Part 7

Quentillian, however, had no desire to pace the room except for the very few steps that would put him outside it.

He debated in vain within himself the most tactful method of making this clear to Canon Morchard.

“I suppose I have been blind. This blow has come upon me with fearful suddenness--I suspected nothing--nothing. How could I----”

The door opened.

Quentillian looked round thankfully at Lucilla. She did not go up to her father, but spoke quietly from the door.

“Father, don’t you think Owen should come to dinner?”

A quick frown drew the Canon’s always formidable brows together.

“Since when do my children interrupt me in my own room, at my work, Lucilla?” he enquired.

Her face did not change, but she looked at Quentillian.

“Thank you,” he said quickly. “I will come.”

The Canon rose. His hand went once more to the resting-place now rapidly becoming habitual to it--Quentillian’s shoulder.

“Do not let my foolish child impose her trivial urgencies upon you.”

The Canon’s other hand went out towards his daughter.

“Did I speak over-sharply, my daughter? Perhaps Mary was nearer my mood than Martha, just now--Martha, careful and troubled over many things. Go, then, children. Lucilla, you will come to me later. Until then, I do not wish to be disturbed again.”

With a heavy sigh, the Canon turned again to his writing-table.

Owen and Lucilla went out.

“He is terribly upset. Could he not be persuaded to come to dinner?”

“No, I knew he wouldn’t want that. But I shall take in a tray when I go to him later. Sometimes, if he’s talking, he eats without thinking about it. I was counting on that--and besides, he would have disliked my suggesting that he should come in to dinner as usual.”

Lucilla’s voice and her face alike were entirely guiltless of irony.

Quentillian followed her into the dining-room:

“The others have finished,” Lucilla said. “Would you rather I stayed, or that I went?”

“Stay, please.”

She sat down opposite to him at once.

“I wish your father were less angry with poor Val, although perhaps it is not my place to say so. But in his--his generous sympathy for me, I am afraid he has rather lost sight of what she must have been suffering.”

“I don’t think suffering, in my father’s eyes, would ever condone what he considers wrong-doing.”

The comment seemed to Owen to be rather an illuminating one.

“I suppose not. It may surprise you to hear that I do not, personally, consider that Canon Morchard is entitled either to condemn or condone whatever Valeria may have done.”

“I quite agree with you.”

Quentillian was less gratified than astonished at the assertion.

“Val herself would hardly agree to that.”

“No.”

“Well, but don’t you see, Lucilla, how difficult that’s going to make things? To my mind, the only natural proceeding is for Valeria and George Cuscaden to marry and go to Canada.”

Quentillian paused almost without meaning to, on a pronouncement that would certainly have met with drastic and emphatic interruption from Canon Morchard.

Lucilla, however, received it unmoved.

“Don’t you think so?” said Quentillian, slightly disappointed.

“Yes.”

“But will Valeria do it? Won’t her strange ideas of filial duty interfere? I am absolutely convinced that one of the principal reasons for her ever becoming engaged to me, was her wish to please her father.”

“I don’t think it was altogether that, Owen. But you did ask her to marry you at a time when she was just beginning to realize that the sort of life she led before the war wasn’t going to be enough for her.”

“Need it have taken a European war to make her see that?”

The smile that Lucilla turned upon his petulance was disarming.

“Don’t be so cross, Owen.”

She might have been talking to a little boy.

“I think,” said Quentillian with dignity, “that perhaps you forget it was only a few hours ago that I learnt how completely cheated and--fooled, I have been.”

He could not avoid a recollection that the Canon would not have needed such a reminder.

“Indeed, I don’t forget at all,” said Lucilla earnestly. “It must be very vexing for you, but--Owen, do forgive me for saying that I can’t really feel as if you minded dreadfully. You’re much too understanding, really, not to know that poor Val didn’t wilfully cheat you, any more than she cheated herself. And I think you, too, perhaps, in another way, were beginning to feel that you’d made a mistake in promising to marry one another.”

Lucilla, Quentillian realized half ruefully and half with amusement, had beaten him at his own game. Her unvarnished appraisement of the situation brought to it no more and no less than the facts warranted.

His answering gaze was as straight as her own.

“You’re right,” he said abruptly.

She held out her hand with a laden plate in it.

“Pudding?” she enquired, prosaically.

“Thanks.”

He made an excellent dinner.

“But what will happen to us now, Lucilla?”

“Well, George Cuscaden will be here again, and that’ll make Val feel better. And you’ll help, won’t you?”

“Certainly.”

And, on the strange assurance, they separated.

It was much later that Owen, from his own room, heard the door of the study immediately below him, open once more, and then shut.

Barely audible, but still unmistakable, he heard a steady stream of sound, rising and falling, easily to be identified as the Canon’s voice.

“Good God, what more _can_ he have to say about it?” reflected Quentillian. He was destined to ask himself the question again, for the sounds, punctuated by the briefest of pauses, doubtless consecrated to the delivery of laconic replies from Lucilla, continued far into the small hours of the morning.

Finally, after Quentillian had fallen asleep, he was roused by a gentle, reiterated knocking at the door.

Only too well aware whose hand was responsible for those considerately modified taps, he rose and went to open the door, omitting the usual invitation to enter.

As he expected, the Canon, unutterably pale and weary-looking, stood without.

“Dear fellow, I knew that I should find you awake. Owen, I could not but come to tell you that all is well with me now. I have forgiven, even as I myself hope--and need--to be forgiven. I will see Valeria tomorrow, and tell her that she has my full and free pardon. Together we will consider what is the best thing that we can make of this most unhappy business.”

“And Cuscaden, sir?”

Quentillian intended to suggest the inclusion of Captain Cuscaden in the proposed conference, which might reasonably be supposed to concern him closely, but the Canon misunderstood the elliptical reference.

“Aye, Owen, I have no bitterness left in my heart, even for him. ‘Unto seventy times seven.’ Those words have been ringing in my ears until I could almost bring myself to believe that I heard them uttered aloud. I need not ask if all is well with you, dear boy? Your self-command and generosity have shamed me all along.”

The absolute sincerity of the utterance caused Quentillian, with considerably more reason than the Canon, to feel ashamed in his turn.

“I am very far from being what you think me, sir,” he said, earnestly, and with complete truth. “I am afraid you are very tired.”

The Canon, indeed, looked utterly exhausted.

“If so, it is in my Master’s service,” said Canon Morchard gently. “And you remember, Owen--‘there remaineth a rest.’ May it be mine, and yours, too--all in His own good time! Good-night to you, my dear.”

For the first time since Owen’s childish days, the Canon placed his hand upon his head and murmured a word of blessing.

Then, with a smile as wistful as it was tender, he turned and went away upstairs.

(viii)

The following day was one of singular discomfort, and of private interviews that were held to be of the greatest necessity, in spite of the fact that the participants always emerged from them in worse plight than they went in.

The Canon saw Valeria in his study, and she came out crying.

Valeria sought Flora, and both wept.

Quentillian deliberately demanded an interview from Captain Cuscaden, but was baffled in his design of a rational discussion of the three-cornered situation by Cuscaden’s honest bewilderment at the mere suggestion of disinterested counsel.

It seemed, indeed, that Captain Cuscaden would have understood Owen better, and certainly have thought more highly of him, had the traditional horsewhip, abhorred of all Owen’s most deeply-rooted prejudices, held a place in their conversation, at least as threat, if not as actual fact.

Failing the horsewhip, Cuscaden was inclined to follow in the wake of the Canon and attribute to Valeria’s discarded _fiancé_ a spirit of generous heroism that was even less to Quentillian’s liking.

“Captain Cuscaden takes primitive views,” Quentillian observed to Lucilla, whom alone he suspected of summing up the whole situation very much at its true value.

“Yes, that will suit Val very well.”

“You think she takes primitive views, too?”

“Yes, don’t you?”

Owen realized that, although he had never thought Valeria subtle, he had at least supposed her to be capable of appreciating his own subtlety. But subtleties had not, apparently, really weighed with Val at all.

The sight of her tear-mottled face annoyed Owen’s æsthetic sense so much, and he felt so sincerely ashamed of his annoyance, that it constrained him to absent himself from the house all the afternoon. He would gladly have left St. Gwenllian altogether and felt sure that the Canon expected nothing less of him, but Flora brought him a piteous little message from Val to beg that he would remain until “something was settled.”

In the forlorn hope that this had been achieved, Quentillian returned.

An eager grasp met him almost upon the threshold.

“Owen, dear lad! Where have you been? I have been uneasy--most uneasy, at your prolonged absence.”

“I’m very sorry, sir.”

“Nay, so long as all is well with you! I should have had more faith.”

The Canon smiled gravely, and relief was latent in the smile. Quentillian suddenly realized that Canon Morchard had not improbably known the sub-conscious fear of his guest and _protégé_ having sought some drastic means of ending an existence in the course of which he had been played so ill a turn.

His sense of his own inadequacy increased every moment.

“May I know how things stand?” he enquired abruptly.

“_May_ you? Who has a better right than yourself, dear Owen? Come you out with me, and let us have a few words together.”

Owen followed his host.

“It has been a trying day--a sad and trying one. But I need not tell you _that_--you, whose grief is so much greater than mine own, even. Though you, at least, Owen, have nothing to reproach yourself with, whereas I am responsible for the weakness in my poor child which has led to this unhappy state of affairs. But at least she is fully sensible of error--she knows what she has done.”

It would be strange indeed if she did not, Owen reflected, in the universal _bouleversement_ that had characterized Valeria’s surroundings ever since her sudden departure from the conventions.

“To my surprise, Lucilla, upon whose judgment I place a certain reliance, although it may sound somewhat odd to hear of a father seeking counsel of his child--Lucilla advocates my sanctioning her sister’s marriage. My first instinct was of course to cut her short at the mention of anything so premature--so--so lacking in all taste or feeling. But--I hardly know----”

“There is nothing against Captain Cuscaden, is there?”

Quentillian made the observation in the simple hope of expediting the Canon’s decision, but he immediately perceived that it led him open once more to the imputation of high-minded generosity.

“I mean to say, he can afford to marry?” he amended hastily.

“He has satisfied me upon that score,” Canon Morchard admitted. “I have never desired wealth for my dear ones, nor have they been brought up to it. Valeria is not unfitted to become the wife of a poor man. Nay, had she but acted an honourable and high-minded part throughout, I should gladly send her forth into the New World. Valeria has something of the pioneer spirit, I have always felt.”

He sighed heavily.

“In short, Owen, if, as Lucilla tells me, you share her own view, then I shall not withhold my consent to this marriage. The haste is strange and unseemly, but Captain Cuscaden cannot postpone his departure, in view of the position awaiting him, and my unhappy child, left here, would be in a difficult and awkward situation, nor have I any security, alas, that she has sufficient discretion to face such a situation.”

“It might be difficult for her,” Quentillian admitted. “Lucilla is looking for us, I think, sir.”

Lucilla was indeed advancing towards them.

The Canon frowned slightly.

“Am I wanted, my child?”

“It was Owen that I wanted, father.”

“My dear, Owen is engaged with me.”

“I know,” Lucilla seemed slightly perplexed, but quite unruffled. “I know, but the post is just going, and I thought Owen ought to see this before I send it to the papers.”

She handed him a sheet of notepaper, upon which he read a brief and conventionally-worded announcement to the effect that the marriage arranged between himself and Valeria Morchard would not take place.

He passed it to the Canon, who groaned.

“Must this be?” he enquired, with some superfluity.

The superfluity seemed to strike himself, for he added almost at once:

“‘If ’t’were done, ’t’were well ’t’were done quickly’, no doubt.”

“There is the other announcement to be thought of,” said Lucilla with merciless common-sense. “If Val is married at the end of this week, we shall have to put that in the papers.”

The Canon gave Owen a quick, anxious glance.

“Come into the house, my daughter,” he said to Lucilla. “We can speak of such matters there.”

Owen understood that Canon Morchard was thinking of him.

On a sudden impulse he went to seek Valeria.

“Look here, my dear, I’d do anything to help you, but do you really want me to stay on here any longer? It’s more than I can stand.”

“Oh, Owen! I thought you’d forgiven me--I thought you didn’t mind, so very much, after all,” she cried in dismay.

“I don’t mind in the least,” Quentillian told her desperately. “But it’s a false position altogether, and I want to be out of it.”

“Of course you do, it was very selfish of me to want to keep you. Only somehow Father is less--dreadful--when you’re there, Owen. But he’s forgiven me,” her tears came falling fast, “and I’m going out with George when he sails, at the beginning of next week. We shall be married very, very quietly, on Saturday.”

“I’m very glad to hear it. Indeed I am, Val. I’m sure he’s a good fellow, and I hope he’ll make you very happy.”

She was crying too much to speak, as he went away from her.

And Quentillian, definitely, could tell himself that he had no regrets in relinquishing Valeria.

Her warm emotionalism had not been without its appeal, but he had no liking for tears at a crisis, nor indeed for a crisis at all. His mind reverted to Lucilla’s matter-of-fact fashion of dealing with the crucial instances of life at St. Gwenllian, and theoretically, he met her attitude with applause. But he also remembered that he had not found her sympathetic, upon the preceding evening.

Impartially, he acknowledged with a rueful smile, his own exactingness.

He must go, and decided that it should be to London. As for Stear, he would face it later. The thought of Stear, and the loneliness there, brought the realest sense of loss to him that he had yet experienced over the defection of Valeria.

He had thought to hear her laughter there, to see the apricot bloom on her lovely face, her children growing up there.

With a long sigh, Owen let the vision go. The warm, human things of life had come very near to him, but he had not known how to hold them. Some subtle, inner sense warned him that Valeria had done well to betake herself and the rich gifts of her ardent nature, to the simple and primitive life of the colonies, and the man who was offering that life to her.

He went away to make his preparations for leaving St. Gwenllian.

* * * * *

Valeria’s wedding, not unnaturally, provided no occasion for festivity.

The bride herself remarked in private to her sisters:

“I feel exactly as though I was one of those unfortunate girls who come to Father for him to marry them so as to ‘make honest women of them’ at the eleventh hour. You know the way that sort of wedding is hurried through, in a hole-and-corner style....”

“It’s lucky for you you’ve got a good deal of your trousseau made already,” was Lucilla’s practical reply.

“Yes, and ‘V. Q.’ embroidered on more than half of it!” cried Val hysterically.

“You can’t possibly use it,” Flora declared austerely. “Unless I can alter it for you in time.”

“Of course she can use it,” said Lucilla.

Valeria left them both. In the overstrained condition of her nerves, Lucilla’s crudely-worded common-sense and Flora’s fastidiousness were equally little to her taste. Her father’s sorrowful gravity struck her with despair, and Owen Quentillian’s magnanimous detachment puzzled her sincerely, and made her doubly remorseful.

It was only when George Cuscaden was actually with her that she knew with real certainty that she had done right at the last moment.

On the night before her wedding, Canon Morchard called Valeria, gave her his blessing and forgiveness, and handed to her some of her dead mother’s jewelry.

“God bless and help you in the way that you have chosen, and may He bring all things together for good, as He alone can do.”

“Forgive me, Father.”

“My child, I have nothing to forgive. It was not I whom you wronged, but yourself,--and one other. His pardon is yours, fully and freely, as you know well. And now, my Valeria, you owe it to your husband to put the past behind you. You will enter into your new life purified by that very sense of past error, humbled by repentance.”

The Canon’s voice was very gentle.

It was long after midnight when Valeria heard him go upstairs.

George Cuscaden and Valeria were married by Mr. Clover, immediately after Matins next day, and Canon Morchard, throughout the ceremony, knelt with his face hidden by his hand.

The sense of irrevocability that comes to most brides assailed Valeria irresistibly for a moment as she walked, alone with her husband, the short distance from the church back to St. Gwenllian.

She glanced up at him, and in the look that met hers she found all the reassurance that she was ever to need.

“A new life, and a new world, my Val. We’re going to face things together, now.”

She was no longer afraid or doubtful, but felt the strangest rush of pure exhilaration.

It was her justification for the past.

“A new life, and a new world,” she repeated. “We’re going to be very happy, in spite of everything that’s happened.”

“We _are_ very happy,” said George Cuscaden firmly, her hand held fast in his.

“I think they’ll forgive me, at home, in time. Father was very kind last night, and Flossie and Lucilla have been so good.”

“Val, my darling,” said the young man very seriously, “there’s one thing I do want to say, and you mustn’t mind. You’ve got to leave the past behind you, now. Isn’t there something or other in the Bible about forgetting thy father’s house and thine own people?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, I don’t really mean forgetting them, you know. But you’ve got your own life now, and it isn’t going to run on the old lines any more. It seems to me there’s been such a lot of talking and thinking in your life up to now, that there’s been no room for doing anything. You and I are going to change all that.”

“Yes, George,” said Valeria.

She had, mysteriously, become absolutely happy and absolutely secure. Nothing mattered any more at all except the fact that George and she had found one another in time.

And she was able to surmise, not without a smile, that she had that moment heard almost the only Scriptural quotation from her husband of which he was ever likely to deliver himself.

Quotations, collections, barren discussions, abstract ideals, all lay behind her. In future her preoccupations would concern the health and welfare of her husband and perhaps his children, food and clothing and warmth, pots and pans, and the work of her own hands.

And from the depths of her heart, Valeria was glad.

II

ADRIAN

(i)

“You know, I can’t help thinking you’ve been all wrong about this business of Val’s,” Adrian said reproachfully to his remaining sisters.

Lucilla seemed singularly undisturbed by the distressing pronouncement, but Flora said anxiously:

“Why, Adrian?”

“Well, look how frightfully hard it is on the rest of us. You know what Father is--he’ll be days and days, if not months and months, getting over this, and it’ll put him dead against anything of that sort for life.”

“These things don’t happen twice in one family, I hope,” said Lucilla. “Neither Flora nor I are particularly likely to break off one engagement and enter into another and get married and go off to Canada, all inside a week.”

“You girls never think of anybody but yourselves.”

“Are you thinking of doing anything like that, then, Adrian?”

Lucilla appeared mildly to be amused, and not at all impressed by the probability of her own suggestion.

“How can I think of doing anything at all when I can’t get a decent job and only have a nominal allowance? I know Father can’t afford more, and we’re all in the same box--and then Val goes and marries a chap like Cuscaden, who hasn’t a penny, when she could have had a fellow with a decent little property and some money of his own, besides what I suppose he makes by writing. Why, just think what she could have done for all of us!”

Lucilla laughed outright.

“It wouldn’t have made millionaires of us, if she had married Owen.”

“Well, I can’t say I blame her, from one point of view,” Adrian conceded. “A more absolute prig than Owen has turned into, I never wish to meet. You know he won’t promise me the living at Stear?”

“The living at Stear?”

Flora looked at her brother in all but speechless astonishment, and Lucilla observed that a living was usually offered to a clergyman.

“And is there any reason why I shouldn’t go into the Church?” Adrian enquired, in counter-irony. “Goodness knows there was enough talk about it before the war, and it would please the governor frightfully. In fact, really, I’m thinking of him as much as anything. He was disappointed about old David going into the army, and he’s frightfully cut up about Val, and he may as well get a little comfort out of one of us. And I really don’t dislike the idea much, especially if it means a settled income in a year or two’s time.”

Lucilla got up.

“Talk to Mr. Clover, before you say anything to Father,” she advised. “Flossie, I’m going to see about Val’s class.”

Flora looked at Adrian with grave, unhumourous eyes.

“You don’t realize what Father would feel about your speaking of going into the priesthood in that sort of way, Adrian. You have no faintest vocation to the life of a clergyman.”

“What do you know about it? I’m the only person who can judge of that.”

“It lies between you and your conscience, certainly. But if you suppose that Father, with all his experience, would be satisfied with any but the highest motives----”

She stopped expressively.

“There may be different opinions as to what the highest motives _are_,” said Adrian. “I wish this business of Val’s hadn’t put it out of the question to ask Owen anything.”

“Owen is coming to Stear in another month. I am quite certain that he doesn’t mean to let this make any difference, and you can ask him anything you want to. But really and truly, Adrian, if this suggestion wasn’t so absolutely wild, I should call it most irreverent.”

It was evident that Flora had uttered the most profound condemnation of which she was capable.