Part 30

“I’m glad she’s happy,” said Lydia, rather to her own surprise. “I never imagined she would marry, though. I never knew she was engaged.”

“Oh, she told me they hadn’t been going together for very long before they got married. Quite well-to-do, he was, and she wouldn’t have to go out to work, though I believe the women in Australia do all their own housework always. But Mrs. Prince was as pleased as anything at going off to Sydney. I must say, I do like to see what I call a real love-match,” said Miss Nettleship in a tone of satisfaction.

Lydia looked at the stout, overworked woman, with her greying hair and the wrinkles round her brown eyes. Those inexpressive, kindly eyes, that actually seemed to look out with pleasure and interest still on a world that was narrowed to the dimensions of the Bloomsbury boarding-house.

As though in answer to her unspoken thought, Miss Nettleship turned to the eager expression of her own solicitude for Lydia and Lydia’s concerns.

“Of course, I’ve heard about your daughter going to be married. She does seem young, but that’s the way nowadays. This war! But I hope you’re pleased, Mrs. Damerel?”

“He’s a Colonial, too--a Canadian,” Lydia replied indirectly.

“So your auntie told me. Well, I’m sure he’s very lucky. But he’s out at the war, with this machine of his, isn’t he? It’ll be hard for her to see him go off again after the wedding.”

“Yes--for both of us. I--I’ve so wanted little Jennie to be happy.”

Miss Nettleship made a clicking sound with her tongue, expressive of sympathy.

“T’thk, t’thk! It _is_ sad for all these young people, to start life like this. When one thinks of all the boys killed and wounded, and the girls working so hard, and losing their brothers and sweethearts and husbands--oh, Mrs. Damerel,” said Miss Nettleship earnestly, “sometimes I’ve thought it hard to be all alone the way I am, and just have myself to work for--but when I think of what the wives and mothers of our soldiers are going through, I realize that I may have been spared something I couldn’t have borne, and I’m thankful to have things the way they are.”

So that was Maria Nettleship’s unsubtle, uncomplicated point of view. She could be thankful because she was out of the swirling current of life’s deepest emotions, safely set aside in undistinguished security upon the bank.

Not for her the strange, twisted anguish with which Lydia resented the sight of even pain and renunciation in which she had no share. Not for her the envious craving to be once more in the grip of dramatic circumstances, to hold the centre of the stage once more, and garner experience wholesale, that might only be doled out grudgingly to a younger, more trivial generation.

Lydia left Miss Nettleship feeling that she had received only one more proof that her own spirit stood in a very desert of isolation. They none of them understood--could ever understand! It seemed to her that she lacked even the words in which to make her misery clear to them.

They none of them spoke the same language. For them “sacrifice” meant personal suffering.

For Lydia it meant standing aside, being denied the importance of personal suffering and the exploitation of it.

They thought that those were to be pitied who were bearing the brunt of pain and privation. But Lydia knew that the pity, and the pride, and the sympathy made up for all the pain and the privation.

She clenched her hands, and sweat broke out upon her forehead.

In the losses of her childhood, the struggle of her girlhood, in her premature widowhood, had she ever suffered as she was suffering now, when no one recognized her claims to impassioned pity any more?

Lydia knew that for the first time in all her life she was really suffering.

She felt as though something within her were being killed by agonized inches.

Something that would not die.

If once it died the suffering would be over, and she herself left shattered, no longer keenly sentient. But it would not die.

She met Jennie and Roland at the station, and they got into the train together.

On the journey, it penetrated to her understanding for the first time that the marriage was to take place on the next day but one.

“Monday? That’s the day after to-morrow.”

“But mama----” Jennie gave her a quick, alarmed glance. “We always did say Monday, if it could be managed. And I asked Aunt Joyce to see if it would be all right about the church that day, and she wired back yes. I showed you the telegram yesterday evening!”

“I’d forgotten,” said Lydia.

She saw Jennie look at Roland Valentine with a piteous, scared expression, and presently they began to talk in very low tones together, carefully avoiding a glance in her direction.

She understood that something in her looks or her manner was making them anxious.

“Mama,” Jennie whispered, when they had at length reached Clyst Milton, and while Roland was in search of a missing suit-case, “he won’t come home with us. He’s going straight to Quintmere, and we’ll only meet at church to-morrow and when we go to Grannie’s for lunch. You and I will have the evening all by ourselves to-night.”

Jennie was trying to make up, evidently, for what she thought was her mother’s pain at losing her.

She was very gentle and quiet when they parted from Roland, who came with them no further than the threshold of Lydia’s cottage.

“They’ll put up the pony in the Quintmere stables for to-night, and we can drive it back after lunch to-morrow. The man will understand. We’ll see you at church....”

Jennie slipped her hand into his.

Lydia realized that they were forgoing some of their few hours together in order that she might have Jennie to herself for one evening.

“Good night,” she said curtly, and turned abruptly into the house, leaving them alone for their brief parting in the winter darkness.

Jennie, that evening, seemed tired, and Lydia, in her own immense fatigue that was so infinitely more of the spirit than of the flesh, half unconsciously resented the slight, unwonted shadows beneath her daughter’s eyes and the pallor of her young face.

Why should Jennie, the invariably robust, elect to look tired to-night?

Then Lydia remembered how much shopping and walking and travelling and interviewing had been crowded into the last two days for the girl unaccustomed to London, and her heart smote her. If Jennie’s fatigue was physical, there was nothing to resent. She was entitled to it. Lydia followed her usual methods and said gently:

“Would you like your dinner in bed? I can bring it up to you myself, and sit with you afterwards.”

“You’re tired too, mama,” said Jennie quickly. “Much more tired than I am, _I_ think. Let’s just have dinner early and then sit in the drawing-room over the fire, all quiet and comfy, just you and me.”

She looked at her mother wistfully, as though seeking to make instinctive amends for she knew not what.

During dinner they spoke of the wedding arrangements, of Jennie’s hastily selected trousseau, and of the rooms secured by Lady Lucy at a North Devon fishing village for the brief honeymoon.

Jennie grew excited; the slight look of strain left her round, childish face, and she talked eagerly about her plans.

“I’ll telegraph to you, mama, what day I’m coming back here. Of course, I shall go to London with Roland to--to see him off.”

Jennie’s lip suddenly quivered at the allusion, and she talked faster than ever, and in the old, rather arrogant strain, as though to reassure herself by a display of great self-confidence.

“I don’t know exactly what I shall do eventually, you know, mama. I think I ought to find some war-work, and Roland would like me to be in London, and of course it would be the best place, in case he got wounded, or when he gets leave.”

“If you were working, you would be tied down to certain hours, I suppose, like your Cousin Olive,” said Lydia. “You remember what she told us about her hospital.”

“Oh,” said Jennie airily, “I’d stipulate all about that beforehand. There must be other work besides hospital work.”

Lydia could not help wondering for what work untrained, inexperienced Jennie thought herself fitted, and she knew that something of that wonder was showing in her face.

“I _must_ learn to do things now,” said Jennie, as though in answer to Lydia’s look, and colouring hotly as she spoke.

The defiant note had crept back into her voice, and the vexed consciousness of that animated Lydia’s reply.

“Certainly. Up to now I don’t think you’ve been very willing to be taught, have you, Jennie? But you know that you can attend classes even down here, now that they’re getting up so many of these Red Cross and other things; and if you want to learn practical, everyday usefulness, I could at least teach you housekeeping.”

Lydia was perfectly aware of forcing an issue, and some imperative desire to lessen the sudden tension of the atmosphere made her rise from the dinner-table as she spoke.

They went into the drawing-room in silence.

When they were seated on either side of the fire, Jennie with empty hands and Lydia stitching at the embroidery on some of Jennie’s new underwear, Jennie suddenly spoke.

She was never diplomatic, poor Jennie, and a far less acute hearer, and one much less familiar with her every intonation than was the observant Lydia, would have known that her hasty, nervously-spoken speech was premeditated.

“Wouldn’t it be rather fun, in a way--as I can’t have a proper home of our own with Roland till the war’s over--for me to find a tiny flat or something in London, and make it all nice and live in it, and--and you come up and stay with me, mama, when you want a day or two in London?”

“Is that your idea--or his?”

“I--I suppose both of us planned it together. I wouldn’t let Roland say anything to you about it--I wanted to tell you myself.”

Jennie looked at her mother with unconsciously imploring eyes, that beseeched her to receive at least in silence a decision which both of them knew to be epoch-making.

But Lydia herself could no longer control the bitterness that had been swelling within her for many weeks.

“You’d rather live by yourself in London, in fact, and cope with difficulties of which you haven’t the slightest idea, whilst I stay alone down here, than let us be together during these miserable times of anxiety--naturally with the understanding that I shouldn’t dream of being there when there’s the slightest chance of your having Roland at home. Is that it?”

“Oh, mama!”

“But isn’t that what you mean to tell me?”

“Oh, don’t!” said Jennie miserably.

“Don’t go on making exclamations that mean nothing. What you’re really saying is that you don’t want me to have anything to do with your new life, isn’t it?”

Lydia’s voice was iron. With every word she was lashing at her own pain as well as at Jennie’s, but some inner force beyond her own control was driving her on.

“I didn’t say, ‘not anything to do with it,’” burst childishly from Jennie. “But if it wasn’t war-time, Roland and I would be going to Canada most likely, and then I’d have to leave you, and everybody would think it perfectly natural--you know they would.”

“The cases are not parallel. I am not suggesting--and never should suggest--making a third in your married life. Those are not arrangements that can ever succeed, from anyone’s point of view. But you know perfectly well that the circumstances are not normal. Roland will be away from you until the war is over, and your natural home--the home of your childhood--is still here; I am still here--to receive and care for you until you can begin your real married life. However, you say you don’t want that care and that shelter. You prefer to be alone in London, and to let me be alone down here.”

The expression of Jennie’s face whilst her mother was speaking had hardened from the pleading apprehension of giving pain into sullen self-justification.

The tone of her voice corresponded to her look when she spoke.

“It isn’t fair to talk like that--as if I was deserting you. I _can’t_ stay always tied to your apron-strings, mama. In fact, even if I wasn’t going to be married, I’d practically decided to go away and do some war-work somewhere, whatever you said. Oh, _can’t_ you understand? When you were my age you went away to London and worked--and there wasn’t a war or anything then.”

“The circumstances were very different,” said Lydia coldly. “I was living with an uncle and aunt, and expense was a very serious consideration to them. You know very well that everything I have in the world is yours, and that my only wish has been to take care of you and keep you good and well and happy.”

“Then,” said Jennie swiftly, “you ought to be glad for me to do what I like, and--and what Roland and I both think is best for me. I’ve got to develop into a responsible grown-up person _some_ time or other, I suppose--and how can I ever do it when all the time you’re shielding me from everything, and only wanting me to be, as you say, good and happy--like a little baby?”

The irrepressible gibe sprung to Lydia’s lips:

“That’s what Roland Valentine has taught you to think!”

Jennie looked straight at her mother.

“He’s given me the courage to say it,” she retorted in a voice as hard as Lydia’s own, “but I’ve been thinking it, and feeling it, for years and years. And I’ve been miserable at home.”

The unforgettable words that could never be unsaid had been spoken between them.

In a flash of unutterable misery Lydia knew that it was too late for the self-control, the pity, the abnegation, that might have saved the final, open contest that never now could be as though it had not been.

As though a veritable physical abyss yawned between them, the mother and daughter stared at one another aghast, with wretched, incredulous unhappiness.

The lines of Jennie’s young face broke first, and she burst into pitiful, tempestuous sobbing and crying.

“Mama, mama, forgive me--I didn’t mean it. Oh, don’t look like that! I was wicked and ungrateful--I didn’t mean it--I’ll do anything you like----”

But Lydia knew that her belated victory held for her no promise of good.

All night long she lay open-eyed and tearless, and for a long while she could hear at intervals from the bedroom next to her own the muffled sounds of Jennie’s unrestrained, childish crying.

XXIX

“What have you been doing to Jennie?” asked Joyce Damerel next morning, in her manner that so oddly mingled disagreeableness with a sort of friendly interest.

Lydia was not in the least surprised by the question. Her own wakeful and wretched night had left no such traces as were plainly to be seen in the unaccustomed rings round Jennie’s eyes, and the heavy, swollen look of young eyelids unused to tears and to vigils alike.

“Jennie must have been crying almost all night.”

“She got overtired in London,” Lydia said unemotionally. “She was thoroughly upset last night.”

“Poor little thing!”

Joyce sought for no further explanation, it was evident.

But Lydia knew, quite as well as though she had been within earshot of the lovers, what had been Roland Valentine’s first startled inquiry when he and Jennie met outside the church porch.

And after the two had walked across the fields together to Quintmere, whither Lady Lucy drove Lydia, she was aware of a new hostility in Roland Valentine’s manner to herself.

The words of the night before, Lydia told herself with a strange apathy, were destined to echo long and far. She wondered dully how they had come to speak them--why she, with her lifelong instincts of self-control, had madly, at this eleventh hour, brought about a crisis that Jennie, the child, had so obviously tried to avert.

Her perceptions were so dulled by the suffering of the last few months, culminating in the breaking-point of yesterday, that she heard hardly anything of the conversation at lunch, and herself took part in it quite automatically.

It seemed to her that Lady Lucy looked at her compassionately once or twice.

“This is a trying time for you, my dear,” said the old lady kindly, when they found themselves alone together in the drawing-room later on. “But you must think of dear little Jennie’s happiness--and trust that the Infinite Mercy will bring her husband back to her at the end of this cruel war.”

Lydia smiled faintly, listening to the gentle platitudes that were the means of expression most natural to Lady Lucy’s spirit of quiet fortitude.

She thought that the turbulent depths of her own wretchedness could never be even apprehended by her mother-in-law.

Without being aware of it, however, Lydia had reached those last outposts of endurance when mental anguish must have the relief of speech, or plunge into the abyss of madness.

Because she could bear Lady Lucy’s kindly, simple commonplaces no longer, Lydia announced a sudden intention of walking home.

“Before tea!” protested Lady Lucy. “I couldn’t hear of it, my dear. Besides, the Kennedys are coming up this afternoon, and the dear old Rector.”

Quite suddenly, the remembrance flashed across Lydia of the day that she had first told Nathalie and her husband of Roland Valentine, and his pretensions to become engaged to Jennie. The Kennedys had been thinking only of the war then, and of their own two boys. They had cared little enough for Jennie’s romance, less still for Lydia’s state of mind on the subject.

But the Rector had looked at her.

Lydia remembered the look with odd distinctness, and the impression of an understanding almost apprehensive in its completeness, that it had produced upon her.

She had hardly seen the Rector since that day. Had he, perhaps, understood?

“I should like to see Mr. Palmer and Nathalie,” she murmured mechanically.

“Oh, yes, and, besides, you must drive back. The pony and cart are ordered for five o’clock, as I thought you would want Jennie to be early. Poor little girl, she looks pale and tired to-day, but I’m sure that’s very natural. Even in ordinary times a girl is apt to look worn out with all the excitement and the preparations just before the wedding....”

Lady Lucy talked on, and Lydia stared out of the window.

It was a bleak, windy day, with scudding clouds flying across a dark sky. Perhaps they would say it was too cold for the Rector to be out of doors, and Nathalie and her husband would come alone.

If so, Lydia felt that her last hope would have failed her.

She looked at the clock.

It was not yet quite three, and they would probably not arrive before four o’clock.

Waiting had become unendurable.

“Where is Joyce?” she asked, wondering if it could be borne, were she obliged to sit _tête-à-tête_ for another whole hour with the old lady, who would resent any pretence at reading, when she was desirous of talking about the morrow’s wedding.

“I think she went to see about poor little Solomon, my dear. You know, Solly feels the cold weather now he’s getting to be an old dog. Joyce has had his basket put by the fire in the housekeeper’s room. We’ve got some stuff for his poor eyes, and he can’t bear anyone but Joyce to put it on....”

The placid old voice rambled on and on. It seemed to Lydia ages and ages before she ventured again to look at the clock.

It must have stopped.

The hands did not even yet indicate three o’clock.

“That clock is fast, my dear,” said Lady Lucy. “It isn’t more than a quarter to three, I feel sure. This new man who comes up from the village on Saturdays now doesn’t seem to understand the clocks in the same way that young Davy did. You know young Davy is actually at the front now? His mother had a field postcard last week. Everything crossed out except ‘I am quite well.’ You’ve seen those curious, printed field postcards, I suppose, haven’t you?”

The sound of Colonel Kennedy’s newly-acquired two-seater was heard outside quite early in the afternoon--long before four o’clock; nevertheless it seemed to Lydia that she had lived through a lifetime of waiting that afternoon.

The quivering nerves of her mind, wrenched to the point of uttermost tension, had with almost irrational intensity fixed upon speech with old Mr. Palmer as the one forlorn hope of relief.

She clenched her hands upon the arms of her chair while the sounds of arrival in the hall outside penetrated to the drawing-room.

“How nice and early they are!” said Lady Lucy. “Will you ring the bell, my dear? Nathalie will be glad of some tea, after that cold drive. I’m sure her father won’t have ventured out of doors in such an east wind.”

Lydia cast upon her a look of affrighted anguish.

What did her mother-in-law mean by so calm a prophecy of a disaster that now presented itself to Lydia’s disordered perceptions as one of almost incredible magnitude?

The door opened and Nathalie came into the room with Joyce Damerel. Colonel Kennedy, alone, followed them, and the door shut behind him.

The Rector had not come.

“Father was disappointed, but we didn’t dare to risk it--the wind has gone right round to the east. He wanted so much to see Jennie, too, Lydia--but he wouldn’t run the chance of catching cold before the wedding. My dear, the church looks lovely--they’ve decorated it all. Where’s Jennie?”

“They’re both in the library,” said Lady Lucy with a significant smile.

“Oh, well, we shall see them presently. I suppose all the preparations are finished, Lydia? You look very tired. Was there a great deal to do?”

“Quite a lot,” said Lydia, and smiled faintly.

They went on talking all round her.

Colonel Kennedy spoke about the war-news, and the others listened to him anxiously, with the deference accorded to the opinion of an old soldier. News of Billy Damerel and of Aleck and Charlie Kennedy was exchanged between Joyce and Nathalie. Old Lady Lucy talked about the family of Belgian refugees installed in the village.

“Poor things, one was so dreadfully sorry for them--and still is--but they are very difficult to please. The mother and the aunt quarrel terribly, and the aunt wants to be sent somewhere else.... How do you find yours, Nathalie?”

“Not at all easy to manage, either. They grumbled so at having to drink tea, that the Committee has had to arrange a special supply of coffee for them--and Monsieur Mertens came up the other day and told us it was such bad coffee that it was making his wife ill. He said she was _énervée au possible_, but Dr. West couldn’t find anything wrong with her.”

“That’s just it! One of ours--that young chemist from Antwerp--says he spits blood every night and is going to die, but he _seems_ as well as possible.”

“I suppose,” said Colonel Kennedy tritely, “that we have the worst specimens over here. The decent ones--the men, at all events--are fighting.”

Lydia heard it all without attending to it. So many similar conversations had been held at Quintmere and elsewhere since the war.