Part 26

“Yes, poor dear, through coming into contact with reality. Oh, Nina, one would give anything to teach them some other way--with less pain and fewer tears. But they won’t listen. _Ah! si jeunesse savait!_”

“Dear Bertie! I understand--and don’t think that I should ever think _you_ egotistical and adding ‘_si vieillesse pouvait_!’” softly said Mrs. Severing, freely sacrificing her reluctance to display an indifferent French accent to the satisfaction of laying a delicate emphasis on the pronoun relating to her friend.

“You’ve felt it all, just as I have, Nina, that’s why I can speak to you so freely,” returned Bertha smiling.

“Darling Bertie! I wish I could give you longer, but you know how tiresome people are, and Gwen Cotton is so dreadfully exacting. _Wretched_ if I don’t stay there whenever I’m anywhere near the place, and never allowing me out of her sight when I get there. It really is absurd--a perfect infatuation--nobody can think why. It always makes me laugh.”

“How dear of you not to mind! That sort of thing, making one look so absolutely ridiculous, always makes _me_ angry,” said Bertha serenely. “Is Morris there too?”

“He joins me to-morrow. I want him to come over and see you.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Tregaskis meditatively. “Yes.”

So Morris came, and in his blue, direct gaze Rosamund read a sympathy that he was later on to express in words.

Together in the garden, on an afternoon that reminded them both oddly of another afternoon spent together in the garden at Porthlew, they stood and looked over the valley.

“May I say something?” asked Morris suddenly and gently.

“Yes.”

“In spite of everything, you are happier here than at Porthlew, aren’t you? I mean--it’s your right place, so to speak--this valley, and your own home and everything.”

“Yes.”

“And you and Mrs. Tregaskis understand one another now?”

“Yes,” said Rosamund simply and seriously. “Cousin Bertie is an extraordinarily brave person, isn’t she?”

“I think she is. And she’s a wonderfully understanding one, too. I’m glad, Rosamund. I couldn’t bear to think of you in an uncongenial atmosphere now.”

Rosamund, to whom it sometimes seemed that the understanding of Mrs. Tregaskis was hardest of all to bear, said nothing. The reticencies, the very reserves, which denoted Bertha’s penetration into the deepest joys and sorrows that Rosamund knew, lashed at her sensitiveness as no lesser sympathy or more shallow insight could ever have done.

Ludovic Argent, again an onlooker, slowly guessed at a little of it. He wondered whether Morris Severing, in love with Rosamund, would understand. He felt a curious certainty that on that understanding would depend her answer to the inevitable question.

But Rosamund’s answer, when Morris asked her to marry him, was in no way cryptic.

“I can’t, Morris. It’s out of the question. And, anyway, I shouldn’t be any good to you.”

“Dearest, you would be everything in the world. Tell me why....”

“For one thing, I don’t love you. No, Morris--I _don’t_. If I did--there wouldn’t be anything more to be said----”

“Indeed there would,” interjected her suitor with a sort of boyish blitheness, “and I’d jolly well hear you say it, too.”

“It’s no good my playing at things any more,” said Rosamund, frowning a little as she sought for her words. “I don’t mean because I feel superior or anything ridiculous of that sort--but simply because it doesn’t amuse me any longer.”

“I don’t want it to amuse you.”

“Well, I can’t do it with any conviction, if you like that better.”

“I don’t care if you do it with conviction or not, sweetheart--I’ll convince you afterwards,” said Morris, his eyes smiling at her after their endearing wont.

“No you couldn’t, Morris. Not the real part of me--the only part that matters to either of us, in the least.”

Morris asked her to marry him again and again, and Rosamund marvelled at her own indifference, was thrilled and shaken by his pleading, and yet refused him with a weary certainty of being true to a standard which, once seen, she must hold to.

The last time that she said she could not marry him finally brought conviction to Morris.

“Oh, _do_ leave me,” she cried. “I’m so tired, and it’s all no use. There’s more than one sort of love in the world, Morris, and your sort and my sort aren’t meant for one another.”

“I could show you that they are, if----”

“Well,” said Rosamund with a sort of weary candour, “I don’t want you to. I’m too tired, mentally, for any more violent emotions, Morris. Honestly, I don’t believe the capacity is in me any more.”

“If you fell in love, Rosamund.”

“Oh, Morris!” said Rosamund, half impatiently and half in fatigue, “there are more ways of loving than falling in love.”

Morris turned away despairingly and left her, carrying with him the unescapable conviction that Rosamund had no need of him.

Definitely unattainable, she became to him more desirable than ever before, and it was of hardly any consolation to him that Nina, in the deepest confidence, hinted at the tragedy obscuring his life, both to her hostess and to as many of her hostess’ friends as appeared sympathetic.

“My poor boy!” she said softly, and Morris divined that despair had imparted a ravaged appearance to his handsome young face.

“I have only cared for one woman in my life,” he told himself, not without some naïve feeling of surprise at the discovery. “First and last, it’s been Rosamund. _On revient toujours à son premier amour._”

The aphorism was so pathetic that he repeated it next day to Nina, who was evidently disposed for the rôle of adoring mother, sympathizing blindly with her boy’s wrongs.

“I can’t forgive that girl!” she cried, with all the feminine unreason of fiction, and a blaze in her great eyes that was distinctly creditable in view of the fact that she so seldom called it into play.

“No,” said Morris magnanimously, “I’m not worthy of her, mother. It’s all right--only I can’t let you blame her.”

“How can I help it, darling?” tenderly asked Nina. “My heart is breaking for you.”

Morris, who was inclined to suppose that a monopoly of broken hearts was his, at least for the time being, could do no less than turn away with a stifled groan, indicating a heartbreak beside which Nina’s could not hope to rank.

It might have been Mrs. Severing’s perception of this which caused her to remark with some decision:

“You will never, never know, Morris, till you have children of your own, what it is to see them suffer. It is all so infinitely more bitter than any grief of one’s own--but the young don’t know--they don’t know.”

She broke off with one of those smiles which are sadder than tears--an impression which Mrs. Severing could at all times convey with great accuracy.

“My youth is over,” said Morris with profound bitterness. Rather to his surprise, Nina repressed the obvious retort, and contented herself with a faint sigh, expressing many things.

Morris felt encouraged to a further display of feeling.

“I must get out of this place, mother,” he declared with an abandon of recklessness that almost turned the luxurious Towers into a medieval dungeon with every drawbridge up and guarded.

“Yes, my darling.”

“I--I can’t quite stand being so near _her_,” groaned Morris.

“We’ll go home again to-morrow,” soothingly declared Nina, who was tired of Lady Cotton’s unappreciative adulation and also hated being asked to “give a little music” every evening after dinner.

“Mother! _how_ you understand!” cried Morris in a sudden rush of gratitude.

Nina looked at her son with liquid eyes.

He let her take his hand for a moment, gave hers a squeeze that drove the stones of her rings into her fingers, and dashed out of the room.

Nina unavoidably devoted an intense second or two to the absorbing pain in her fingers, but did so, as it were, in parenthesis. At the earliest possible moment she had recovered herself, and was murmuring softly: “My little son!” She saw Morris as a baby boy again, and at the same time clearly visualized her present self indulging in this tender illusion.

“Such a _little_ boy,” murmured Nina again, her uninjured hand hovering with a touching, instinctive sort of gesture about two feet from the ground.

The same rapt look of retrospective tenderness tinged and irradiated Mrs. Severing’s rather elusive and sketchy explanations of her hostess and carried her serenely past the loud and affectionate reproaches that assailed her up to the very moment of farewell.

“I hate to leave you,” she sighed, “but you must come and see my Cornish home one day--_soon_.”

She stepped into the little car, swathed in the most becoming of amber coloured veils, and remarked to Morris almost as they left the hall-door:

“Not that anything would ever induce me to have either of them inside my house.”

Her matter-of-fact tone caused Morris to break into an irrepressible laugh, and after an instant she joined him. For a moment they enjoyed a delightful sense of companionship. But Morris speedily resumed his dejection, and even added to it a dash of recklessness that caused him to sit back as far as possible in the driving-seat and disregard the speed limit and his mother’s protests alike.

“Morris,” said Mrs. Severing bitterly, when the car had apparently spun round a sharp corner on one wheel, “do you ever think of anyone’s wishes but your own? I do all I can to please you--cut short a visit which I am enjoying, at the risk of hurting a great friend, come home with you simply because you wish it--and you can’t even do such a small thing as drive a little bit carefully when I beg you to.”

“What does it matter?” muttered Morris, in the tone of a desperado outfacing death.

“Only that it’s very bad form to be a road-hog,” suavely said Nina.

The shot told, for Morris was exceedingly proud of his driving, but discretion was never Mrs. Severing’s strongest weapon, and she added rashly:

“How little you know what it is to be highly strung, my poor Morris! My nerves have been a misery to me all my life long, and even if I’ve never said very much about it, that doesn’t mean I don’t suffer. No one can look at me,” said Nina with emotion, “and think me a strong woman.”

“Lady Cotton and Mrs. Tregaskis both told me they’d never seen you looking better,” said Morris viciously.

Nina’s slight laugh was compounded of annoyance and of a rather satirical compassion for the blindness of the authorities quoted.

“Dear Gwen! She always loves to say that I look better after staying with her. As for Bertie, she’s such a tower of strength herself, that I rather fancy nothing short of a broken leg would ever attract her attention. I’ve heard other people say the same thing about her too, dear, kind thing though she is.”

But Morris was annoyed.

“Well, I quite agree with them both,” he remarked disagreeably. “I’ve never seen you look better, mother--the picture of health.”

His mother smiled the pitying smile of one better informed, and Morris, subconsciously aware of it, gazed straight ahead of him with absorbed determination.

“I’m afraid what I call my best would be a very poor state of health for most people,” murmured Nina, and added hurriedly: “Don’t talk to me any more, Morris, I want to close my eyes. I had a very nearly sleepless night.”

Morris was not minded to concede to his parent the feminine privilege of the last word.

“I’m sure you must be much stronger than you suppose, mother, if you can sleep when you’re nervous.”

On this encouraging reflection he drove the car with great and unnecessary rapidity to the junction where the chauffeur met him and took charge of it, while Morris and his mother proceeded to Cornwall by train.

The journey was made by Morris in a smoking carriage, with the considerate remark: “Do finish your doze in peace, mother. I want to smoke, and besides, I wouldn’t disturb you for the world.”

It may reasonably be conjectured that the annoyed Mrs. Severing did not follow this filial advice.

The ensuing days at Pensevern were pleasant neither to Nina nor to her son.

Morris played the piano stormily, and Nina, wincing perceptibly, said:

“Don’t, Morris. It jars horribly to hear that banging. Your touch is not at all improved.”

“The ‘light trills and runs’ of the eighties are altogether out of keeping with modern music, mother.”

“Dear me, is that what you call modern music, my poor boy? _I_ should simply call it strumming. But I suppose,” said Nina with an annoying laugh, “that you like to call it _improvization_.”

“Like!” said her son with gloomy scorn, unable to think of a better retort. “I don’t suppose I shall ever like anything again.”

He flung out of the room.

Most of his days might be said to be spent in this exercise, resorted to at ever shortening intervals, until finally the time came when he prefaced it by a definite statement:

“Mother, this is no good. I must go away.”

“Very well, Morris. You know I’m used to being alone.”

“Of course I know it is lonely for you in a way, especially since Mrs. Tregaskis has left Porthlew----”

“Very lonely,” repeated Nina with a patient smile. “But I shall make some music, Morris, and read a good deal in the long evenings, and then there’s the garden....”

Nina’s acquaintance with the garden hardly extended beyond the kaleidoscope of herbaceous border outside the drawing-room windows, but she liked the idea of silently communing with Nature.

“I shall go to America with that concert-party,” announced Morris, referring to certain projects of a professional friend.

Nina, without the slightest warning, dissolved into tears.

She cried so much less becomingly than usual that Morris was moved to quick, sudden compunction.

He came and knelt beside her.

“Darling, don’t cry. I won’t go if you hate it. But what am I to do here? There’s no work fit for a man.”

Nina continued to weep.

Morris gazed at her with miserable perplexity. Accustomed though he was to Nina’s easy tears, they invariably caused him acute discomfort, and, moreover, he was conscious of a certain feeling of remorse.

“Mother, don’t cry. I’ll stay if you want me, of course.”

“No--no--it isn’t that exactly.”

He watched her with growing anxiety, and felt that he would do anything to stop her tears. In the tension of the moment, he sought to relieve his own intense discomfort, and at all costs to stop his mother’s weeping, by an impulsive suggestion.

“Come too! Why on earth shouldn’t you? _The_ Nina Severing would be an enormous asset--you know they love your stuff over there.”

He saw with thankfulness that her tears had stopped, and hurried on eagerly:

“Carrol wants someone to chaperone the two girls--those two who are going to do the violin duets, you know--and of course your name would be an immense draw.”

“Oh, Morris! It’s nonsense. How could I leave this place to look after itself?”

Morris became aware that his project was being met with a tacit acceptance. Material objections had never yet stayed any progress of Nina’s.

“Easily!” he declared lightly. “You’d simply love it--and we needn’t be tied to Carrol’s show after the three months are up. We’d come home on our own, or stay out there for a bit.”

“I should be glad to leave England behind me,” said Nina recklessly, and for no reason save the sensation of weariness induced by tears. “And so would you.”

“Yes,” Morris declared vehemently. “Thankful. Look here, I’m going to telegraph to Carrol and you’ll see what an enthusiastic answer he’ll send.”

“_La vie de Bohème_ once more!” murmured the mistress of Pensevern, with more appreciation of the sentence than its truth warranted. No life of Bohemia had ever been, or ever would be, Nina Severing’s, but her son knew by the phrase that he need fear no further display of emotion.

“Am I mad?” he demanded of himself outside the door with some amazement, then characteristically shrugged his shoulders and dismissed the thought.

He hated Nina’s weeping, and had chosen the first means of consoling her which had occurred to him.

It was not Morris’s way to envisage the consequence of his own impulses until actually confronted by them, and in the urgencies of departure both he and Nina found a salving for many things.

If, in the months that ensued, neither Morris nor Nina Severing found that a momentary common impulse was to prove an enduring link between them, the knowledge weighed lightly on Morris, to whom no enduring link that humanity can forge would ever equal the glamour of a new enthusiasm.

To Nina, the fundamental resemblance between them would hold out eternal lures, and promises of a new understanding. That these should fail as often as they should renew themselves, would never succeed in permanently disturbing Mrs. Severing’s treasured conception of her own motherhood.

XXIX

Ludovic Argent sometimes thought that the understanding of Mrs. Tregaskis seemed hardest of all to Rosamund. Had she anything at all left of her very own?

He found himself wondering.

He went across the valley on many days, and Mrs. Tregaskis always welcomed him with eager cordiality. It was only after a time that Ludovic admitted to himself that he sought another welcome than hers with an insistence which surprised him vaguely. One day in the autumn his halting step came slowly up the narrow garden path where Bertha Tregaskis, in the short, dark tweed of determinedly unconventional widowhood, was crouching over a border. She raised herself briskly enough at the sound of his stick upon the gravel.

“Splendid!” she cried exuberantly, showing a pair of earthy palms. “I can’t shake hands--too grubby. But you’ll help me tie up these poor dear things, won’t you?”

Ludovic adjusted his crutch-like stick, and fumbled obediently with long pieces of bass and the top-heavy overgrown dahlias.

“Rosamund is not good at this sort of job, although she offers to help me most regularly, poor dear! But it’s not in her line at all.”

“Why don’t you have in old Jones or someone two or three times a week?” said Ludovic with the more earnestness that his own wrestlings with the bass were strangely unsuccessful.

“We do have him every now and then, but I love pottering about, and so does Minnie. We’ve practically _made_ the whole of this border--the place was in a dreadful state when we came.”

Ludovic looked round the small garden.

“It has altered a good deal,” he conceded.

His voice was expressionless.

Bertha looked up sharply.

“There have been no changes to hurt her,” she said quickly. “One understood--good heavens, yes! There are the two tiny plots over these under those lilac bushes, that belonged to them--Rosamund and Frances--when they were little children. Somehow I knew that by instinct--and why she always said wallflowers were her favourite flowers. This place is one mass of them in the spring. She’s not sentimental, you know, but little things like that that are sacred to one--afterwards. And Rosamund knows that I understand.”

“Yes.”

“It’s curious,” Mrs. Tregaskis continued meditatively, “how quickly one ‘senses’ things, when it’s a question of a beloved child. I don’t think, though I _do_ say it myself, that any suggestion or change of mine has jarred on Rosamund. You see, I can share in some of the associations. I fetched them away from here as little children--and I was here with them when their mother died--and now the place, in a sense, is mine as well as hers. You see it’s been a harbour of refuge for me, too, hasn’t it?”

“You don’t regret Cornwall?”

Bertha straightened herself slowly, and faced him.

“No,” she replied, deliberately, but very decisively. “The love of a place is a great thing--and I’m Cornish through and through, as you know--but, after all, other things matter more. Little Rosamund, for instance. Oh, it’s not only that she wanted me--wanted me to mother and shield and comfort her, as only a child that’s bought its own wilful experience _can_ want one, but there’s the need of giving in her, too. You know that. I rather fancy that you, too, understand Rosamund.”

She looked at him rather enigmatically for a moment, but Ludovic was silent.

“Your mother told me once that she rather wondered if the whole thing would end in Rosamund’s becoming a Roman Catholic, too. She made friends with a woman at Francie’s convent.... But it won’t. Rosamund hasn’t the religious temperament, for one thing. All she needed was to find herself. A modern phrase, isn’t it--and one that I rather avoid, as a rule, but it’s expressive enough. The child had to learn proportion--and it was taught her through the strongest thing she knew--her love for Frances. Reality is the only medium for reality, after all. Her other emotions and phases weren’t real, you know--not even a sort of love affair that she had one year. But she had to get right down to bedrock to teach her what relative values are.”

Ludovic felt with an absolute conviction that Mrs. Tregaskis, as she had said, understood indeed.

He wondered deeply concerning Rosamund’s acceptance of such comprehension.

That the acceptance was almost matter of fact in its completeness was evident, but it was only after a time that he became aware of a deeper serenity underlying her tranquil receptivities. It was not the pale serenity of resignation, either, for he was conscious of a certain strength and hopefulness in her outlook that differed oddly from the atmosphere of unrest diffused by Rosamund Grantham as he had known her a few years earlier.

“I’m getting much happier,” she once said to him with laughing candour. “Not for any reason, you know, but just because I am.”

“I thought you would. I’m very glad.”

“There’s no reason for it,” repeated Rosamund thoughtfully. “I’m horrid enough to Cousin Bertie very often, as you know.”

He had seen her lose her temper in a quick, childish outburst over a small matter that afternoon.

“And I always thought I _must_ have definite work or go mad. You know I tried writing, and everything, and none of it seemed right. Yet here I am, doing nothing at all, except little tiny jobs that Cousin Bertie mostly makes for me, and sometimes wondering if I’m justifying my existence at all--yet the days go by very quickly.”

“Work will come,” said Ludovic, voicing a conviction. “The jobs one takes up just to save one’s fancied self-respect never seem to me to be worth while.”

Rosamund laughed a little.

“I never can remember that you’re in Parliament--but I always think of you in connection with your writing,” she remarked frankly.

“Exactly,” returned Ludovic dryly.

They both laughed, with the sense of companionship that a shared laugh almost inevitably carries with it.

“Aha!” said Mrs. Tregaskis, at work in the garden with Miss Blandflower, as the sounds came through the open window. “What do you think of me as a scheming old woman, Minnie? I can always enjoy a little match-making, even in my dotage.”

“Oh, Mrs. Tregaskis, how can you talk so ridiculously?” protested Minnie. “Why, you’re the youngest woman I know. They always say a woman is only as old as she looks.”

“Minnie, Minnie, don’t flatter! You know that spades are always spades with me. But I don’t mind telling you a little secret. I think we shall see Rosamund happy yet.”

“Oh! Do you mean...? But I used to think--only, of course, one can never tell----”