Part 17

“Before Val and Flossie grew up, it was obvious that I should stay at home and look after the house. Besides, I liked doing it. My father was--and is--the whole world to me. But there was a time, just once, when Val grew up, and David had gone away, when I wanted to go away, too. Of course I’m talking of a good many years ago, and there weren’t so many openings to choose from. But I wanted very much to go to college. Father could just have managed it, without being unfair to any of the others.”

“You told him, then?”

“Oh, yes; I told him.”

“Would he not consent?” inquired Owen, as she paused.

“He promised to consent if I still wished it, after thinking it over.”

“But he persuaded you not to wish it any more?”

“No, it wasn’t that. It’s a little bit difficult to explain. He did ask me what I should gain by it, and whether it wasn’t just restlessness and seeking a vocation to which I was not called. You remember hearing him say that about Val, too?”

“I remember.”

“Well, that was all. He didn’t say anything more. Of course I knew he wouldn’t like my going away from him, without being told. But it was I who decided that it was an occasion for making what I’m afraid I thought of as a sacrifice.”

She surprised him by a little laugh.

“You see, Owen, I think _now_ that I was quite wrong.”

“Quite wrong,” he echoed gravely.

“It was an odd, muddled sort of time for some years after that. I suppose I was resenting my own decision, and yet trying to buoy myself up all the time by thinking of my own self-abnegation and generosity. It had seemed rather a beautiful thing to do at the time--to sacrifice my own life to my widowed father and my motherless brothers and sisters. At first, I remember thinking that there would be something almost sacred about my everyday life at home.”

“When people begin to think that things are sacred to them, it generally means that they’re afraid of facing the truth about them.”

“Exactly. It was a long time before I told myself the truth. But in the end I did, when I saw that no one was likely to want to marry me, and that my life was going to be exactly what I had decided to let it be. And of course from the minute I faced it fair and square--after the first--it all became a great deal easier. Besides, there were compensations, really.”

He made a sound of interrogation.

“Well, it’s really a great thing to have a home. I’ve always felt sorry for women who lived in their boxes, and had nowhere of their own. And being mistress of the house all these years--I’ve liked that, and been fairly interested in it. And I’ve got imagination enough to see that books, and music, and a garden, to anyone brought up as we were especially, are quite important items. You know, women who have a career don’t generally get those other things thrown in as well, unless they’re exceptionally fortunate.”

“You set them against independence and your own freedom?”

“I don’t say that, but they _do_ count,” she said steadily. “If it comes to a question of relative values, of course they take second place. But once I’d admitted to myself, quite honestly, that I’d relinquished my chance of the best things of all, then I could quite see those other things as being intrinsically worth something--a very good second best. They’re really only unsatisfactory when one tries to think of them as substitutes. Taken at their own value--well, I’ve found them helpful, you know.”

There was a silence before she spoke again.

“Most of all, there was Father.”

“That relationship has been the biggest factor in your life, of course.”

“Yes.” She paused, and then in a tone resolutely matter-of-fact, said: “I think perhaps I won’t talk about that now. But I know just as well as you do that in the course of nature, those particular links can only be expected to endure for a certain number of years. They’re breaking now, for me, and it means that part of my life goes too.”

He could not contradict her.

“Is Adrian any use?”

“Poor Adrian! He says now that he and I must keep together, and make a home for one another. He wants to comfort me, and he knows Father would be glad; but you can see for yourself that it wouldn’t be fair to take him at his word. Perhaps we may be together for a little while--till things have worn off a little bit, for him. Adrian is emotional, isn’t he? I don’t know what he’ll do, eventually.”

The recollection of Adrian’s promise to the Canon, that he would relinquish his work, was evidently not a factor that Lucilla took into serious consideration. By tacit agreement neither of them alluded to it.

“Valeria will hardly be able to come home, I suppose?”

“Oh, no. It’s out of the question. She couldn’t leave the two babies, nor very well bring them with her.”

“Flora?”

Already, Owen realized with faint surprise, he had come to remember Flora’s corporeal existence only by an effort. He could scarcely feel her to be less separated from the realities of life than one who had died in youth, and been long forgotten.

Lucilla only shook her head.

“They are all gone. Whatever anyone may say, Owen, they didn’t shirk their chances. They said Yes to Life as they saw it.”

“Can you be glad of that?”

“Very glad. Even selfishly, I can be glad. Think of three--unfulfilled--lives to be spent side by side, held together by affection if you like, but fundamentally built on an artificial basis! No, no”--her smile held humour, rather than conscious valour, though Owen saw it as valiant too--“I’m glad to have faced my facts at last, though it ought to have been done long ago, when I made my choice. I’m not optimistic now, but I--I’m free.”

As they turned, at the end of the garden path, a dark figure sped across the grass towards them. Adrian’s voice reached them, low and urgent:

“Come!”

(ii)

The Canon lay back against his pillows and it did not need the nurse’s gesture to Lucilla to tell them that he was dying. His breath came loud and fast and his eyes were closed.

Adrian had flung himself on his knees at the bedside and was sobbing, his face hidden in his arms. Quentillian stood beside Lucilla, who held her father’s hand in hers.

“Is he conscious?” Lucilla asked.

The nurse shook her head.

“Can anything be done to make it easier?” Lucilla said then.

“No, my dear. I’ve sent messages for the doctor and Mr. Clover, but----”

Her face completed the sentence.

They remained motionless, Adrian’s irregular sobs and the Canon’s heavy breathing alone cutting intermittently across the silence.

Quentillian never knew how long it was before Canon Morchard opened his eyes and spoke, articulating with great difficulty.

“All safe--all happy ... verily, _all_ things work together for good!”

He smiled, looking straight across at Owen Quentillian, and suddenly said with great distinctness:

“_Mors janua vitæ!_”

Owen could hear the cry still, ringing through the room, in the time of dumb struggle that followed.

It seemed a fitting epitome of the spirit that had been Fenwick Morchard’s.

Just before the first hint of day dawned into the room, Lucilla and the nurse laid back on to the pillows the form that they had been supporting.

Adrian was crying and shivering like a child.

“Take him downstairs and give him something hot to drink,” the nurse commanded Owen. “There’s a fire in the kitchen.”

Quentillian looked at Lucilla.

“Please go,” she said.

He went downstairs with Adrian.

“If only I’d been better to him! He was awfully good to me, really,” sobbed Adrian. “He used to make an awful fuss of me when I was a little chap, and I wasn’t half grateful enough--beast that I was!”

“Drink this.”

“I can’t.”

“Of course you can. Try and be a man, Adrian, for your sister’s sake.”

“It’s worse for me than for any of them,” said Adrian ingenuously, “because I’ve got things to be remorseful about, and they haven’t. And now it’s too late!”

“You were here in time,” said Quentillian, abominably conscious, and resentful, of his own triteness.

“And I promised him I’d chuck my job. I think it comforted him.”

“I’m sure it did.”

“It was a sacrifice, in a way, to throw the whole thing up, when I was doing well and keen on it, and all that sort of thing; but I’m thankful now that I did it. Perhaps it made up to--_him_--for my having been such a hound, often and often.”

It was oddly evident that Adrian was torn between genuine grief and shock and a latent desire to make the most of his own former depravity.

“I daresay you’re thinking that having been through the war and everything, I ought to be used to the sight of death,” he said presently; “but it’s quite different when it’s like this. One got sort of hardened there, and everybody was running the same risk--oneself included. But my father--why, it seems like the end of everything, Owen. I must say, I think I’m a bit young to have my home broken up like this, don’t you?”

“Very young,” repeated Quentillian automatically, and yet not altogether without significance.

“I don’t know what will happen, but of course Lucilla and I have to leave St. Gwenllian. It’s hard on her, too. I thought we ought to keep together, you know, for a bit. It seems more natural. I shall have to look for a fresh job, and I don’t know what Hale will say to my chucking him.”

Adrian was silent, obviously uneasy, and it was evident enough that it was the strong revulsion from that anxiety which prompted his next sudden outburst.

“I’m so awfully thankful that I had the strength to make that promise about leaving Hale. It’ll always be a comfort to me to feel that I made a sacrifice for the dear old man, and that he--went--the happier for it. Mind you, I don’t agree with him about Hale and Hale’s crowd. Father had the old-fashioned ideas of his generation, you know, and of course all progress seemed a sort of vandalism to him. I daresay if he’d ever met Hale he’d have had his eyes opened a bit, and seen things quite differently. Hale was always jolly decent about him, too--he’d read some of his stuff, and had quite a sort of admiration for it, in a way. Said it was reactionary, and all that, but perfectly sound in its own way, you know--scholarly, and all that kind of muck.”

“Have you written to Hale?”

“No. Of course, in a way it’s an awfully awkward situation for me, having to tell him why I’m not coming back to him, and so on. I thought I’d pop up and see him as soon as it could be managed. Of course there are arrangements to be made----”

The boy broke off, in a fresh access of bewilderment and grief.

“I simply can’t realize he’s gone, Owen. I say--you do think he was happy, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“That promise of mine meant a lot to him. I’m so thankful that I’ve got that to remember. You might say, in a way, considering how much he always thought of us, that some of his children had rather let him down, in a way. I mean, Lucilla and I were the only two there, out of the five of us. Of course, David, poor chap, had gone already, and Val and Flossie couldn’t very well help themselves--and yet there it was! Do you suppose that when he said--_that_--about ‘all safe, all happy’--he was thinking of us?”

“Yes, I do.”

“It’s a comfort to know his mind was at rest. He wouldn’t have said that if I hadn’t made that promise, you know,” said Adrian.

“Look here, Adrian, hadn’t you better try and get some sleep? There’ll be things to be done, later, you know, and you and I--if you’ll let me help--must try and take some of it off Lucilla’s hands.”

All the child in Adrian responded to the transparent lure.

He drew himself up.

“Thanks awfully, Owen. I shall be only too glad of your help. There’ll be a good deal for me to see to, of course, so perhaps I’d better lie down for an hour or two while I can. What about Lucilla?”

“Would you like to come and find her?”

The boy shuddered violently.

“Not in there--I couldn’t,” he said piteously.

They went upstairs together.

As they passed the door of the Canon’s room, it was cautiously opened and the nurse came outside and spoke to Adrian.

“The doctor should be here presently. I want him to see Miss Morchard. She turned faint a little while ago, and I’ve got her into her room, but I’m afraid she’s in for a breakdown. I’ve seen them like this before, after a long strain, you know.”

The woman’s tone was professionally matter-of-fact.

“Had I better go to her?” said Adrian, troubled, and seeming rather resentful at the fresh anxiety thrust upon him.

“I shouldn’t, if I were you. It’ll only upset her. She’s broken down a bit--hysterical. It’ll relieve her, in the end. I shan’t leave her now, till the doctor comes.”

Lucilla hysterical!

Owen, almost more amazed than concerned, watched the nurse depart to what she evidently looked upon as a fresh case.

“Well, I can’t do anything, I suppose,” said Adrian miserably.

“Go to bed,” Quentillian repeated. “Shall I draft out some telegrams for you, and let you see them before they go? It’s no use sending them to the post-office before eight.”

“Don’t you want to sleep yourself?”

“Not just now, thanks.”

“Well, I’ll relieve you at seven. Send someone to call me, will you?--though I don’t suppose I shall sleep.”

The boy trailed into his room, disconsolate and frightened-looking.

Owen Quentillian, searching for writing materials, found them on the table in the Canon’s study, a table scrupulous in its orderliness, each stack of papers docketed, each article laid with symmetrical precision in its own place.

Owen would not sit there, where only the Canon had sat, under the crucifix mounted on the green velvet plaque. He went instead to another, smaller table, in the embrasure of a window, and sat there writing until the morning light streamed in upon him.

Then he laid down the pen, with a sense of the futility of activities that sought to cheat reflection, and let his mind dwell upon that which subconsciously obsessed it.

Canon Morchard had died as he had lived--an optimist. An invincible faith in the ultimate rightness of all things had been his to the end, and perhaps most of all at the end.

Quentillian envisaged the Canon’s causes of thankfulness.

He had seen his children as “safe” and “happy.” Was it only because he had wanted so to see them?

David, who was dead, had been mourned for, but the Canon had been spared the deepest bitterness of separation. He had known nothing of the gulf widening between his own soul and that of his eldest son....

A fool’s paradise?

He had seen Lucilla as safe and happy.

And yet Lucilla’s life was over, unlived. As she herself had said, her chances had gone by. Torquay remained. It was not very difficult to imagine her days there. An old lady--the placid kindness accorded by the aged to the middle-ageing--the outside interests of a little music, a few books, a flower-garden--the pathetic, vicarious planning for scarcely-seen nephews and nieces--the quick, solitary walks, cut short by the fear of being missed, and then, as years went on, more solitude, and again more solitude.

Lucilla had said: “I’m not an optimist now--but I’m free.”

From the bottom of his heart Owen recalled with thankfulness the fact of Lucilla’s freed spirit.

It was the best that life would ever hold for her now.

His thoughts turned to Flora.

Quentillian could not envisage her life: eternally secluded, eternally withdrawn. She was lost to them, as they were lost to her.

Subconsciously, he was aware of associations connected with Flora’s vocation upon which he preferred not to dwell. He knew, dimly, intuitively, that Lucilla’s merciless clarity of outlook had seen Flora less as a voluntary sacrifice than as the self-deluded victim of fanaticism.

But no doubts had crossed the Canon’s mind on Flora’s behalf. He had known no distrust of her craving for self-immolation, no dread of reaction coming too late.

He had thanked God for the dedication of Flora.

The one of his children for whom he had grieved perhaps longest was Valeria. And it was on Valeria that Owen’s thoughts dwelt most gladly. She had purchased reality for herself, and although the price might include his own temporary discomfiture, Quentillian rejoiced in it candidly. Nevertheless, it was Val’s error, and not Val’s achievement, that her father had seen. His hope for her had been the one of ultimate reparation implied in his own favourite words--“All things work together for good.”

And the Canon had quoted those words yet again, when Adrian, his favourite child, had come back to him. His deepest thankfulness had been for the emotional, unstable promise volunteered by Adrian’s impulsive youth.

Quentillian could see no reliance to be placed upon that promise to which the Canon, with such ardent gratitude and joy, had trusted. Adrian would drift, the type that does little harm, if less good. Strength of intellect, as of character, had been denied him. No interest would hold him long, no aim seem to him to be worth sustained effort.

And yet the Canon had felt Adrian, too--perhaps most of all Adrian, in the flush of reconciliation after their estrangement--to be “safe” and “happy.”

Then optimism was merely a veil, drawn across the nakedness of Truth?

From the depths of a profound and ingrained pessimism, Quentillian sought to view the question dispassionately, and felt himself fundamentally unable to do so.

Hard facts and--at best--resignation, or baseless hopes and undaunted courage, such as had been Canon Morchard’s?

The death of the Canon, bereft of all and yet believing himself to possess all, had epitomized his life.

Overhead, sounds and stirrings had begun, and Quentillian softly let himself out of the house and stepped out into the fresh chill of the morning air. His eyelids were stiff and aching from his vigil, and sudden, most unwonted tears filled them. He glanced at the windows of the old house. A light still burned in Lucilla’s, as though the nurse had been able to spare no thought from her ministrations.

Lucilla, the finest and bravest of the Canon’s children, had been broken on the wheel.

In the passionless sorrow that possessed him, Quentillian grasped at the strand of consolation that he knew to exist somewhere. It had been found for him once before, by Canon Morchard.

He found it again, remembering.

_Mors janua vitæ._

The Canon had proclaimed it, as a joyful certainty. Approached far otherwise, Owen could yet proclaim it, too, as the supreme and ultimate Fact to be faced, of which the true realization would strike forever the balance between optimism and pessimism.

He turned towards the entrance again, and as he did so the blinds of Canon Morchard’s room were drawn down, by a careful, unseen hand.

V

OWEN AND LUCILLA

(i)

It was nearly a year later that Owen Quentillian went to Torquay to see Lucilla Morchard, and asked her to marry him.

Nothing in the occasional letters that they had exchanged could have been regarded as in any way indicative of such a _dénouement_, and for once Owen saw Lucilla thoroughly disconcerted.

“But why?” she demanded, in a tone at once wistful and indignant.

Her face was pale and lined, but her eyes had lost neither humour nor sanity of outlook.

“Not for the only reason that it ought to be, dear Lucilla,” he answered humbly. “But because of the awful loneliness at Stear, and my own weakness which makes me afraid of it. And a little because of your sadness here, perhaps, but most of all because you are the only person I know who can face facts, and _then_ be happy. It’s the most wonderful combination in life.”

“You have faced facts, yourself.”

“And it has only brought me bitterness.”

She reflected for a moment and then said:

“That’s true. But you won’t find your remedy in marriage with me, Owen.”

Her voice held all its old crisp, common-sense.

“Are you staying to tea, because if so, my aunt will want some warning. She is old, and fussy, and there’s only one maid.”

They had met out of doors.

“Pray don’t let me cause any inconvenience,” he said stiffly, offended by the irrelevance.

“It won’t be in the least inconvenient,” Lucilla assured him kindly. “Aunt Mary likes to see people, very much, it’s a new interest for her. Only it worries her if the drawing-room fire isn’t lit, or there’s no cake for tea. Things like that, you know.”

He hardly did know, so different was his own world, and he could scarcely credit that Lucilla, the erstwhile mistress of St. Gwenllian, could know.

“You’ve remembered, of course,” she said reflectively, “that I’m several years older than you are?”

“What can that matter?”

“Nothing at all, certainly, if you’ve faced the risk that it entails and are prepared to take it. But, of course, that isn’t the only risk, Owen.”

“I suppose not. Is this an acceptance, or a refusal, Lucilla?”

They both broke into laughter.

“Here we are,” said Lucilla, stopping at a little gate in a row of other little gates. “I’ll walk with you to the station afterwards.”

She paused, with her hand on the little gate, and looked at him.

“It’s only that we are--or we ought to be--past the stage of following a generous impulse and hoping for the best. I--I don’t want either of us to bite off more than we can chew.”

On the elegance of her simile, Miss Morchard opened the front door of “Balmoral” with a latchkey, allowing no time for a reply.

She left Quentillian in the tiny, red-tiled hall while she went into a room opening out of it, that was as obviously the drawing-room as the room on the other side was the dining-room.

Quentillian looked round him, at the walls crowded with foolish brackets and bad water-colours, at the painted deal staircase and balusters, at the window on the landing that looked out on to little back gardens, all of exactly the same size and shape, and had a momentary vivid recollection of the shabby, dignified rooms at St. Gwenllian, and the old cedars close to the tennis court.

Lucilla had been fond of gardening.

From somewhere in the basement came the screeching note of a parrot.

Then Lucilla summoned him.

The drawing-room was exactly what he had expected it to be, and so was the aunt.

She talked a little about Torquay, and explained that she knew some of the residents, but none of the visitors, unless there was “a link,” and she asked Owen if he had read the life of Mary Slessor of Calabar.

He had not.

“You ought to read it. She was such a wonderful person,” said the old lady with enthusiasm, and she talked about foreign missions for some time, though even this failed to enlighten the uninterested Quentillian on the identity of Mary Slessor of Calabar.

Lucilla did not talk very much--but, then, she never had talked very much.

The old aunt referred to her several times, and once said to Quentillian: “My niece is clever, you know. She reads a great deal. I like having an opinion to go by, and she chooses my books for me so much better than the girl at Boots’ lending library. So many people just go by the name of a book, I fancy, but Lucilla and I like to know something about the author as well.”

She spoke with a faint air of justifiable pride.

Quentillian suddenly thought of the mountain of manuscript concerning Leonidas of Alexandria, at the laborious compilation for which Lucilla had worked for so many years. He heard the oft-repeated tag of which Canon Morchard had been fond: “Lucilla, here, is our literary critic.”

A small, panting maid brought in tea, and the old lady poured it out, and was very meticulous in inquiring into Quentillian’s precise tastes as to milk and sugar.

As soon as he could, he made his farewell.

“I hope you’ll come again, now you’ve found the way here,” said Lucilla’s aunt, kindly.

Lucilla, as she had promised, went with him, when he left “Balmoral.”

They walked in silence for a little way and then Owen said pleadingly:

“You’ll let me take you away from that, won’t you, Lucilla? It’s an impossible life for you.”