Chapter IV (2)

It was the first scratch. Mollie, though with a little startled glance, took it with all mildness, making no comment as Percival led her away, Percival remarking that it was, he thought, a ripping way of doing her hair; and I, as I went out manless, heard Captain Thornton, behind me, saying, in answer to Vera’s murmurs:

“Yes; I see; I see what you mean. But, do you know, all the same I think it’s most awfully becoming to Mollie. It brings out the shape of her face so.”

“What a _dear_ little face it is!” said Vera, rapidly leaving the cheese.

It all worked like a stealing spell. There was nothing marked or sudden in it. No one, I think, except Vera, was aware that his or her attitude to little Mrs. Thornton had changed. She had become visible, that was all, and they became aware that she was not only worth looking at, but worth talking to. At dinner that night old Sir Francis fixed his eye-glass to observe her more than once and after dinner he joined her in the drawing-room and talked with her till bedtime. It turned out then that he had known her father and actually possessed one of his pictures; had been a great admirer. Next morning he was walking with her on the terrace before breakfast. Mollie in a blue lawn, as sprightly as it was demure, her casque of golden hair shining in the sunlight. Lady Dighton asked her that afternoon to come motoring with her and the Tommies, and in the evening I heard Mrs. Travers-Cray, while she and Mollie wound wool together, telling her about her two boys at the front. The only person who didn’t see more of Mollie was Captain Thornton; but that, I felt sure, was because Vera was determined that he shouldn’t.

It was not for a day or two that I was able to compare notes with Mollie.

“Well,” I said, joining her on the terrace before dinner, “_ça y est_.”

“It’s extraordinary,” said Mollie. “Everything is different. I myself am different. I feel, for one thing, as if I’d become clever to match my clothes. It would be almost humiliating to have the mere clothes make so much difference and every one change so to me unless I could really feel that I’d changed, too.”

“You’re staked. I told you how it would be.”

“And I owe it all to you. It’s a wonderfully sustaining feeling to be staked; secure, peaceful. Such a funny change, Judith, is little Milly! Have you noticed? She came up to me when I was walking this afternoon and linked her arm in mine, and in ten minutes was confiding in me all about her perplexed love-affairs, as if we’d been old friends.”

“Yes, she would. She loves to tell people about her love-affairs.”

“But I couldn’t have imagined that she was really so ingenuous; for, in a sense, she is ingenuous.”

“Exceedingly ingenuous when she isn’t exceedingly sophisticated; I think one often sees the mixture. The only thing you must be prepared for with the Milly type is that in a week’s time she may forget that she ever confided in you and, almost, that she ever knew you. Her ingenuousness is a form of presumptuousness.”

“Yes, I think I saw that. I’m beginning to see so many things--far more things than I’ll ever have use for on a chicken-farm, Judith.” And Mollie laughed a little.

“And what does your husband say?” I asked.

“Well, I’ve not seen much of him, you know. But I’m sure he likes it awfully, the way I look.”

“Only Vera won’t let him get at you to tell you so.”

“Oh, he sees enough of me to tell me so,” said Mollie, smiling: “only it takes him time to come to the point of saying things, and it’s true that we haven’t much time.”

“And she hasn’t given you any more scratches before him?”

“Not before him.” Mollie flushed a little. “It _was_ a scratch, wasn’t it? I don’t think he saw that it was.”

“He will see in time. And it’s worth it, isn’t it, since it’s to make him see?”

“Yes, I can bear it. She’s rather rude to me now when he isn’t there, you know; but it’s really less blighting to have some one see you enough to be rude to you than to see you so little that they are affectionate. Yet I hope she won’t be too rude.”

“She can hardly bear it,” I said.

It was the next morning that Vera showed me how little she was able to bear it. She had kept me singularly busy, as if afraid that I might wave a magic wand even more transformingly, and she came into the study where I was writing invitations for a garden-fête in aid of the Red Cross fund, and after giving me very dulcetly a long list of instructions, she went to the window and looked out for some silent moments at Mollie sauntering up and down with Sir Francis under the blue bubble of her parasol.

“I suppose you dressed her when you took her up to town that day,” she then remarked.

I had wondered how long Vera could keep under cover and I was pleased to see her emerge.

“Well, hardly that,” I said, marking off with my pen the names of the people on my list who were away and not to be counted on for help with the bazaar. “She badly needed some clothes and couldn’t afford expensive places; so I took her to my little woman. She was able to carry out Mollie’s ideas perfectly. She has charming ideas, hasn’t she? She knows so exactly what suits her.”

“Carry out her ideas? She hasn’t an idea in her head. Carry out yours, you mean, you funny creature. I can’t conceive why you took the pains to dress up the deadly little dowd.” Vera drummed with her fingers on the window-pane. Mrs. Travers-Cray had joined Mollie and Sir Francis, and they sat down in a shady corner of the terrace. Mrs. Travers-Cray, sweet, impassive, honey-coloured woman, was one of the few people for whose opinions and tastes Vera had a real regard.

“Oh, you’re mistaken there, Vera, just as you’ve been mistaken about her looks,” I said, all dispassionate limpidity. “She has heaps of ideas, I can assure you, and I saw it from the beginning; just as I saw that she was enchanting looking.”

“Enchanting! Help! Help! That little skim-milk face, with those great calf’s eyes! Who is the poor dear martyr thing who carries her eyes on a plate? St. Lucia, isn’t it? She makes me think of that--as much expression. You may have succeeded in making her less of a dowd, but you’ll never succeed in making her less of a bore.”

“Well, Mrs. Travers-Cray doesn’t find her a bore,” I remarked, casting a glance of quiet, satisfied possessorship at the group outside.

“Oh, Leila always was an angel,” said Vera, “and your little protégée has made a very determined set at her.”

“Sir Francis is an angel, too, then. He delights in her; that’s evident.” It was perhaps rather indiscreet of me to goad Vera like this, but I could not resist taking it out of her and rubbing it into her, and I knew that Sir Francis would vex her almost as much as Mrs. Travers-Cray. “And look at Milly,” I added. “You can’t say that Milly is an angel. The fact is that Mrs. Thornton is a very charming young woman, and that if you don’t see it you are the only person who doesn’t.”

“Another person who doesn’t see it is her husband,” said Vera. She was determined not to show that she was angry, but I could see how angry she was. “Sir Francis, of course, old goose, thinks any one charming if they are young and dress well and look at him with appealing eyes. It is her husband I’m really sorry for. It’s evident that he never spoke to a civilized woman in his life till he came here. He doesn’t show much signs of finding his wife interesting, does he? Poor fellow! It’s pitiful the way men fall into these early marriages with the first curate’s daughter they find round the corner. And now that she’s pushing herself forward like this, he is done for.” Vera, I saw, was very angry to be goaded so far.

“Surely she is the more interesting of the two,” I blandly urged. “Neither of them has a spark of ambition if it comes to pushing; they’ll be quite happy on their chicken-farm. But if it were a question of getting on and getting in with the right people, it would, I imagine, be she rather than he who would count. This last day or two has made that evident to my mind. In her soft, strange way little Mollie is unique, whereas he is only an honest young soldier, and there are thousands more just like him, thank goodness!”

Vera at this turned her head and looked at me for a moment. After all, even if I wasn’t angry, I, too, had given myself away. And it evidently pleased her to recognize this--to recognize that she wasn’t being worsted merely by Mollie’s newly revealed charm, but by my diplomacy as well. And it is rather a good mark to Vera, I think, that I don’t believe it ever crossed her mind for a moment that she had the simplest method of speedy vengeance in her hands--had simply to send me packing. Of course we should both have known that to use such a method would have been to reveal one’s self as crude and vulgar; yet a cattish woman who is very angry may easily become both. Vera didn’t. There are things I always like about her.

She took up now one of my lists, and while she scanned it said, smiling with cousinly good-humour:

"Ah, but you can hardly expect me to look upon you as a judge of that, Judith darling--how much a man counts, I mean, and how much he doesn’t. You are so essentially a woman’s woman, aren’t you? I suppose it’s just because you are so crisp and clever and unromantic that men don’t feel drawn to you, foolish creatures! So that you never get a chance, do you, of finding out anything about them except their way of brushing their hair and the colour of their ties. You’re a first-rate woman’s woman, I grant you, and you’re very clever and you’ve succeeded in foisting your little friend on silly Sir Francis and on Leila Travers-Cray, and it’s all rather dear and funny of you, and I’ve quite loved watching it all and seeing you at work; but you won’t succeed in foisting Mrs. Thornton on her husband, and he’ll hardly give you an opportunity of finding out whether he’s anything more than an honest young soldier. I have found him,"--and Vera now spoke with a simple candour,--“quite, quite a dear; with a great deal in him--sensitiveness, tact, flavour. So much could have been made of him! I, in my little way, could have taken him up and started him. But what can one do for a man who has a wife who doesn’t know how to dress without help and who will push herself forward? No; I’m afraid Mrs. Mollie, after she’s left your hands, Judith dear, will tumble quite, quite flat again. _Would_ you mind, darling, getting all the invitations off to-day? We mustn’t be slipshod about it. And don’t forget to write to the merry-go-round man, and to Mark Hammond to see if he’ll sing.” So, having delivered what she hoped might be a somewhat stinging shaft at my complacency, Vera trailed away.

If I hadn’t so goaded her I don’t believe, really, that she’d have taken the trouble that she did take to prove herself right and me wrong. There had been, before this, little conscious malice or intended unkindness. But now the claws were out. During the next day or two it at once justified and infuriated me to watch the manifold little slights and snubs of which poor Mollie was the victim, the dexterity with which, while seeming all sweetness, Vera essayed to belittle and discompose her, to display her as ignorant or awkward or second-rate. Only a woman can be aware of what another woman is accomplishing on these lines, and though Captain Thornton once or twice showed a puzzled brow, her skill equalled her malice, and he never really saw. I was prepared for it when Mollie came to my study one morning and shut the door and said:

“I’m afraid I can’t stand it any longer, Judith.”

“It has been pretty bad,” I said. “She’s been so infernally clever, too.”

“Our time is really nearly up,” said Mollie, “and I’m trying to think of some excuse for getting Clive to feel we’d better go before it comes. Only now she’s telling him that I am jealous of her.”

Pen in hand, I leaned back and looked up at my poor little accomplice. This, I recognized, was indeed Vera’s trump-card, but I certainly hadn’t foreseen that she would use it.

“Has he told you so?” I asked.

“Oh, no, he wouldn’t. He couldn’t, could he? But I know it. Men are very transparent, aren’t they, Judith? He is always urging me to see more of her, and telling me that she is so kind, so clever, such a dear, and that I’d really think so, too, if I’d try to see more of her. And when I say that I’m sure she is, and that I hope I shall see more of her, he thinks--I can see it--that I’m only playing up, and between us, her and me, he is rather wretched and uncomfortable. What shall I do, Judith? You saw the way at tea yesterday, when she was talking about pictures, she was really sneering at father’s, and when I tried to answer,--because I felt I had to answer about that,--making me seem so rude and sullen. Clive knows nothing about pictures; so he didn’t understand. And it’s all the time like that. I have to pretend not to see and be bland and silent; or, if I try to answer, she turns everything against me.”

“Be patient. Give her a little more time,” I said. “She’ll run to earth if you give her a little more time.”

“But it is so horrid, between Clive and me, Judith: if I say what I think to him, he will only see it as jealousy, so even with him I have to pretend, and it makes me feel as if I were growing to be like her, and I can’t bear it.”

I meditated while poor Mollie dried her eyes, to which the irrepressible tears had risen. “Ask him if he can’t arrange for you to see more of her,” I said presently.

She looked at me with a general trust, yet a particular scepticism.

“But she will make that seem as if I were trying to force myself on them; because she’s always with him, isn’t she?”

“Only now because she keeps him, not because he wants to stay. I’m quite sure that he wants to be more with you. I think you can manage it, Mollie. Just say, when he next urges: 'Oh, but I’d love to, Clive. Only you must tell me when. Perhaps sometime you’d take me to the dream-garden when you think she’ll be there and that she’d care to have me, and then, when you get us started, you could leave us. You could go and take Judith for a stroll.' Something of that sort.”

She eyed me sadly and doubtfully.

“I’ll try whatever you tell me to try, but I feel afraid of her. I feel as if she cared, really cared, to do me harm.”

“She’s been proved wrong,” I said, “and I’ve rather rubbed it in; but at the worst, Mollie, she can never harm you now as there was danger of her doing. It’s better, far better, you’ll own, for your husband to think you’re jealous and a naughty angel than for him to think you’re a second-rate one.” With this aphorism, for the time being, she had to be contented. I myself felt sure that the hour of reckoning was to come.

It was next afternoon, after lunch, Vera being engaged in the drawing-room with visitors, that I met Captain Thornton on the lawn with his wife. Mollie was very large-eyed and rather pale, and I inferred from her demeanour that she had taken a step or made a move of some kind.

“Do come with us, Miss Elliot,” said Captain Thornton. “I’m just taking Mollie along to the dream-garden. She wants to have a little talk, all to herself, with Lady Vera, and Lady Vera told me to wait for her there till these people were gone; so it’s just the thing. And you and I can leave them together, do you see? People never get really to know each other unless they are alone together, do they?”

“No, they don’t,” I replied. “Though sometimes they never get to know each other when they are alone together,” I couldn’t resist adding; but as I saw a slight bewilderment on his honest face I indulged in no further subtleties, and made haste to add, “Does Vera know that you were going to arrange a meeting?”

“Oh, not a bit of it. That’s just the point,” said the guileless young man. “I want her to think that it’s all Mollie’s doing, you know; because she’s got it into her head that Mollie doesn’t really care about her. Funny idea, isn’t it? As if Mollie could be like that to any one who’s been as kind to us as Lady Vera has! But I’m sure that if they have a few quiet talks it will all come right. Mollie is so undemonstrative; I told her that. It needs time for her to get used to anybody.”

Mollie, her arm within her husband’s, cast across his unconscious breast a grave, deep glance upon me as he thus quoted his defence of her. What was she to do with Vera, the glance perhaps asked me, too, now that she was to have her? What account of the interview would Vera serve up to Clive? Was not her last state to be worse than her first? I tried, in my answering glance, to reassure and sustain, yet I myself felt uncertainty about this fulfilment of my counsel.

We reached the dream-garden. Vera and Captain Thornton had been there for most of the morning, and books and papers were piled on the seat where the grey and purple cushions denoted attitudes of confident tête-à-tête.

Captain Thornton and I talked about the war, and I saw, with a mild, reminiscent irony, remembering Vera’s sting, that he was perfectly prepared to give me every opportunity for judging him. I felt, indeed, though Vera had so absorbed him, that he had never cared to talk about the war with her. She and the other angels were there to help one to forget, but with me he was glad to remember. It was I who heard Vera’s swift footfall approaching. Captain Thornton, stooping to mark out with books and pencils the plan of a battle, had, I think, almost forgotten the coming interview, and until Vera appeared among the cypresses, flushed above her pearls, he remained unaware. She stood there at the top of the steps for a moment, looking down at us, at Captain Thornton and me, our heads so close together, and at Mollie in her blue and with her unrevealing little face, and I saw from her expression, as she took us all in, that she had not been succeeding so well with Captain Thornton as Mollie and even I had feared. It was a smouldering irritation against him that flared up with her anger against Mollie and me.

“Oh!” she said, a dreadfully significant monosyllable on Vera’s competent lips. It expressed surprise and weariness and the slight embarrassment of the civilized confronted with the barbarian. “Oh!” she repeated, and she descended the steps, Chang trotting after her with his countenance of quizzical superciliousness. “I’m so very, very sorry.” She did not look at any of us now; her voice was exceedingly inarticulate and exceedingly sweet. “I’m afraid there’s been a mistake. It’s the other gardens that are for my friends. I’m charmed always to see them there. And there are so many other gardens, aren’t there? But this is my own dream-garden, my very own; for solitude, where I come to be alone. One must be alone sometimes. I get very tired.”

We had, of course, all risen, Clive staring, while, still with those weary, averted eyes, Vera softly beat the desecrated cushions and shook them into place.

“It’s my fault,” Clive stammered. “I mean--I didn’t understand. I thought you and Mollie could have a talk here. She wanted to get to know you better, and I suggested this.”

Vera had sunk down in her corner, patting her silken knee, so that Chang sprang up upon it and settled down among the pearls. “I’m very, very sorry,” she gurgled, with oh, such vagueness! “It’s my one corner. My one place to be alone. I don’t see people here unless I’ve asked them to come.” She took up a review and opened it, and her eyes scanned its pages.

We were dismissed,--“thrown out,” as the Americans say,--and we retreated up the steps, Mollie helping Clive, and down the flagged path and out into the lime-tree alley.

It was a display so complete that it left me, indeed, a little abashed by the success of my manœuvres, while at the same time I felt that I mustn’t let Captain Thornton discern the irrepressible smile that quivered at the corners of my mouth. When we were out on the lawn he turned his startled eyes on me.

“Really, you know, I’d no idea, Miss Elliot--what?” He appealed to me.

“That Vera could lose her temper?” I asked.

Clive continued to stare.

“It comes to that, doesn’t it? What else can it mean?” He looked now at his wife. “To speak like that to you, Mollie! And when she’s been saying she wanted so awfully to make real friends with you.”

Mollie, I saw, was dismayed. The triumph had been too complete. She could not keep up with it.

“I am sure that Lady Vera is very badly overwrought about something,” she said. “She wanted particularly to be alone and she found us there, and it put her on edge.” Actually she was trying to patch up his fallen angel for him.

“But she told me to wait there for her.--Sent me off to wait for her when those people came,” said Clive. “It seems to me that it was you she minded finding. And yet she’s been going on about your never coming to talk to her. She’s been going on about it like anything.” He caught himself up, blushing, and I saw that Vera was all revealed to him. I hardly needed to pluck another pinion from her, though I didn’t resist the temptation to do so, saying:

“You see, Vera is rather jealous. She can’t bear sharing things--her friends of her dream-garden. She liked to have you there, but she didn’t like to have Mollie there. Did she tell you she wanted to make friends with Mollie? She’s never taken any pains to show it, has she?”

“Oh, please, Judith!” Mollie implored.

“But he sees it all now, Mollie, so why shouldn’t I say it?” I inquired. “Her point has been, Captain Thornton, to keep you in and to keep Mollie out, and she very nearly succeeded in doing it.”

“Please, Judith! It’s not only that. She’s been such a real friend to you, Clive! I’m sure she is overwrought about something, and it will be all right when you next meet her.” But Mollie pleaded in vain.

“I’m hanged if it will be all right!” said Captain Thornton.

Vera made no attempt to reinstate herself. It was part of her strength never to try to recover what was lost. She kept up appearances, it is true, but that was for her own sake rather than in any hope, or even wish, to regain his good opinion. When we all met at tea, she came trailing in, with Chang under her arm, and as she sank into her place, diffusing the suavest unconsciousness, she said to Mrs. Travers-Cray:

“Charlie Carlton’s been killed, have you heard? This war is something more than I can bear.”

Charlie Carlton, as I knew, was a cousin of the recent callers and a most remote friend of Vera’s; but it was the best that she could do for the occasion, and all that she was inclined to do, though a melancholy smile, as impersonal as it was impartial, was turned more than once on Captain Thornton and Mollie as she inquired whether they liked sugar in their tea or had enough cream. She had made their tea for six weeks now, and after the first week she had never forgotten that they both liked sugar and both disliked cream. But she thus washed her hands of intimacy while keeping up the graces of hostess-ship. They might have arrived that afternoon.

Mollie and her husband rose beautifully to the situation, for their last two days at Compton Dally; that is, Mollie rose, for the husband at such times has only to follow and be silent. I don’t think that she could have shown a grace and a distance as achieved as Vera’s had it not been for those charming clothes of hers. You must have something to rise from if you are to float serenely above people’s heads; otherwise you merely stand on tiptoe, very uncomfortably. Mollie and Vera might have been two silken balloons, passing and repassing suavely in the dulcet summer air. And on the last day Vera’s sense of dramatic fitness prompted her, evidently, to the most imperturbable _volte-face_: she showed to Mollie a marked tenderness. To Captain Thornton she was kind, perfectly kind, but that she found him rather dull was evident. It might have been Mollie with whom she had spent all those hours in the dream-garden.

“Must you really go, dear?” she asked.

Mollie said that she was afraid they must. She had heard from her aunt, who was waiting to take them in, and, owing to all Vera’s kindness, Clive was now quite strong again. Vera did not insist.

“I’ve _so_ loved getting to know you!” she said, holding Mollie’s hand at the door of the motor on the morning of their departure. “It’s been _such_ a pleasure. You must often, often come to Compton Dally again. _Good_-bye, dear!”

But Mollie knew, and Vera knew that she knew, that never again would they be asked to Compton Dally. Meanwhile, if the war isn’t over and Jack hasn’t come back, I’m to go and stay with them next spring on the chicken-farm.

EVENING PRIMROSES

IT had been a hot day and there seemed to be thunder in the air, but she was afraid there would be no rain that night. The abandoned garden needed it sadly; though, as she reflected, rain would encourage weeds rather than the few remaining flowers. Poppies had sown themselves everywhere, degenerates of the Shirleys which, three years ago, had spread their silken cups in the large bed at the foot of the lawn. Their withered stalks cracked beneath her steps in the paths and glimmered under the unpruned branches of the cordon apple trees. There were thistles, too, sorrel, and tall nettles, a matted carpet of bindweed and groundsel in the little kitchen-garden, once so neat, and, of course, as poor Charlie had predicted, the Michaelmas daisies had eaten up nearly everything in the herbaceous border. That was one of the last questions he had written to her: “How are my pink phloxes? Have the Michaelmas daisies smothered them?” They had. It was the season at which the phloxes should be in fullest flower, but not one was to be seen; the dense, fine foliage of the daisies had advanced in a wall of green nearly to the border’s edge.

It was still oppressively warm. A toad hopped indolently away and paused at the box edging, lying up against it, his front feet extended, as if so wearied by the heat that he took his chances of discovery. She stopped to look at the clumsy creature, in which so little of nature’s accurate grace was expressed; and as she stood there, a sudden rustle in the box betrayed another inhabitant--this time a baby hedgehog which, too young for fear, moved busily about among the flat dandelion plants that rosetted the path, and even, encountering the tips of her shoes, stopped to examine them carefully before moving on again. The baby hedgehog would have amused Charlie. He had always been delightful about animals; he and the boys had always had that great interest in common.

Yes, the bird-boxes were still there. She could see one in the big apple tree and one fixed to the porch of the house, under the rose. How well she remembered the frantic delight that hailed the hatching of the first brood of tits. And the day when Charlie had deemed it prudent to withdraw the door for a peep at the beautifully fitted mosaic of bright little heads and bodies within, lifting up Giles in his holland pinafore for a long, blissful gaze. Six years ago that must have been.

The light was altering now, and when she turned at the end of the path, a great moon had risen across the lane and seemed to hang in the branches of the walnut tree that grew in the field beyond. A great, shining, heavy moon, and mournful, it seemed to her; her desolate thoughts, she was aware, lending their colour to everything. Heavy, mournful, desolate; that was the rhythm of her own steps passing along in the twilight, pursued by the unformulated consciousness that lay behind all these pictures of the past; pausing at last, as if to let the dogging sorrow overtake her, as she came to where, near the summer-house, against the wall, the evening primroses grew.

It was years since Charlie had first planted them there, and she had said to herself at the time that they would never be rid of them, tenacious, recurrent things, sowing themselves patiently, and coming up loyally even when there was no one to wish them well. She felt touched by their presence; for though she had always found them untidy and uninteresting, she saw, really now for the first time, that they could be beautiful. Homely, loyal flowers; yet--was it the invading sense of sorrow colouring them, too?--a little uncanny, showing at this neutral hour of mingled dusk and moonlight their pale, evident gold; becoming conscious, as it were, becoming personal at the time when other flowers became invisible. Not that it was a sinister uncanniness; not that of ghosts; of fairies, rather; the very strangeness, sadness, sweetness of the moon, to which, from them, she lifted her eyes. And they reminded her of something, but what, she could not say. Not of Charlie. There had never been anything strange or sad about Charlie, except the fact, pursuing her now in his deserted garden, that he was dead and would never see it again.

It was a year to-day since he had been killed, and she had come down to the country with the sense of commemoration. She wanted, alone in the little place so full of thoughts of him, to find him, to recall him; and she had been doing that at every turn. Yet the evening primroses shining there brought a pang deeper than any vision of him. They, though so homely, seemed to personify loneliness; they seemed to be missing something; and although she was desolate because Charlie was dead, because he would never again delight in his garden, it was, in a sense, for him rather than for herself that she sorrowed, and, in a sense, she did not miss him at all.

She stood still in the path, her hands clasped behind her, her head bent, a personification of widowhood in her thin black draperies, her intent, memorial poise. And she could have said of herself with truth that, during all this year, she had known only a widow’s sad preoccupations. There had been the settling of business matters; lawyers and bankers to interview; planning for the boys, with school-masters to visit; and the tending of bereaved relations--Charlie’s dear old parents clung to her. But now, on the day of his death, it was as if for the first time she had had leisure, at last, to realize that, with it all, she had never had the widow’s heart. She had grieved over him; she had longed to do all for him that could be done--there was nothing new in that; but it was far worse than not being heartbroken: it was the sorry fact that she did not even miss him. He had left, as it were, no emptiness behind him.

She had lifted her head and looked round the garden, trying, in the physical fact of absence, to summon the spiritual void. How he had planned, dug, planted it; pruned his fruit trees; placed his anemones in leaf-mould, his bulbs on sand. She saw his kindly, handsome figure everywhere; his brown cheek, good grey eye, and close-cropped, tawny hair. A manly, simple creature; the salt of the earth, as honest as the day--oh, she saw it all; she had said it to herself a hundred times; and there had, indeed, been nothing one could say against Charlie. But then, as a wife, there had been nothing to say against her, either; he had been perfectly happy with her--the happiest creature, even in the manner of his death. He had been killed instantaneously, while walking, on a sunny day, beside his men along a road in France. Every letter she had had from his brother officers over there spoke of his gaiety and good spirits. The war itself had, on the whole, meant happiness to him, for all his gravity over certain of its tragedies. But he had been almost as grave over mischances with his Boy Scouts, and it had all remained for him an immense, magnificent form of boy-scouting.

Dear, good Charlie! Yet--was it possible that something of the old long-conquered exasperation could still, at this hour, thrust itself into her memories? He had not been quite boyish enough to justify his lightness and make it loveable. That had been the final fundamental trouble in their mistaken marriage; she had not been able to mother him. He had not been appealing, beguiling, endearing, like a child. Not like a child; not boyish, fatherly, rather; even, playfully didactic, and assuming always that theirs was a completely reciprocal marital intimacy. It had not been his fault, of course. She had been too clever ever to let him guess how stupid she found him. She felt the possessive arm laid about her shoulders for an evening stroll; saw the wag of his premonitory finger as he raised himself from a border to call out a jocose reprimand; heard the chaff with which, before friends, he counted her mistaken opinions.

And it had been when they were alone, especially at dinner,--Charlie across the table from her in his faultless black and white,--that the pressure of their distance had been most difficult to protect him from. He talked then, and she had to answer adequately. He was fond of talk, and, while the most uncritical of Conservatives, was full of solutions for old ills. He took Trade-Unionists, Home-Rulers, and Dissenters playfully and held them up to kindly ridicule. “You can laugh most people out of their nonsense,” was one of Charlie’s maxims; and if they didn’t respond to the treatment,--he had tried it unsuccessfully on the village cobbler who preached in the tin chapel on Sunday,--he suspected them of being rather wicked.

In the first year of their marriage she had paid him the compliment of disagreement, or, at least, discrimination. She had, until her marriage, thought of herself as a Conservative; to be counted one by Charlie disturbed her sense of rectitude. But Charlie opposed, became puzzled, and finally aggrieved. He bothered and bothered and argued and argued, with the air of trying to bring an erring child to reason. “Now look at it in this light,” he would say. Or, “Try to see the thing squarely, Rosamund”; and would turn upon her irrelevant batteries from the _Spectator_. She had at last the sensation of flying, battered and breathless, from his platitudes, and found, soon, her only refuge in duplicity. After that, through all the years of their married life, Charlie, she knew, thought of their evening hours alone together as exceedingly pleasant and successful. He wasn’t one of your fellows who doze over the _Field_ with a cigar after dinner. He had a clever wife and he appreciated her and was proud--in spite of feminine aberrations affectionately recognized and checked--of what he called her “intellects.” He called his father and mother his “respected progenitors” and his stomach was never other than “Little Mary.” And while he talked and expounded and made his unexacting jests, Rosamund knew that her silences had no provocation, her smile no irony.

So it had gone on--so it might have gone on for the normal span of life. The only insecurity that had threatened her careful edifice was the question of the boys. The boys were like herself, or, rather, like her adored and brilliant father--proud, sensitive, ardent little creatures, tender-hearted and frightfully intelligent. Physically, too, they were of a different race from Charlie, with thick brown locks, passionate yet gentle eyes, and full, small, closely closing mouths. As boys, Charlie had fairly well understood them,--he got on well with the average boy,--as persons, never; and though as boys, at least as little boys, they got on beautifully with him, they had, as persons, almost at once understood him, even when they were too young to evade or hide from him. If they had not been so young, they would, already, then, have hurt him often.

And for her the boys at once complicated everything. It had been easy, in one way, to yield in non-essentials, though she was woman enough to cry her eyes out when Charlie had taken Philip and Giles, at the earliest age, to have their dear Jeanne-d’Arc heads close-cropped in pursuit of the ideal of manliness; easy, comparatively, to steel her heart when timid little Philip, blanched with terror, was made to ride at six. Charlie had been right about that,--how glad she had been to own it!--for Philip had, in a week’s time, forgotten his fears. But she and Charlie had come near quarrelling over Giles’s rag-doll Bessie. Giles was only three and adored Bessie, and Charlie had tossed her in the air, mocked her, and held her up by the toe while Giles sobbed convulsively.

“Do you really want our boys to be milksops, Rosamund?” he had asked, as, refusing to argue, she took the doll from him, placed her in Giles’s arms, and kept them both on her lap, pressed within her arms, her head bent down over them so that she need not look at her husband. He had gone away vanquished, and Giles had kept his Bessie, until, in the course of nature, she had dropped away from him.

Worse than this came one day when Charlie had found Philip in a corner writing poetry. He had not been altogether pleased by the children’s literary tastes. To grind dutifully at Latin and Greek was one thing, and he was fond of a tag from Tennyson. But he had never cared to read Keats and Shelley when he was a kid. He took the copy-book out of Philip’s reluctant hands and, turning from page to page, read out, in mock-dramatic tones, the derivative, boyish efforts, which yet, to her ear, had every now and then their innocent, bird-like note of reality.

“And now this--'To a Skylark,'” said Charlie, laying a restraining, affectionate hand on Philip’s shoulder, wishing him to rise superior to vanity and join in the fun, once it was pointed out to him.

"‘Glad creature from the dew upspringing
And through the sky your path upwinging!’

Up, up, pretty creature!"

Philip, twisting round under his father’s arm, burst into tears of rage, tore the book from his hand and struck him.

It had been a terrible moment, and Rosamund, reduced as she almost was to Philip’s condition, had never more admired her husband, who, turning only rather pale, had walked away, saying, “I think you’ll be sorry for that when you think it over, old fellow.” That he had been astonished, cut to the quick, she had seen, feeling it all for him at the moment of her deepest feeling for Philip.

“I’m not sorry! I’m not sorry!” Philip had sobbed, rushing to her arms and burying his head on her breast. “I’m not sorry! He’s stupid! stupid! stupid!”

“Hush, hush,” she had said--what a horrid moment it had been! “That is wrong and conceited of you, Philip. You must learn to take a little chaffing. You know how your father loves you.”

“It’s not conceited! It’s not conceited to care about what one tries to do. You know it’s not. _You’re_ not stupid!” the boy had sobbed.

Alas, it had been only four years ago; only a year before the war! Even then, at nine, Philip had been old enough, when he recovered from his weeping, to know that he had hurt her most, had made things difficult for her; and he had been sorry about his father, too, going to him bravely with a tremulous, “Please forgive me, father.” “That’s all right, old boy,” Charlie had said. It _was_ all right, too, in a sense. It left not a trace in the sweetness of Charlie’s nature. It was Philip who had been shaken, frightened to the very core, by what his own outburst had revealed to himself and to her. The boy would always have felt affection for his father; but he, too, would soon have protected him; he, too, would hardly miss him.

The moon had now risen far up out of the walnut branches, and flooded the garden with sorrowful brightness. Poor, poor Charlie! was that all it came to, then, for him? this deserted garden and a wife and children who hardly missed him? Why, was it not the very heart of his tragedy for her to see that they would be happier without him? “And he _was_ a dear,” she said to herself, remembering with an almost passionate determination kind, trustful looks and the happy love of fifteen years ago.

She had been standing still all this while, near the evening primroses; but now, with the great sigh that lifted her breast, she moved forward again, and a bird, disturbed in its rest, flew out from the thick tangle of honeysuckle at the entrance to the summer-house, startling her. As she stopped, her eyes drawn to the spot, she saw, suddenly, that a pale figure was sitting in the summer-house, closely shrunken to one side; hoping in its stillness,--that was apparent,--to remain undiscovered. Ever since she had entered the garden it must have been sitting there; and ever since she had entered the garden it must have been watching her. But why? How strange!

Dispelling a momentary qualm, she stooped her head under the honeysuckle and entered; and then, clearly visible, with her pale hair and face,--as pale, as evident as an evening’s primrose,--the girl sitting there, wide-eyed, revealed, with her identity, that haunting analogy of a little while ago. Of course, it came in a flash now, that was what they reminded her of. Long ago she had thought--conceding them their most lovable association--that Pamela Braithwaite looked like an evening primrose.

“My dear Pamela,” she said, almost as gently as she would have said it to a somnambulist; for, like the flowers, again, she was sad, even uncanny; although Pamela’s uncanniness too,--sweet, homely creature,--could never be sinister. She put a hand upon her arm, for the girl had started to her feet.

“Oh--do forgive me, Mrs. Hayward!” Pamela gasped. Sad? It was more than that. She was broken, spent with weeping. “I didn’t know you were coming. I sit here sometimes in the evenings. I thought you wouldn’t mind.”

“My dear child, why should I mind? I’m thankful to you for coming to the sad little place. It’s much less lonely to think about, for you have always been so much of our life here.”

This, she knew, was an exaggeration; but she must be more than kind to such grief as this: she must find some comfort, if that were possible.

And to feel herself accepted, welcomed, did give comfort; for, sinking again on the seat, bending her face on her hands, Pamela sobbed, “Oh, how kind you are!”

“Poor child, poor, poor child!” said Rosamund. She was only five years older, but she felt as a mother might feel towards the stricken girl. She put an arm around her, murmuring, “Can you tell me what it is? Don’t cry so, dear Pamela.”

Pamela Braithwaite had been a girl of eighteen when they had come, in the first year of their marriage, to Crossfields. The Braithwaites lived a mile away, near the river, a large, affectionate, desultory family, in a large, dilapidated house. Already Pamela mothered the younger brood, and mothered the widowed father as well--a retired tea-planter, who had brought from Ceylon some undefined but convenient complaint that enabled him to pass the rest of his days wrapped in a number of coats, eating very heartily, and, as he expressed it, “sitting about.” A peaceful, idle man, legs outstretched in sun or firelight, hat-brim turned down over his eyes (he had a curious way, even in the house, of almost always wearing his hat), pipe between his teeth; good-looking, too, tall and fair, like his daughters, and with a touch in his appearance, though not in his character, of amicable distinction.

Pamela, except for a brother already married and in Ceylon, was the eldest, with a long gap between her and the group of younger brothers, of whom Rosamund thought mainly as a reservoir of Boy Scouts until they had had to be thought of as a reservoir of volunteers. There were three or four younger sisters, too, some of whom had married and some of whom had gone forth into the world--always with an extreme light-heartedness and confidence--as companions or secretaries. These again were hardly individualized in Rosamund’s recollection, except for the fact that, since Pamela was always making blouses or trimming hats for them, she had become aware that it was Phyllis who wore pink and Marjory blue.

But whoever went, Pamela always stayed; and even when the war broke upon the world, with Frank, the Braithwaite baby, just old enough to enlist, and Phyllis and Marjory at once enrolling themselves as V.A.D.'s, Pamela remained rooted. Who, indeed, had she gone, would have taken care of Mr. Braithwaite, and of the brothers and sisters home on leave, and of the garden earnestly dedicated to potatoes, or the small family of Ceylon nephews and nieces deposited continually in her charge by their parents?

Poor little Pamela! She had had a burdened life; the assiduities of maternity and none of its initial romance. With her large, clear eyes, very far apart, she had always a wistful look; but it was that of a child watching a game and waiting for its turn to come in, and no creature could have given less the impression of weariness or routine. For she had remained, even at thirty-three, the merely bigger sister; an atmosphere of schoolroom tea and the nurture of rabbits and guinea-pigs still hanging about her; her resource and cheerfulness seeming concerned always with the organizing of games, the care of pets, and the soothing of unimportant distresses. Tall, in her scant tweed skirts, her much-repaired white blouse, her slender feet laced into heavy boots, gardening gloves on her hands, so Rosamund had last seen her, a year ago, just before Charlie had been killed, when she had straightened herself from moulding potatoes in the lawn borders and had come forward with her pretty smile to greet her visitor and take her in to tea. Frank had been killed since then, as well as Charlie, but at that time, for both households, the war was splendid adventure rather than sorrow.

Mr. Braithwaite, in the sunny, shabby drawing-room, had stumbled up among his wrappings, to point out to her his accurate flags, advancing or retreating on the many maps that were pinned upon the walls. Frank’s last letter had been read to her, and Dick’s and Eustace’s; and Pamela had come in and out, helping the maid with the tea (the Braithwaite maids were always as cheerful and desultory as the family, and Rosamund never remembered seeing one of them who had not her cap askew or her cuffs untied), standing to butter the bread herself, the side of the loaf before cutting the slice, after her old schoolroom fashion; her discreet yet generous use of the butter--the crust covered to a nicety and no lumps on the crumb--seeming to express her, as did the pouring out of the excellent tea, drawn to a point and never over, and the pleasant, capacious cups with their gilt rims and the immersed rose which, as one drank, discovered itself at the bottom.

A sweet, old-fashioned, homely creature; like the evening primroses; like them, obliterated, unnoticed in daylight; and like them now, becoming visible, becoming personal, even becoming tragic at this nocturnal hour; for was this really Pamela, sweet, prosaic Pamela, sobbing so broken-heartedly beside her? How meagre, intellectual, and unsubstantial her own grief seemed to Rosamund as she listened, almost aghast, her arm about Pamela’s shoulders; and her instinct told her: “It is a man. It is some one she loves--not Frank, but some one she loves far more--who is dead. It is something final and fatal that has broken her down like this.” And aloud she repeated: “Can you tell me, Pamela dear? Please try to tell me. It may help you to tell.” Her own heart was shaken and tears were in her own eyes.

Between her sobs Pamela answered, “I love him--I love him so much. He is dead. And sometimes I can’t bear it.”

Rosamund had never heard of a love-affair. But these years of war had done many things, had found out even the hidden Pamelas.

“I didn’t know.--My poor child!--I never heard. Were you engaged?”

She had Pamela’s ringless hand in hers.

“No! No! It wasn’t that. No--I’ve never had any one like that. No one ever knew. He never knew.” Pamela lifted her head. Her face seemed now only a message emerging from the darkness; shadowed light upon the shadow, it was expression rather than form. “May I tell you?” she said. “Can you forgive my telling you--here and now,--and to-night, when you’ve come to be with him? It was Mr. Hayward I loved. I’ve always loved him. He has been all my life. Ever since you first came here to live.”

Rosamund gazed at her, and through all her astonishment there ran an undertone of accomplished presage. Yes, that was it, of course. Had she not been feeling it, seeking it all the evening?--or had it not been seeking her? Here it was, then, the lacking emptiness. Desolate voids seemed to open upon her in Pamela’s shadowy eyes. She tightly held the ringless hand and felt, presently, that she pressed it against her heart where something pierced her. Was it pity for Pamela? or for Charlie? This was his; had always been his. And Pamela, who had had nothing, had lost everything. “My dear!” she murmured.

“Oh, how kind you are!” said Pamela. She sat quiet, looking down at their two hands held against Rosamund’s heart. And with all the austerity of her grief she had never been more childlike in Rosamund’s eyes. Like a child, once the barriers of shyness were down and trust established, she would confide everything.

Rosamund knew how it must help her to confide. “Tell me if you will,” she said. “I am glad you loved him, if it has not hurt you too much. You understand, don’t you, that I must be glad--for him?”

“Yes, oh, yes; I understand. How beautiful of you to see it all!--Even though it’s so little, it is his; something he did; and so you must care. But I don’t think there’s much to tell; nothing about him that you don’t know.”

“About you, then. About what he was to you.”