Part 27

“That young Scotsman the Bishop’s daughter is engaged to has had to go, Lydia. They may even have to put off the wedding. I _do_ think it’s hard on the girl. If I were her, I should get married as quickly as possible, I think.”

“Why?” said Lydia sharply.

“They’ll have had something, anyhow, that way. If they were married, she could be with him up to the last minute, and perhaps go and look after him if he’s wounded later on. I’ve heard lots of people say that. Oh, Lydia, it’s going to be dreadful for all these young people! Look at your own Jennie--she’s not begun life yet, and there she is in the midst of tragedy and horror--all the boys of her own age going off to fight and be killed perhaps. She’s had none of the innocent enjoyment that we had yet, and Heaven knows if they’ll any of them enjoy anything any more now.”

“This nightmare won’t last--it _can’t_ last,” said Lydia. “They’re young--they’ll recover from all this, and have their lives before them. It’s we, who know what it all means, that are the worst sufferers, I think. Look at you, Nathalie, having to let Aleck go, and perhaps little Charlie!”

Nathalie shook her head. Her eyes were full of tears, and she did not speak.

Presently her father came and joined them.

Mr. Palmer was a very old man, but he did not seem to Lydia to have changed a great deal since the early days of her own married life, when he had lived his gentle, unobtrusive life beside her and Clement at the Rectory, and treated her now as though she were his daughter.

It was he who gazed at her with his mild, good blue eyes, that needed no glasses yet, even though they had lost their brightness, and said gently:

“You’ve come to share this anxiety with us, Lydia, my dear. That’s very good of you. But you look tired and troubled. There is no fresh news, is there?”

“Nothing that I know of.”

Lydia, overwrought and resentful of Nathalie’s blindness, could not withstand the kind anxiety with which Mr. Palmer still looked at her.

“I _am_ worried--though I hardly know if I ought to say anything about it to anyone yet. But I’m afraid little Jennie has been reckless and silly--I’ve not been taking proper care of her.”

“Oh, Lydia! Jennie’s not ill, is she, poor child?” said Nathalie, her voice all genuine concern at once.

“No, no. She’s embarked on a--a--I don’t know what to call it, except a sort of flirtation--with that Canadian friend of Billy’s, the young man who came down here in a flying-machine the other day.”

“I remember,” said Nathalie. “Isn’t he nice, Lydia?”

“Rather third-rate--and, besides, they don’t know each other. They just met that once at Quintmere, when I’m sorry to say that I let Jennie stay there without me, just for one night--and then they seem to have arranged that he should call on us here on his way from Plymouth.”

“I remember, you told me,” said Nathalie. “Did he come?”

“He came to-day.”

Lydia paused, and her mouth tightened.

She could never bring herself to speak to anyone of the things, the unpardonable things, that young Valentine had said to her. She did not wish to recall them to her own mind, when they stabbed her afresh with every involuntary recollection.

“Well,” said Nathalie placidly, “you’ll have heaps of things of that sort to reckon with, Lydia, now that Jennie’s grown up. I’ve always thought that girls must be more trouble than boys, especially if they’re attractive. Jennie will marry young, I’m sure.”

“She won’t marry this young man,” said Lydia.

Nathalie said something about Canada being a long way off, and then her face changed again.

“But poor little girls of this generation, there may not be anyone for them to marry! Who knows what is going to happen?”

The Rector’s eyes had never left Lydia’s face.

“Is this young Canadian undesirable in any way, my dear?”

“His manners are not good,” Lydia declared. “Really, I know very little about him.”

Her tone was quite purposely light, as though by treating the subject casually she were relegating Mr. Roland Valentine and his proposal to the negligible value of a mere episode.

“And little Jennie is in love with him?”

“He is conceited enough to think so,” said Lydia. She even laughed, with a curious sense of relief at being able thus trivially to present the Canadian’s declared certainty that his love was returned. It was as though, while convincing the Rector and Nathalie, she was also convincing herself. “Jennie and I haven’t had our talk about it yet. He stole a march on her when I drove him to the station this afternoon.”

“I should let them be engaged if I were you, Lydia,” Nathalie said wearily. “If we’re all going to war, Heaven knows what will happen to any of us, and she’ll, anyway, have a man to take care of her. I suppose he’ll go back to Canada?”

“I suppose so. I don’t know,” said Lydia stiffly. She did not want to proclaim the Canadian’s intention of taking his aeroplane into the zone of war, aware that the knowledge would only strengthen Nathalie in her unconsidered advice to let the young generation snatch at its desires of the moment. “I must go, Nathalie. The child will be wondering what has happened to me. If you get any news, you’ll let me know?”

“At once. Oh, Lydia, what shall we see in the papers to-morrow?”

Lydia went away with the speculation still ringing in her ears. She felt unreasonably resentful that Nathalie had taken no serious interest in the individual problem centring round Jennie and the decision of her future that lay in Jennie’s mother’s hands. But she realized that the resentment was unjust, and that she herself had purposely spoken as though the affair were of no account.

How could she do otherwise, when the real hurt lay in those phrases that Lydia so passionately denied and repudiated, in which young Valentine had arrogantly taken upon himself to epitomize her mental and moral attitude towards her child?

XXVI

The country had been at war for over a month, and the epidemic of war-marriages had already set in.

Engaged girls bought special licences, bought their own wedding-rings, held everything in readiness for an immediate marriage “whenever he should get leave.”

And every day fresh engagements were announced.

“What are they all thinking about?” said Lydia half impatiently, when they heard at Ashlew that the Bishop had taken his daughter to London himself, at twenty-four hours’ notice, to marry her Highlander.

She said it only because it seemed to her that everything was conspiring to the ultimate achievement of an immediate marriage between Jennie and Roland Valentine.

It would come to that.

Lydia knew it quite well--had known it with absolute certainty ever since old Lady Lucy--the conservative, the tradition-bound Lady Lucy--had said to her very gently:

“I’m very sorry for you, my dear, but poor little Jennie! Let her be happy while she can. We hear nothing against this young man--quite the contrary--and this is a new world we’re going to live in. The old traditions mustn’t be made binding on these young folk, who are giving up everything. And I think he is a good young man,” said Lady Lucy emphatically.

Valentine was at Ashlew again, with three days’ leave before departing with his aeroplane to the front.

“He’s not a gentleman,” said Lydia, her mouth hardening.

She remembered how, once upon a time, Lady Lucy had begged her son Clement to wait, before asking in marriage a girl who was indubitably not of his own social standing.

“Colonial manners are never the same as ours,” declared Lady Lucy. “My dear, I think that in all the essentials, Mr. Valentine _is_ a gentleman. And somehow the little rule-of-thumb by which one had always measured things up to now doesn’t seem to hold good any longer. We must go back to essentials in these terrible times--the old, primitive things.”

“Supposing I let Jennie marry him, and he is killed in a week--what has she gained?”

“Supposing you _don’t_ let her marry him, and he is killed--what then?” asked the old lady gently. “Would Jennie ever forgive you, Lydia?”

“At Jennie’s age, though it would be a brutal thing to say to her now, one’s first love is not one’s last. She would almost certainly come to care for someone else.”

Lydia’s mother-in-law did not point out to her that the argument applied as much to Jennie prematurely widowed as to Jennie unwedded.

Instead she put into words an insistent intuition of Lydia’s own, that she had tried strenuously to stifle.

“My dear, forgive me, but have you altogether taken into consideration Jennie’s temperament? She might, as you say, come to care for someone else--but will it ever be like this again?”

Lady Lucy’s old face flushed delicately.

“It was love at first sight on both sides, Lydia--and they are madly in love. The change in little Jennie is one of the most extraordinary things I have ever seen.”

Lydia winced.

To her lifelong instinct of repression, that ardour of Jennie’s, unrestrained as unconcealed, came as something almost shocking.

It was true that Jennie was changed.

Lydia had seen traces of tempestuous tears on her face, on the very evening of the day that Roland Valentine had gone up to London, driven to the station by Lydia.

And Jennie had said:

“I’m crying because I’m so madly happy--I didn’t know anybody on earth could be so happy. I can’t help crying----”

She cried, but her eyes said, as her lips had said, that it was because she was so madly happy.

When war was declared, and Lydia, white-faced, had bidden Jennie try to realize what it might mean for all of them--for England--for Billy Damerel--for Nathalie’s boys--for thousands of other boys--Jennie had said recklessly:

“I know it’s all true, and that I don’t realize it. I can’t even realize Roland is going out there. And whatever happens, nothing can ever--ever take away what I’ve had.”

What Jennie had had!

In those early days she had had less than half-a-dozen meetings with Roland Valentine, one impassioned declaration of love, a brief, imperative farewell, and then only long daily letters, of which Lydia knew nothing but that they sent Jennie, radiant-eyed, to the inditing of blotted, scrawled replies, to be sealed and taken to the post-office in her own clasp.

Now, six weeks later, by degrees that seemed to Lydia in the retrospect sometimes almost imperceptible, and sometimes tempestuously sudden, Jennie had “had,” as she put it, a good deal more.

Roland Valentine’s claims as to his modest income, and the considerable salary that he would be in a position to obtain when he chose to apply for it, were triumphantly verified. Other inquiries, of which Jennie, so far as Lydia was aware, had been told little, but which were stringently made through Billy Damerel and Colonel Kennedy, met with unimpeachable reassurances.

And so the young man came down to Ashlew once more, wearing the magic uniform that still excited a display of enthusiasm all over England whenever it appeared.

Lady Lucy capitulated.

The Kennedys, Nathalie eagerly and her husband more cautiously, advocated the cause of the lovers. Joyce Damerel had always, unwaveringly, if hitherto almost silently, supported Jennie’s claims against her mother.

“Of course they’re engaged,” said Joyce. “He’s asked her to be his wife, and she’s promised. The only question is whether you’ll let them marry at once, Lydia. And I don’t see how you can refuse in times like these.”

Lydia was making her last stand. She knew herself defeated, she knew that Jennie and Roland Valentine would marry in the course of his first leave from the front; she even knew, clearly and inexorably, that her opposition to the marriage was based upon no objection that could be made valid in the eyes of the Damerels, the Kennedys, her other friends.

She argued with them, not because she thought for a moment that argument would convince them, but in a desperate last effort to cheat herself into believing that her attitude was what she represented it to be, and not the mere manifestation of an impassioned resentment that the man to take Jennie from her should be a man who saw her, and would encourage Jennie to see her, with the hard, defiant gaze of youth in judgment.

She had never liked Joyce Damerel, but in the new and overwhelming sense of loneliness that had come upon her, Lydia appealed to Joyce.

“Can’t you understand? When all the objections as to Canada, and his not being altogether--quite--and Jennie’s youth and all the rest of it--when _they’ve_ all been disposed of, there’s still something else, Joyce. Roland Valentine doesn’t like me.”

“How can you expect him to, when he knows that you’re against the marriage?”

“It was before that. A--a sort of antagonism. Don’t you remember that very first evening of all, when we all dined at Quintmere?”

“I remember that he took Jennie’s part every time,” said Joyce bluntly. “Surely you wouldn’t want him to do anything else, Lydia? If he loves her and is going to marry her, how can you possibly want him to take anybody’s part but hers--ever?”

“Why must there be ‘parts’ to take?”

Joyce shrugged her shoulders.

“Now you’re raising another issue altogether.”

“Yes, that’s quite true,” said Lydia, collecting herself. “My point is this, though. An older man--one of more experience and wider sympathies--would have understood my position--my whole attitude in regard to Jennie--and would have brought her, in time, to see it too. This boy, with his crude, Colonial ideas of independence, and his young, arrogant, heartless verdict--‘gratitude is a beastly feeling’--he actually said that to me, Joyce, quite naïvely!--everything that is defiant and ungrateful in Jennie, he will exaggerate.”

“I don’t think Jennie is ungrateful to you, exactly.”

“Do you think I want gratitude from my own child?” cried Lydia illogically.

“Yes,” said Joyce, “you do. You want unquestioning gratitude from her the whole time, and unquestioning acceptance of everything that you do for her. And it’s absolutely against nature that you should get it, Lydia. Jennie is sturdy and independent by nature. If she hadn’t been, by this time you would have made her into a helpless, selfish, boneless weakling. As it is, of course, she’s in a state of constant rebellion. _She_ wants to be generous and to give, and to take care in her turn--and so she ought. But you want to arrogate all those rights to yourself.”

“What you are accusing me of,” said Lydia bitterly, “is of having loved Jennie too well, and sacrificed myself too much for her sake.”

“I?” said Joyce slowly. “If you want to know, Lydia, I think you the most monstrous egotist that I have ever known in my life.”

Not only the shock of hearing herself so described, but also the amazement of hearing so trenchant a personality from Joyce Damerel, who was never personal, and seldom vehement, kept Lydia absolutely silent. She looked at her sister-in-law without a word.

Joyce faced her unflinchingly, and without any compassion or hesitation in her gaze.

“Perhaps I’ve no right to say these things to you, but for once I’m going to. While Clement was alive I shouldn’t have said a word--it was for him to say it, if anyone did, only he never would have. Oh, I know he was your husband, but I knew Clement and his brother in their nursery days--we were all more or less brought up together--and he never _would_ have spoken, for fear of hurting you. He’d only have kept Jennie more and more with him. Do you remember when Clement died, how you kept on telling me that Jennie was too young to understand--that she wouldn’t really feel it? You didn’t want her to feel it, because you wanted to have the sole prerogative of grief. Clement’s mother is old, and a saint--even you couldn’t grudge her her sorrow; but you knew very well that she wouldn’t claim any pity or sympathy--and the very old are too near eternity to get the compassion of the multitude. You wanted it all for yourself--you grudged Jennie her share, and you wouldn’t admit that she had any right to suffer at all.

“And it’s been like that all along. Jennie may have the nice, little, happy, easy, trivial things--especially if she owes them all to you, and everyone knows it--but the real experiences, the things that hurt and teach one, and are the privilege of the people that are to be worth anything--those she must leave to you. And you try to believe, and to make everyone else believe, that because you make Jennie’s clothes, and live economically and are a wonderful manager, and save money for her, and do the tiresome things in the house yourself, so that she can enjoy herself in the garden--because of all that, you love Jennie as no daughter has ever been loved before, and it puzzles and pains everyone that she doesn’t seem grateful and loving in return. Well, it isn’t Jennie you love at all--it’s yourself. I don’t believe you’ve ever loved anyone, Lydia.”

A very far-away echo of the past came dimly to Lydia’s stunned perceptions. A little pale-faced, Cockney girl, Rosie Graham, the cashier at Elena’s, had once said something to her like that.

“I know very little about your life before you married Clement,” said Joyce ruthlessly. “Perhaps there was someone then. But you didn’t want any friends or relations to come and stay with you, as most girls do when they marry and have a house. Nathalie told us you had cousins, and an aunt and uncle who brought you up, and friends in London--but we never saw any of them. Your aunt came when we were all away--and after you’d been married for years and years. _Clement_ wanted her to come while he was alive--it was you who didn’t want anyone.”

“It was our home--why should I want other people?” Lydia attempted to justify herself mechanically and without conviction.

Joyce laughed contemptuously.

“That cock won’t fight, my dear. The old Rector came to you, at your own suggestion, before you’d been married a year. Clement’s mother loved you for that, and thought it was a sacrifice you were making, so that Nathalie could get married and go to India, and so that Clement could come down here and live near her. _It wasn’t a sacrifice_, Lydia. Nothing matters to you so much as having the _beau rôle_. You can’t bear anyone else to be in the foreground, and no sacrifice costs anything if it’ll get you there. You sacrificed even Clement, over and over again.”

“How dare you speak like that?” Lydia was choking.

“I’ve watched it for nearly twenty years,” Joyce declared recklessly, “and I’ve not spoken. Once you told us--do you remember?--that your grandfather had given you a rule, and that you’d kept it all your life--always to let the other people talk about themselves. And you did. You let the people that did love you--Clement, and good, simple Nathalie Kennedy, and little Jennie, at first--you let them all talk about themselves, and you listened, thinking all the time how superior you were to be able to keep your own counsel, and never give yourself away in return. And when you were sympathetic, and said kind things about what they’d told you, they were grateful, and that pleased you, because it put you in the position of giving, while _they_ only took. But that sort of thing won’t go down for ever with sensitive and loving people. Do you suppose that Clement didn’t come to know that there was nothing real behind all your patience, and your sympathy and your listening? You liked to feel that he was dependent on you for something, that was all. You didn’t really care for his little, fiddling jobs about the garden, that Jennie loved instinctively; you didn’t really care about the parish, and the people, although you liked being the parson’s wife, and having them come to you for things. Clement found out what your sympathy was worth, and that his, in return, that he would have given you so lavishly, wasn’t what you wanted, or ever would want. He fell in love with your pretty face and your quick wits, and with what he thought was your courage in going to work, as a young girl, in London. And he helped you, when I suppose even you, for once in your life, were frightened and in want of comfort--when you found yourself, an ignorant and helpless child, on the verge of being mixed up in the divorce scandals of your employer. You’d got down to bedrock that time, I imagine, and needed someone human and warm-hearted, like Clement, to come to your help.”

“Don’t mention his name to me again,” cried out Lydia suddenly.

“No, I won’t. I’ve said my say, and if it’s hurt you, Lydia, I’m glad. Not because I hate you--I don’t now, though I came very near it once when I saw Clement, first bewildered, and not understanding what it was that you lacked, and then gradually realizing what I’d realized long ago--that you care for nothing and nobody on earth, except as it affects yourself.”

Joyce, as she had told Lydia, had said her say.

The two women faced one another in dead silence for another moment.

Then Joyce Damerel turned and left the room.

Lydia, sitting huddled in a chair beside the window, with eyes that conveyed hardly any message to her stunned mind, saw her sister-in-law’s tall figure walking away swiftly across the garden.

She was left alone.

Jennie and young Valentine were out together.

The house was curiously silent.

So that was what Joyce thought of her. Did it matter? Joyce and she had never liked one another, and Joyce’s opinion did not really count for very much....

Only gradually was Lydia’s inner vision able to focus the real point at issue.

Were these accusations true?

Falteringly, and very, very slowly in its deepening anguish, her mind took a long journey back through the years.

Through a dim, childish era, when she had proudly resented her mother’s widowhood, to which her own orphanship must be subordinated. She had hardly regretted her mother’s death at all, partly because it had freed her from the capricious tyranny of weakness, principally because it had left her, undisputed, the first right to consideration and compassion.

Through the inauguration of her life in the little Regency Terrace household.

She had known all the time, even as a little girl, that Aunt Evelyn was silly and snobbish, Aunt Beryl limited and provincial, Uncle George pedantic with his perpetual Mr. Barlow monologues on uninteresting subjects, their old friend, Mr. Monteagle Almond, a pompous and narrow-minded little bank clerk, who had never made any success of his life.

They had been very kind to her, had admired and praised her cleverness, without stint as without discrimination, and had trustfully displayed their real characteristics to the little Daniel come to judgment, who had always listened and responded so intelligently and gently.

She had taken what they offered, keeping her own counsel all the time, and inwardly criticizing and despising them.

Grandpapa--but Grandpapa had known all the while. One could not doubt for an instant that Grandpapa’s shrewdness had penetrated through all the good behaviour and proper deference of the little girl Lydia, to the acute self-interest that had actuated the good behaviour and the deference.

Grandpapa had known.