CHAPTER X

If you devote your life to studying the feelings of others you may get a little overtired, and see things out of proportion, but you are not likely to be mistaken in what these feelings are.

During Hermione’s convalescence Elise discovered that there was an alteration in her father. Mr. Brett appeared superficially the same, but there was, so Elise fancied, an undercurrent of restlessness in him.

He did not walk any further than usual, and he was always to be found in his accustomed haunts, but behind his quiet eyes and his unperturbed domestic comments there was a strange new grip of attention.

He knew that he was seeing the fuchsia hedges and the bird bath for the last time. He would not often sit under the giant black yew, and watch the retreating harvest fields stretch yellow and pale to the Downs’ edge.

He would not often see Elise standing at the top of a flight of steps, balancing a white parasol over her sunny hair.

Mr. Brett did not look at Elise with emotion, he was not an emotional man, but he looked at her with a prolonged attentiveness.

Elise did not ask him any questions, but she became daily more and more conscious that change was in the air.

She came out oftener to look at her father, to share his gentle prowls to the garden’s edge, and sit with him in the last patches of the retreating sun.

Summer was drawing slowly to an end at Mambles, the colour of the garden had changed, the delicate, myriad shades of the flowers had singled and massed themselves into the hard and flaunting gold of sunflowers, dull mauves, and stalwart reds and browns. Only a bush of pale blue flax burned on as if it were still June.

The birds were all about the sky, practising unendingly their migratory flights. They broke and clustered and spread open fans above the garden hedges, crying instead of singing their last songs. The garden at Mambles was full of their agitated wings and leave-takings.

John alone noticed no sign of change, except in the weather, and Elise forbore to tell him of her premonitions.

She had discovered that John did not like changes and that it was better to let them happen to him of their own accord than to prepare him for them with a prevision that might look like consent. Elise was no doubt very bad for men because she always altered herself to suit their conveniences. She never expected attention, and she made John feel that his wishes were a pleasure to her, and his tastes and habits part of the fixed laws of the universe.

Nothing must stand between John and Yorkshire pudding with beef. She felt the same about her father, only with Mr. Brett it was horse-radish sauce.

Elise went to Church regularly with Mr. Brett because he said he had come to the conclusion that religion should be like tobacco, got from an old firm and mild, but she told John quite truthfully that she loved to hear him read free-thinking books out loud on Sunday evenings. When John said that you could not be orthodox and honest simultaneously, Elise saw what he meant; and when Mr. Brett said very few men were honest anyway—even a first-class infidel rubbed all over by the higher criticisms could tell a lie at a pinch—Elise saw an equal significance in her father’s opinion.

Nevertheless Elise had a mind of her own, she knew what was going to happen before anybody else did, and she never repeated facts which were inconvenient for other people to know unless it was absolutely necessary that they should know them.

If Elise was more with her father than she had been before Hermione’s illness, John made up for it by being oftener with Hermione.

John had been extremely impressed by Hermione’s illness. It struck him that nobody else realised how seriously ill she had been.

Elise had been temporarily alarmed, but having seen Hermione very ill before and known her to recover, she seemed to think that the process would reassert itself.

Mr. Brett went still further. He said:

“Why, John, she’s _got_ to recover—she wants to.” It was only John who faithfully believed that Hermione’s illness was the stroke of a Higher Power, and watched her convalescence with the painstaking anxiety which such a belief suggested.

Hermione made a steady and courageous recovery, she dismissed Nurse Davies with three new hats and a long list of errands to do for her in town, and then she proceeded to eat normally and assume the habits of other people.

It was not an easy task to undertake for any one who had been a dangerous invalid for five years, but Hermione did not only undertake it, she carried it out with fortitude and common sense.

A fortnight after her illness she came down to a meal and ate it without having ordered it beforehand. The cook was thunderstruck.

Afterwards Hermione went out into the garden. She expected Elise to accompany her, but Elise with her hand in her father’s arm wandered off heartlessly in the direction of the village; she did not even say where she was going, and Hermione particularly resented the mysterious disappearances of other people. Elise was absorbed in Mr. Brett. Hermione, watching her with aggrieved eyes, felt that it was time this unreflecting intimacy was destroyed.

“If I let her,” she said to herself, “I believe she would put Papa before John and ruin her life’s happiness—Elise never had any judgment.”

Elise and Mr. Brett had gone to see Bodger. He had been boarded out in the village with a thick chain and a large quantity of dog biscuits, but in the evening he was allowed to go for a walk by himself, and from his lack of appetite when he returned it was supposed he had, with gross lack of patriotism, accounted for many rabbits. On the whole Bodger had a happy life though he missed John.

When they returned, Mr. Brett went into the library and Hermione advanced across the lawn to meet Elise, carrying, with obvious difficulty, an enormous vegetable marrow.

“Dearest Hermione!” cried Elise. “What are you doing that for?”

Hermione laid the marrow reverently upon the grass and, with a lace pocket handkerchief, delicately wiped the dirt off her long, carefully manicured fingers.

“I did it to save you, dear,” she said panting. “I did not wish you to be overtired after your walk—perhaps a long one—with Papa.”

“Oh, but—” cried Elise aghast, “I never _do_ pick marrows—Demster always does!”

“Not, I think,” said Hermione gently but implacably, “for the soldiers’ hospital. I understand from Demster that the vegetables for the hospital you always pick yourself.”

“How _very, very_ good of you,” said Elise gratefully. “You must sit right down and rest.”

Hermione sat down but she had no intention of resting. She took an erect, uncomfortable chair, the only one of the kind in the garden.

“Don’t trouble about me, dear,” she said meekly. “I do not mind discomfort; but promise me you will not go again into the marrow bed yourself?”

“Oh, why?” asked Elise remorsefully choosing the next most uncomfortable chair she could find, because it looked so awful to lounge in the face of a full-fledged invalid determined on discomfort.

“There are adders there,” said Hermione impressively. “It would not be safe. I have heard that the sting of an adder can easily prove fatal.”

“Oh, but Hermione!” cried Elise. “You oughtn’t to have gone there yourself. But are you sure there are adders? I thought—”

Hermione interrupted her smilingly.

“Dear,” she said, “I don’t grudge a personal risk to serve our splendid men. Think what they do for us!”

Elise bit her lips and looked into the laurel bush. John had investigated the marrow bed himself that morning and he had found there were no adders there, but one panic-stricken slow worm, which gave up its taste for marrows from that hour. But Elise was a generous soul. She saw that for dramatic reasons Hermione wanted adders and she forbore to replace them by a slow worm.

“Demster can easily take the marrow down to the hospital to-night,” she said gently.

“Forgive me,” said Hermione bitterly, “if I have been officious. You sometimes make me feel as if I were a little in the way.”

Elise winced as if she had been struck.

“Oh, Hermione!” was all she said.

“Do not be distressed, dear,” said Hermione kindly. “Young married people like to feel their new authority, I know; it is a punishment I deserve.

“I stepped out of my path to come here. I must now step back again.” Hermione looked at the house and let her eyes wander across the garden to the hills. She would have liked a country house to be larger than Mambles. “It is all too simple and happy and peaceful for me here,” she added. “You do not feel so deeply about it I know. Why should you? John is safe—and for you the cataclysm of nations is but a humming in the air. I cannot take it so calmly. I feel as if a knife were pressing against me every hour.”

Elise looked conscience-stricken: she could not truthfully say she felt the war every hour. She felt it regularly after breakfast when the newspaper came, and from time to time during the day when there was something she could do about it; but it did not haunt her like the possibility of John’s wet feet.

Hermione looked haunted.

She was suffering from severe indigestion caused by carrying a heavy marrow after an ordinary meal.

“I came to you,” Hermione said gravely, “because you called me.”

Elise did not deny this fact, but she wore a guilty air. She had called Hermione, but she remembered that she had felt she ought to.

“I cannot say that I am sorry that I came,” Hermione continued kindly. “I have seen your life for myself. Perhaps I have been able to remove from your path a few of the stumbling blocks of marriage.”

“Oh, yes!” Elise interrupted gratefully. “I never knew there were so many before!”

“But you know now,” said Hermione tenderly. “And I have seen something else besides, something which it is quite natural that in the first flush of your happiness you should have overlooked—Papa’s dire need.”

“His what?” cried Elise aghast.

“His need of me,” Hermione repeated briefly. Her eyes held Elise’s firmly. Elise could not have looked away if she had wanted to. She felt like a bird fascinated by something that is about to strike it.

“Oh,” she faltered, “I thought Papa was happy.”

“My dear!” said Hermione impatiently. “You never thought at all, your mind was—as it is even now—drugged by the miasma of marriage. Papa has been failing steadily. Mambles does not suit him. He needs a dry, bracing place with plenty of life in it. He has been living here alone with his double tragedy and there are five underground rivers in Sussex. I wonder he has not gone mad!”

“Does he—is he—thinking of going away?” asked Elise apprehensively.

“Yes, dear,” said Hermione impressively. “Papa is coming with me to Paris. I shall make his declining years the study of my life.”

Elise said nothing.

It was a hot, still day—not a leaf stirred in the garden, only above it the swallows took their circling, hurrying flights; they swept across the hedges, and through the red creepers that covered their nests beneath the eaves, with a speed which showed nothing but the quick-blown passage of their flight.

Outside in the fields there was an occasional sharp whir and click of a frightened partridge.

“I thought he liked quiet,” Elise murmured after a pause.

“I daresay we shall have a garden in the Champs Elysées,” said Hermione loftily, “that will be quiet enough for him.”

Mr. Brett appeared in the library door. He advanced slowly across the south terrace.

“Are you warm enough out there?” he asked. “It’s what they call the heat of the day over here, isn’t it? I guess I’ll bring a fur rug along.”

“It will be hotter in Paris,” said Hermione incisively.

Mr. Brett drew forward a long, low chair and made himself thoroughly comfortable.

“Why, yes,” he agreed leaning back and half closing his eyes to study the herbaceous borders at his ease. “I guess there’ll be hot moments over there and cold ones too, as far as that goes. Have you been telling Elise our little plans about Paris?”

“Yes,” said Hermione, “I have told her, Papa.”

Elise said nothing; her eyes rested intently on her father’s face.

Mr. Brett drew his soft hat further forward over his eyes, and stretched out his legs in front of him.

“Hermione,” he said, “is going to devote herself to my declining years. Say, Hermione, I tell you what it is, I want some of that devotion right now. As you are going into the house, I’d like you to tell my man to bring me out an overcoat.

“Do you remember that hymn, Elise, played to a waltz tune, ‘The roseate hues of early dawn how fast they fade away—’? Well, I guess it’s accurate; anything to do with the sun over here is liable to pretty rapid fading.”

Hermione rose slowly and gracefully. She had not been going into the house. She opened her lips to speak, then she shut them again, and walked leisurely towards the open library door.

“Hermione has made a grand recovery,” said her father appreciatively. “She reminds me of Jonah’s gourd: as far as I remember it came up in the night and was powerful shady on the following day. But in the end it crossed Jonah by wilting when he least expected it. Jonah miscalculated that gourd—but he wasn’t much of a stayer as a lodger anyway.”

“Oh, Daddy!” said Elise. “Are you really going to Paris?”

Mr. Brett met her eyes; for a long time they neither of them spoke. Then Mr. Brett said with a gentleness which his voice never held for any one else.

“I guess you’re going to be all right here Elise—with John.”