petty spites and envies, and she and Roger would do very well. As Sarah Greene reached this conclusion the door opened to admit Mary with the tea-tray and a letter, addressed in Mrs. Rodney Greene's unmistakable writing.

"Oh, Mary, I knew that letter was coming, but I'd forgotten all about it."

"Is it something tiresome?"

"No, not exactly. It's an invitation to dinner next week at the Rodneys but I don't feel like meeting people just at present."

Sarah Greene drew the letter rather reluctantly from its envelope and read it.

207, Sussex Square. 9th Nov.

My dear Aunt Sarah,

Many thanks for your kind letter after the wedding. I am so glad you thought it all went off nicely and that you weren't too tired.

I expect you have heard that Hugh and Jessica get back on Tuesday after a delightful honeymoon apparently. We have had several very happy post-cards from them, though I must say I should have liked a letter.

I have planned a little dinner-party for them for Friday the 18th, to-morrow week, at 7.45, which I do hope will suit you. It is only a family affair, but I am anxious that all six Mrs. Greenes should meet and enjoy each other, so I very much hope you will be able to come.

With love from Rodney and myself,

Yours affectionately, EDITH GREENE.

"Mrs. Rodney is having her party next Friday," said Mrs. Greene slowly. "I hadn't meant to stay in town quite so long."

"Oh, do stay, Aunt Sarah," urged Mary. "We love having you and if you don't want to go to Mrs. Rodney's we can easily think of something. Why not invent an engagement for that evening?"

Mrs. Greene shook her head.

"No," she said decisively. "You know I almost think I shall enjoy it, and I think it will be salutary too."

"How do you mean, salutary?"

"Well, you know, my dear, one begins to think oneself and one's own affairs too important; and then being plunged into a family dinner party like that, one finds how relatively unimportant one is. The young people are taken up with their own lives, and Mrs. Rodney is busy about her arrangements, and poor Mrs. Edwin is always very pre-occupied and so I shall forget about my own troubles."

"I shouldn't have thought you had any troubles or worries," was Mary's naïve comment, to which Mrs. Greene responded briskly and quite genuinely, "Well, no, Mary, I haven't many. One thing on my mind is my second gardener. He isn't turning out as well as I expected. He has bad hands for planting."

There was a pause as Mary poured out a cup of tea and handed it to her Aunt who thanked her and added:

"You know it's very nice and luxurious to be here like this and have tea brought to me. Now tell me about this evening; what did Roger say?"

"He was delighted," said Mary. "He says he can get away fairly early from the office, and he'll get the tickets on the way home. And he asked me to give you his love and ask what it was you were celebrating?"

Mrs. Greene's heart missed a beat. She felt that she could hardly say, "I'm celebrating my death sentence," and yet the melodramatic little phrase nearly escaped her. She hesitated for a second and then said quite naturally:

"We're celebrating the very good news you told me this morning, my dear Mary. I'm very happy about it; I shall enjoy having a grand-nephew."

Mary's face glowed with pleasure.

"I never thought you'd be so pleased. Would you like us to call him Hugh if he's a boy?"

Sarah Greene took her hand and held it for a moment.

"It's kind of you to think of it," she said, "but no, Mary, I don't really think I'd like it. I've never quite believed in calling children after people; it doesn't seem to me to mean very much; I'd rather you just called your boy any name you liked."

"I had thought of Roger, but I'm not sure."

"Well, don't be influenced by anyone; just decide what name you like and keep to it. It's only a convention to name children after their relations, and I don't quite believe in conventions that are based on sentiment. Perhaps we get harder as we get older; I'm not sure. But it seems to me that my generation has a good deal in common with yours. We were very differently brought up, of course, but we arrived at rather the same conclusions as you young people have now: a distaste for anything too easy, or flabby, as you might call it."

She turned questioningly to Mary, who reflected for a moment in the struggle to assemble her thoughts.

"I know what you mean," she said at last. "I do feel we've much more in common with people of your age than people about forty-five or fifty. We're harder than they are, and we take things in our stride like your generation did. I always think you were awfully brave. And we're a greedy generation, but I don't think we're greedy in such a soft way as middle-aged people are."

She stopped again to think, and then added:

"Your generation doesn't strike me as being greedy at all. You were all so awfully good at self-sacrifice."

Mrs. Greene laughed.

"My dear Mary," she expostulated, "that sounds terrible--as if we were all would-be martyrs. Yes, indeed, we were just as greedy as you are, but we wanted different things, and I think we very often wanted them for other people. As wives, we were contented to be a good deal in the background; we liked our husbands to shine and we didn't need so much personal success as women do nowadays. But it wasn't so very different after all; I know you want things for Roger more than for yourself, for instance."

"I do want a lot for Roger," agreed Mary eagerly and Mrs. Greene exulted in the thought of how much her death would do for this satisfactory and devoted young couple. Money she could give them in her life-time, but what was money compared to Lynton whose lovely perfection was solace enough for the bitterness of life and the fear of death?

She switched abruptly off this trend of thought.

"If we are dining early and going out," she said, "it's certainly time I got up and began to think about dressing. And we've never taken the tray down. Let me help you, Mary, like a good child."

But Mary refused help, piled the tray up competently and left the room.

Mrs. Greene found herself strangely comforted by this short and uneventful conversation. Later, as she dressed, she thought about the young Dodds and their contemporaries. They have good points, these young people, she decided finally; lots of courage and spirit; and how pleasant it is to think that I, who was brought up a model of deportment, at the end of my life should find myself able to take things in my stride.

She smiled over the phrase. Uncouth and slangy as it was, it seemed to her to show a good enough standard, and when she went downstairs she said gaily, "Roger, your wife's been teaching me modern slang and I like it."

III

The evening was a very happy one. There was a distinct air of festivity about the elderly woman and her two young companions as they sat in the restaurant enjoying dinner, liking and admiring each other and full of pleasurable anticipations of the play.

Mary looked pretty. The lamps were becomingly shaded and softened her too pronounced features. Roger's naturally sober manner never lapsed into heaviness and much of his anxiety had been allayed by the way in which his aunt had not only welcomed the news of his prospective son, but was determined to help at what was undoubtedly a crisis in his affairs. Sarah Greene was lost in the pleasure of the moment. As she looked at Roger and Mary and thought of them at Lynton, her heart was warm and her mind at peace.

"My dear children," she said towards the end of the dinner, "I'm very pleased with you both; I want you to be very happy."

"This really is a celebration," said Mary excitedly, "we are enjoying ourselves."

But Roger lifted his glass, and looking at Mrs. Greene smiled charmingly.

"I'd like you to drink to our friendship, Aunt Sarah," he said. "I'm thirty-two now, and I've appreciated you for quite twenty years. Our relationship is something I value very highly."

For a moment the emotional tension was high. Rare tears sprang to Sarah Greene's eyes.

"My dear Roger," she stammered, "my dear boy. It is so sweet of you to say that; I'm getting old and I need your affection."

She stopped uncertainly and Roger saw that her usually imperturbable face was blurred and twisted; the face of an old woman.

Before he had clearly taken in her sudden change of feature Mary intervened.

"But, Aunt Sarah, we never think of you as old; you have such a modern point of view."

Sarah Greene steadied herself and regained her normal tranquil expression.

"I must be getting old," she announced, "because you're making me feel quite sentimental. In fact the sooner we get off to the theatre the better."

She rose and went with Mary to fetch her cloak, perfectly in command of herself again, but a cold breath of foreboding had touched Roger.

All evening, at the theatre listening to the play, during the intervals while he talked to his aunt and his wife, even in the taxi driving home, he was teased by the recollection of Mrs. Greene's face. He felt as if he had been given a clue to some puzzle, but not a final clue that would unravel it.

Later, as he was falling asleep, he thought contentedly: well anyhow she'll be here for ten days; perhaps she'll tell me; I might be able to help, whatever it is.

IV

Sarah Greene wakened in the night straight from deep sleep to considerable pain.

She had wakened often these last few months to that same rending pain which numbed her elbow, ran up her under arm, stabbed fiercely at her arm-pit and concentrated itself in an agonising grasp of her left breast.

She had lain on her back panting and sweating, conscious of her heart thumping unevenly, waiting for the first moment of relief when she would be able to stretch out her hand for the opiate that was always ready by her bed: an opiate too mild to give sleep, but strong enough to dull the edge of the attack.

When this stage had been reached and she was no longer abandoned to the horror of the moment, Mrs. Greene almost invariably found herself betrayed into moments, and even hours, of pure panic, when speculation as to the nature of her disease forced itself on her reluctant mind.

Time and again she had brought herself to the point of deciding to see a specialist; time and again she had told herself that she knew what it was--cancer--and she would repeat the word, Cancer; cancer is what is wrong with you Sarah Greene; but always there had been an element of uncertainty to torment her with a hope too frail to build on but too tough to disregard.

These hours of desperate indecision had culminated at last in the appointment with Dr. Stiff, whose verdict left no loophole, as Mrs. Greene remembered when the pain began to subside.

Instead, she was conscious of a feeling of comfortable relaxation. The ugly possibility established as an inevitable fact, had lost its horror; it simply had to be accepted and dealt with.

Lying there with her face turned to the small window of Mary's spare bedroom Sarah Greene found that she was perfectly happy. Now that no further struggle was possible and that a conclusion had been reached, she had fallen into a condition of luxurious restfulness which she decided would probably last till her death, broken of course by successive bouts of pain, and by small variations of mood. But fundamentally she was at ease and likely to remain so.

A small wind blew along the street between the two rows of tall narrow houses, and fluttered the curtains at her window.

She sighed; it was a London wind; even in the cool of the autumn night long before dawn, it was a London wind. She got up restlessly, put on a dressing-gown and sat down in a chair beside the low window.

The house opposite seemed indecently near and indecently small. There could be no dignity of life in so cabined a space. Everywhere she saw a huddle of houses and chimneys. Wind blew along the street again and a casement curtain flapped out of the window opposite and filled her with distaste. It was so close to her, this grotesquely flapping piece of linen that belonged to people whose name she did not know, whose lives were alien to hers.

A sudden nostalgia for Lynton broke like a storm in her heart; Lynton where her windows looked out on lawns and fields and beech trees, and even the sky seemed more remote.

She stood up, her fingers pressed nervously on the window sill, and whispered, "I must go back to Lynton, I must go at once. It's impossible to spend a whole week in town. I'll go to-morrow."

There was a gentle knock at the door. Resentful of any intrusion she said sternly, "Come in," and waited, a rigid small figure at the window.

Roger came quietly round the door and shut it carefully.

"May I come in for a few minutes?" he asked, "Mary's asleep, but I wakened up and heard you moving about, and thought I'd like to come and talk to you. I've had a feeling all evening that there was something wrong, or not exactly wrong; I don't quite know."

He broke off uncertainly, then lifted a chair over to the window and said gently:

"Let's sit and talk for a little; will you tell me if there's anything on your mind?"

Mrs. Greene sat down again. Her resentment had died. Roger in pyjamas and dressing-gown looked young and tentative, and yet there was about him an air of steadfastness that suited the occasion. She looked at him and said lightly:

"My dear, this is a very funny scene. You and I sitting here at the window in the middle of a cold November night."

But Roger only answered:

"Don't put me off, Aunt Sarah. I feel there is something wrong, and I do want you to tell me."

She sat silent. It had never occurred to her to take anyone into her confidence; the thought of being pitied was too upsetting; but Roger was different. He would be able to help; he was strong and reliable and dignified. Supposing she told him, he would not obtrude his knowledge of her secret during the next few months, and indeed he must be fond of her, she decided, or he would never have guessed at the existence of trouble for he was not naturally intuitive.

She took a rapid decision and then spoke.

"I'm glad you came in to-night, Roger. I would like to tell you something rather important both to you and to me. I had never thought of telling, but now I feel I would like to do so."

She paused for a moment, looking down into the quiet street, and then continued:

"I saw a specialist to-day as you know, and he told me what I've feared for some months. I've got cancer, Roger dear, and they can't operate or do anything for it."

Unconsciously she tightened her grasp of his hand and hurried on. "And you see dear, I haven't much time left; only a few months in fact, and you can help me to arrange all sorts of things if you will."

She stopped, a little breathless, and looked at Roger. He was sitting very still but she could see the muscles of his throat twisting as he swallowed and swallowed again, still in silence. When at last he answered her his voice came huskily from a dry throat.

"I never guessed at anything like this, Aunt Sarah. I never dreamed of anything so terrible. I don't suppose you want me to tell you how sorry I am"--He broke off and then burst out, "It's hopelessly inadequate just to say I'm sorry; it means far more than that."

"Hush, my dear, you'll waken Mary if you talk so loud; and listen, Roger, I don't want you to feel like this. I'm an old woman and I've not got much to live for, so it seems quite natural and right to me. I don't want you to get worked up about it; I want you to help me."

"Of course I will," answered Roger. "You must tell me what to do. But you must realise, Aunt Sarah, that this is a bad knock to me; it's so awful to have you here like this, here with me now, and to know at the same time that you're so ill."

He was obviously unstrung, but Sarah Greene was too intent on her subject even to notice. Her soft untroubled voice went on:

"It isn't awful to know beforehand, Roger; it's splendid, because of Lynton. Lynton really is important, and I can make so many preparations now that I know. I'm leaving it to you, Roger--money too, of course, but that doesn't matter. It's the house and land that matter. You'll live there, you and Mary; your children will be born there, and when you die your son will have it. Are you listening Roger dear, do you understand?"

Roger relaxed his attitude of strained attention; he had caught something of the urgency of her preoccupation.

"I love Lynton," he said simply. "It will entirely change my life. You know I'm not very happy in my work and living like this, but I can be absolutely happy at Lynton, and I'll try to have things exactly as you would like them. It's absurd to thank you, Aunt Sarah; Lynton isn't a Christmas present, but I promise you I'll keep it up to standard."

"It does reassure me to hear you say that," Mrs. Greene answered happily, "I know you love it, Roger, and there will be enough money to keep it as it ought to be kept."

Her eyes were vague, her thoughts abstracted as she brooded over the years during which her life had been bound up with the life of Lynton.

"You know, I've lived there all my life," she went on, "except for the first three years after I married. There was never enough money when I was a girl; the house got shabbier and shabbier, and there were only two labourers for the gardens, and everything was over-grown; even the lawns had to be scythed and looked like rough meadows. And then I married Hugh and he loved it nearly as much as I did, and even during the three years when Mamma was still alive, he spent a little money here, and a little there, very secretly and carefully so that she shouldn't guess."

"Where were you living then, Aunt Sarah?" interrupted Roger.

"We had taken a house not far from Lynton. You know it surely; it's called Willowes, only about two miles the other side of Petworth. Of course Hugh came up to town during the week; he was very busy you know. Geoffrey had refused to go into his father's business, so Hugh stepped into old Mr. Greene's shoes when he died. I came up sometimes, but not very often. Then when Mamma died we went to live at Lynton of course, and Hugh gave me a free hand. I put the house right first; it was the easiest, but then it took a long time to work up the gardens, and the lawns didn't come right for years. And you see the tenants hadn't had anything done for them for a long time, so I had to be very judicious. The farms needed new roofs and some wanted new outbuildings, and the fences and gates were in a shocking state, but we improved it all slowly."

Mrs. Greene fell silent, thinking gratefully of all that her husband's money had been able to do for the place she loved.

"And now of course it's perfect," said Roger soberly.

She caught eagerly at the word.

"Yes, I think it is perfect, but you know it would go downhill at once if it wasn't looked after. And that's why I'm so glad to have told you all my affairs. You see dear, now I can go over everything with you, and give you all sorts of details that it would take you some time to find out for yourself, and so there need be no hitch later on when you take over."

Both were conscious that this was a reminder of the grim fact underlying the whole conversation, but to Mrs. Greene it seemed unimportant, and Roger was enough in tune with her to be able to concentrate on the one lovely aspect of the situation.

"I'd like to go with you to Lynton," he suggested.

"That's exactly what I want. I feel I must get back there at once dear. I can't stay on in town. But I don't want to hurt Mary's feelings, and I must come up again next week for Mrs. Rodney's party. What is the best thing to do?"

"Do you really want to go at once?"

"Yes, really at once. To-morrow if possible--I suppose I mean to-day------"

A sudden realisation of the time swept over Mrs. Greene.

The stars had faded and a pale dawn was creeping up the sky.

"It's cold," she said, "and it's some absurd hour in the morning. We must both go to bed. I don't know what we've been thinking of; this is all most unusual."

Roger smiled and stood up.

"I'm just going," he said, "but first about plans: We'll tell Mary that you feel it's too long to stay in town, and that you're going home to-day, and coming back next week. And I'll join you to-morrow, Saturday, and spend Sunday with you."

It was surprising that Roger should take the initiative to this extent; he seemed suddenly to have become more mature, more capable, and Sarah Greene found the effect very restful.

"Thank you, Roger dear, that will be the best possible plan," she said, enjoying to the full the rare sensation of being arranged for.