Part 7

“Yes, dearest, of course,” tenderly replied Nina, but she refrained from telling him the only piece of news which transpired during the next few days: that Frances was not well enough for Mrs. Tregaskis to leave her, and that Rosamund had refused to accompany Hazel to Scotland, but remained with her guardian at Porthlew.

“It _is_ tiresome of her,” said Bertha, in a tone more nearly resembling annoyance than she often used.

“Frances isn’t seriously ill at all, and if she were Rosamund would be the worst possible person for her. She goes about looking like a tragedy-queen, as though Frances were at death’s door.”

“Why on earth did you let her stay?” said Nina with more derision than sympathy in her voice.

“She asked Frederick. You know how tiresome and contradictory he can be, and of course he knew perfectly well that I didn’t want Rosamund fussing and fretting on my hands, but he said she could do as she liked. He always takes up an absurd attitude of having no authority over those two, as you know.”

“I know. So Hazel has gone alone?”

“I’ve had to send my maid with her, though I should have done that in any case. I don’t approve of young girls travelling about all over the country by themselves.”

“Lucky for you that you have girls who can be chaperoned! Look at poor little me--I can’t run after Morris, let alone send a maid with him, and have to sit here with a trembling heart, wondering all the time how things are going with him.”

“That’s always the way with a son, my dear, or a husband either,” said Bertha, determinedly emphasizing the fact that she, although not the mother of a son, also possessed a male appendage.

“It’s our part just to sit at home and work and wait, while they have all the fun,” Nina sighed. “A woman’s life is one long self-sacrifice,” she murmured.

“It is, when one has to mend and make and nurse, and all the rest of it,” cordially agreed Bertha, with one fleeting glance at Nina’s exquisite, empty hands, folded in her lap.

The glance was not lost upon Mrs. Severing, who presently said reflectively that Mr. Bartlett would no doubt call upon her shortly with some of his interminable business questions, and she must ask dearest Bertie to forgive her. It was not her way to put off a matter of business.

“Unpractical, dreamy creature that I am,” said Nina with a sad, sweet smile, “I have had too many years’ hard training in looking after this big estate, ever to be unbusinesslike. Mr. Bartlett always amuses me so much when he _will_ say that I should make a better agent than he does.”

“I don’t wonder!” exclaimed Bertha, the dryness of her tone making it abundantly evident that her emphatic assent was directed towards Nina’s amusement, and not towards Mr. Bartlett’s opinion of his employer’s abilities. “No, no, dear. You must stick to your charming songs. They’re _your_ work in the world,” smiled Bertha tolerantly.

“Dear Bertie! How sweet of you to say so. I’m always afraid of being just some silly, trivial flowery thing--not of any real use in the world.”

“The world needs its little speedwell flowers just as much as its sturdy oak-trees,” laughed Bertha tenderly.

“Yes, dear,” said Nina deftly. “There is room for Mary as well as for Martha. It always comforts me to remember that.”

Comfort, however, was not the predominant expression on the face of Mrs. Tregaskis as she heard her friend’s favourite Scriptural parallel once more enunciated.

“If you’re really waiting for Mr. Bartlett, darling, I mustn’t keep you,” she said rather hastily. “Anyhow, I must get back to my invalid. She’s much better to-day, and only fretting at the idea of my having missed the Scotch visits. Of course one _had_ been rather longing for a breath of Scottish air, this weather, but I dare say I shall manage without. It’s an economy, at all events.”

She gave her cheery, plucky laugh.

“How is Morris enjoying Norway? Has he got over his love-lornity?”

Nina laughed a little.

“I think he has. I’ve had a very cheery letter from him, raving about the fiords and things.”

Bertha looked slightly puzzled.

“The----? Oh, you mean the _fjords_! Yes, of course they must be perfectly gorgeous at this time of year,” she remarked thoughtfully, with the air of a connoisseuse.

“They are just the same at any time of year, dear,” sweetly returned Nina. “Geoffrey and I went there for a fortnight once--it seems oh so long ago! It somehow made one think of those far-away days when everything was couleur de rose----”

There were few topics that Bertha enjoyed less than the retrospective couleur de rose of her friend’s married life, and she hastily dragged the conversation back into the living present.

“I’m so very glad about Morris. Give the boy my love when you write. I wish Rosamund was half as sensible as he is. She goes mooning about the place as though she’d lost her dearest friend.”

Bertha gave a slightly apologetic laugh at her own acerbity, and Nina, whose regard for Rosamund always waxed in proportion as her friend’s waned, murmured with the air of a compassionate angel:

“Poor child! One remembers the heartaches of one’s own youth. The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts, Bertie!”

“Well, Morris appears to have curtailed his successfully enough, at all events,” crisply returned Bertha. “I always said there was stuff in the boy, Nina, although you’ve spoilt him so outrageously.”

Nina laughed, and kissed Mrs. Tregaskis affectionately as they said good-bye.

It always pleased her to be told that she spoilt Morris. She had consistently over-indulged him as a little boy, and did so still in all matters where his personal pleasures were concerned, provided that they did not interfere with her wishes. The accusation of spoiling seemed to add colour to her frequently-voiced conviction that youth was very hard, and that a mother’s sacrifices often went unheeded.

“I’m afraid I _have_ spoilt him,” she sighed in response to Bertha’s words. “But after all, Morris has been my only thought for so many, many years....”

Bertha told herself that really poor Nina was sometimes positively maudlin, and firmly created a diversion by demanding the loan of Nina’s seldom-used garden scissors.

“At all events,” she told herself, as she walked briskly away, “I managed to forestall an allusion, for once, to poor Geoffrey. And now for my little tragedy-queen!”

* * * * *

But Rosamund, though not undeserving of her guardian’s epithet, gave less trouble than Bertha had anticipated. With characteristic want of balance, she was absorbed in one thought only: that of her sister. As long as Frances remained ill, Rosamund gave little thought to Morris Severing. Perhaps the measure of her undeveloped lack of proportion might have been probed by that fact. The memory of a spoilt illusion might come to vex and grieve the youthfulness of her spirit later, but that would only be when the nearer, and to her infinitely more real, solicitude had ceased to be.

And Rosamund, her outlook being honest, knew, and was to know more clearly yet, that her first love had brought her no nearer to that reality which lies at the back of all wisdom, and which for her was still typified by her love for Frances.

VIII

“Rosamund!” wrote Hazel from the North. “The most marvellous things in all the world are happening. I am in love--with a man who wears an eyeglass--(you know how I’ve always hated an eyeglass) and he is in love with me. He is Sir Guy Marleswood, and he’s thirty-four, and _quite_ six foot, and I don’t think I should mind if he were five foot nothing. I _know_ I shouldn’t. I’ve known him a fortnight, and yet we both feel as though we’d known each other all our lives, and yet it’s new and wonderful all the time. It’s indescribable. There’s one thing--which _I_ have to keep reminding myself of, but which will assume enormous proportions as soon as one begins to do anything--I mean, write to mother, or wear an engagement ring. (He’s given me a most beautiful one, a ruby marquise, only I won’t wear it.) He’s been married before, and he had to divorce his wife five years ago. I knew it before we met, because the girls here had been talking about him, and said that was why their mother had not asked him to stay in the house, but he came to the dance, and he is staying at the Ludleys’, a mile away. That’s where we met, and I’ve seen him nearly every day since--and the days when I don’t see him are just _hell_--only knowing that Heaven may open again at any minute.

“Rosamund dear, I know now that I was a fool ever to let boys make love to me or propose in the sort of half-and-half way that a boy does--asking one to wait for him because he may have enough to marry on in fifteen years’ time, and meanwhile exchange photographs and write every Sunday afternoon. You know the sort of thing--that does to tell other girls about, and sentimentalize over when a waltz that you used to dance with _him_ is being played. But when it’s the real thing--when a _man_ tells you that he cares for you and asks you to be his wife--it’s absolutely and utterly different. Guy asked me the fifth time he saw me. He told me about his wife first. The odd thing is, that I don’t mind. Of course I shouldn’t mind about the moral part of it, anyhow--I mean whom God hath joined together and all that--but I don’t seem even to mind about his having once loved her and married her. They only cared for one another a very little while, and it’s all past and over. The present is ours--and more glorious and wonderful than any words can ever say. As for the future--he says he is going to marry me before the end of the year. And I am to put off my other visits and come home this week, and then he will write to daddy, and come down to Cornwall. Of course it isn’t daddy that counts at all, since I can manage him perfectly, but I have a sort of an idea that Guy will get exactly what he wants, even out of mother. He’s the sort of person that does.

“We haven’t told anybody anything. I haven’t the slightest doubt that Lady Alistair has guessed, and the girls too, but even if she writes to mother it’ll only bring things to a crisis rather sooner. I’m writing to her myself this evening, so she’ll know by the time you get this.

“I’m not afraid of anything or anyone in the world. Guy and I have found one another, and nothing else matters. Besides, I _know_ he’ll manage everything!

“As ever, “Your loving “HAZEL.”

If Hazel’s letter brought a strange wondering sense of disquietude to Rosamund, and that not wholly on her cousin’s account, the much shorter note which she had sent her mother apparently produced no such effect. Bertha appeared at luncheon with a brow but slightly corrugated, and only an added tinge of briskness in her manner to betray perturbation of spirit.

“I see you’ve had a letter from Hazel by the midday post, Rosamund,” observed Miss Blandflower in the middle of luncheon, with a praiseworthy desire to dissipate the slight atmosphere of constraint which had lately been noticeable at meals, in spite of the valiant and hearty efforts of Mrs. Tregaskis. “When does she return to the bosom of her family?” She gave a slight giggle in lieu of quotation marks.

Rosamund hesitated, felt her cousin Bertha glance sharply at her, and answered nervously:

“I’m not sure--soon, I think.”

“She has two more visits to pay,” said Mrs. Tregaskis coldly. “You knew that, Rosamund.”

Her husband looked up suddenly.

“She’s coming back on Friday. You knew that, Bertha,” he said mockingly. “I understand that our parental sanction is required to an engagement of marriage. Very gratifying, I’m sure, in these emancipated days.”

Miss Blandflower turned startled eyes from one to the other of Hazel’s parents.

“They say one wedding makes another,” she sighed with nervous inappositeness. “But is it really--who is it...?”

“My dear Minnie, Hazel is a silly little girl who ought never to have been allowed to pay visits without a chaperoning mamma. It serves me right for having relaxed my rule--but one can’t be in two places at once, and really these young ladies require such a lot of looking after!”

Bertha sighed gustily.

“One only wonders how you can manage in the marvellous way you do, with so much upon your hands,” said Minnie, feeling that this remark, although far from being original, came at any rate from a safe stock, and might be more acceptable than further questions.

At all events it steered the conversation into smoother channels, and no further allusions were made in public to Hazel’s affairs, until three days later, when Hazel herself returned to Porthlew.

Rosamund was instantly conscious of an indefinable change in her cousin.

Self-possessed Hazel Tregaskis had always been, but the youthful security of her manner had somehow deepened into an impression of inward assurance that held less of self-confidence, and more of some larger stability, that would not be easily shaken. When her mother greeted her with matter-of-fact warmth, and said gaily, “Well, my little girl, I’m glad to have you under my wing again; I think it’s the last time we must let you go gallivanting off on your own for the present,” Rosamund saw that Hazel did not give the petulant shrug or grimace with which the girl Hazel would have received such a greeting, but looked at her mother with a strange, remote look that held something of an almost impersonal compassion.

It was that same look, Rosamund thought, which angered Mrs. Tregaskis when her daughter resolutely asked her for an interview that evening.

“No, my darling; I’m not going to let you stay and chatter now. You’ve had a long journey, and must pop off to bed early. We’ll have a long talk to-morrow. Dad and I are not at all angry with you, but I’ve had a letter from Jessie Alistair, and it’s quite plain that I ought never to have let you go and stay away without me. Now run along with Rosamund, my pet.”

“What did Lady Alistair say?”

“I shall talk to you about that to-morrow. I am not at all angry with you, Hazel, but one thing you and Rosamund may as well understand, since I suppose you’ve told her all about it. You may flirt with boys of your own age, if you like, and have all the fun that’s natural and proper, but----” Bertha Tregaskis paused. She spoke with a quiet and good-humoured implacability, her hands resting on her broad hips, and her resolute mouth set firmly. “_But_--to flirt and get yourself talked about with a married man, is--a--thing--I--don’t--allow. See, darling?”

Rosamund caught her breath and looked at her cousin. Hazel, who seldom or never blushed, had flushed the slow, deep crimson of a woman who hears herself insulted.

“Sir Guy Marleswood is not a married man,” she said slowly. “At least, neither he nor I think so, which is what matters, after all. He divorced his wife five years ago. He has asked me to marry him.”

“Very well, darling. When he writes and asks the permission of your parents, we shall see. But a man of four- or five-and-thirty, who has led the sort of life that he has led, does not generally want to marry a little girl of nineteen, even though he may be dishonourable enough to play at making love to her.”

But this agreeable theory was shattered next day, when Sir Guy Marleswood wrote a formal statement of his position, and an almost equally formal request for his daughter’s hand in marriage, to Frederick Tregaskis. He also stated unemphatically that the following day would find him at Porthlew Railway Hotel.

Thereafter, Rosamund watched the storm break over the household with a strangely aching heart.

Bertha regarded Sir Guy as a married man, and said so staunchly. Frederick Tregaskis, whom Rosamund had never yet heard to agree with his wife, declined to view the question from an ethical standpoint, but declared Hazel too young to enter upon a marriage which would of necessity be regarded more or less dubiously by the world in general.

“Wait another five years,” he remarked grimly to his daughter, “and see if you can’t do better for yourself than a divorced baronet fifteen years older than yourself.”

“No,” said Hazel, her small face set like a flint. “He wants me to marry him now.”

“I dare say. And I want you to wait. I suppose you owe something to your father?”

“Yes,” she said, and began to cry. “But not everything in the world. I owe something to myself. It’s _my_ life.”

It was the passionate cry for individualism that Rosamund had heard from Morris Severing.

But Hazel Tregaskis, unlike Morris, was directing all the energies of her will into one channel. And Rosamund, watching, saw those energies guided and strengthened day by day by the stronger force that held steadfast behind her.

Guy Marleswood was not of those who fail.

Before the close of that year, the day came when he extorted from the exasperated Frederick: “Marry her, then. I see you mean to do it, both of you, and it may as well be with my consent as without it. Anything to put an end to the subject.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Sir Guy imperturbably. “I will go and tell Mrs. Tregaskis that we have your consent to the marriage.”

“You will do nothing of the kind. I shall tell her myself. I may as well get some satisfaction out of it,” said Frederick viciously.

He sought his wife in the library, where she sat, looking unusually disheartened, amid a pile of leaflets.

“Bertha, you are about to be relieved of one of your responsibilities.”

“I’m thankful to hear it,” she returned wearily.

“I have decided to give Hazel into Marleswood’s keeping.”

“Frederick! You can’t. You’re mad. A child of nineteen--and a marriage that’s no marriage--she’ll be no more married in the eyes of God than if she were openly living as that man’s mistress.”

“I’m not concerned with the eyes of God,” said her husband in detached tones. “It’s perfectly evident to mine that if we don’t give our consent they mean to do without it, and I don’t choose to have my daughter making a runaway match. We had better give in gracefully while it is still possible, Bertha. Marleswood is not the sort of man to heal a breach, if it came to that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that we don’t want to be cut off from the little girl for ever after her marriage,” said Frederick, his voice shaking a very little. “That’s what it’ll mean if we let her go from under our roof in defiance, Bertha.”

“Hazel is an infatuated, self-willed child, but she is not heartless,” cried Bertha.

“I do not intend to put her to the test.” Frederick Tregaskis had regained his habitual dryness of utterance.

With unwonted consideration, he added a word of consolation for his wife.

“I may as well tell you that I am perfectly satisfied that Marleswood is a good fellow in every way, and devoted to her. The whole thing, after all, amounts to a question of conscience, which she is entitled to judge for herself.”

“She’s not,” flashed Bertha. “She’s only a child, and ought to accept the ruling of her parents until she’s old enough to judge for herself.”

“I have no doubt,” said Frederick drily, “that all parents, taken as a class, would agree with you. Unfortunately for ourselves, however, we have passed into an era where the individual, and not the class, will rule.”

He walked out of the room, looking older and more deeply lined than ever.

Rosamund found Mrs. Tregaskis, who never broke down, weeping violently among the piles of disordered pamphlets.

“Cousin Bertie! Don’t!” cried Rosamund fearfully. “Is it about Hazel?”

Bertha raised a piteously mottled and disfigured face.

“I’m beaten,” she cried. “Frederick has consented to this iniquitous marriage, and nothing can stop it now. My little girl, whom I’ve brought up to be good, and to whom I’ve tried to teach religion--that she should be willing to break my heart, and rush deliberately into sin, the first time temptation comes near her!”

“No--no. It’s not that. She doesn’t think it’s sin. She doesn’t believe it’s sin--not for an instant. Her point of view is different.”

“Her point of view!” cried Bertha bitterly. “How dare you talk to me, a woman of fifty, of such preposterous nonsense? You and she are children; you know nothing of life, you’ve had no experience. How can Hazel judge of what is right or wrong? She’s a child--a child.”

In the vehement repetition of the assertion, it seemed to Rosamund that she found her clue to Bertha Tregaskis’s impotent suffering. She would not, could not, admit in her daughter any claim to the rights of an individual.

Hazel’s judgment, unrecognized by her mother, carried with it no amazement to Rosamund.

Certain faiths, certain scruples and acceptances inborn in Rosamund and Frances, had been the veriest lip-service to the child Hazel always. Rosamund recognized in her the purest and most natural type of highly-evolved paganism.

“You know, Rosamund, I’m not doing anything wrong, although they won’t believe it. It isn’t wrong _to me_, and I don’t believe in an abstract right and wrong. Each individual case has its own laws.”

“Should you do it if you thought it _was_ wrong?”

“I don’t know,” said Hazel thoughtfully. “I can’t imagine seriously believing that it would matter to God, one way or the other. Should you? Frances wouldn’t, one knows.”

“If I did it,” slowly said Rosamund, “it would be as a deliberate choice between good and evil. I should believe myself to be breaking God’s law--but I might do it, if I thought it worth while.”

She knew that if, as she said, it seemed to her worth while, no laws of God or man should bind her. But she would break them of deliberate intent, whereas to Hazel Tregaskis they were non-existent, myths designed for the wanton frightening of children.

Rosamund recognized the absolute sincerity of Hazel’s point of view, and sometimes found herself wondering what Sir Guy’s might be. One day, very soon before the marriage, she held an odd little conversation with him, standing in the wintry sunshine of the terrace. Frederick Tregaskis was ahead of them, grimly poking with a walking-stick at a little drain that was choked with leaves.

“He’s been very kind to me,” said Sir Guy abruptly, indicating with a gesture the odd little figure.

“I think that he really likes you very much,” said Rosamund. “And though he would be very angry at being told so, I have always known that Cousin Frederick adores Hazel.”

Sir Guy nodded with full comprehension.

“Yes, of course. She knows that, too. It’s been the best thing in her life so far--that and having you and your sister here.” He paused for a moment or two. “You know,” he said slowly, “I want to try and make up to her for everything that she hasn’t had, so far. She ought to have everything. She seems, somehow, so made for happiness.”

“I have never seen Hazel sad,” said Rosamund, rather surprised. “I think she is happy by nature.”

“Yes, though an atmosphere which might perhaps seem an unsympathetic one----”

He left the sentence unfinished, and it required no effort on Rosamund’s part to conjecture his meaning. Sir Guy resented, none the less implacably that his resentment was expressed by implication only, the attitude of Mrs. Tregaskis towards her daughter. That Hazel herself had never resented it, and had only opposed to it the bright glancing hardness of her impenetrable self-confidence, did not, Rosamund felt, in any way diminish his perfectly silent ire. Mrs. Tregaskis herself would be forced to recognize that in this man fifteen years her senior, Hazel had found champion as well as lover, knight as well as comrade.

Rosamund turned away with an aching heart, wondering dimly whether her need had not been greater than Hazel’s.