Part 8

“I have no doubt,” said Frederick drily, “that all parents, taken as a class, would agree with you. Unfortunately for ourselves, however, we have passed into an era where the individual, and not the class, will rule.”

He walked out of the room, looking older and more deeply lined than ever.

Rosamund found Mrs. Tregaskis, who never broke down, weeping violently among the piles of disordered pamphlets.

“Cousin Bertie! Don’t!” cried Rosamund fearfully. “Is it about Hazel?”

Bertha raised a piteously mottled and disfigured face.

“I’m beaten,” she cried. “Frederick has consented to this iniquitous marriage, and nothing can stop it now. My little girl, whom I’ve brought up to be good, and to whom I’ve tried to teach religion--that she should be willing to break my heart, and rush deliberately into sin, the first time temptation comes near her!”

“No--no. It’s not that. She doesn’t think it’s sin. She doesn’t believe it’s sin--not for an instant. Her point of view is different.”

“Her point of view!” cried Bertha bitterly. “How dare you talk to me, a woman of fifty, of such preposterous nonsense? You and she are children; you know nothing of life, you’ve had no experience. How can Hazel judge of what is right or wrong? She’s a child--a child.”

In the vehement repetition of the assertion, it seemed to Rosamund that she found her clue to Bertha Tregaskis’s impotent suffering. She would not, could not, admit in her daughter any claim to the rights of an individual.

Hazel’s judgment, unrecognized by her mother, carried with it no amazement to Rosamund.

Certain faiths, certain scruples and acceptances inborn in Rosamund and Frances, had been the veriest lip-service to the child Hazel always. Rosamund recognized in her the purest and most natural type of highly-evolved paganism.

“You know, Rosamund, I’m not doing anything wrong, although they won’t believe it. It isn’t wrong _to me_, and I don’t believe in an abstract right and wrong. Each individual case has its own laws.”

“Should you do it if you thought it _was_ wrong?”

“I don’t know,” said Hazel thoughtfully. “I can’t imagine seriously believing that it would matter to God, one way or the other. Should you? Frances wouldn’t, one knows.”

“If I did it,” slowly said Rosamund, “it would be as a deliberate choice between good and evil. I should believe myself to be breaking God’s law--but I might do it, if I thought it worth while.”

She knew that if, as she said, it seemed to her worth while, no laws of God or man should bind her. But she would break them of deliberate intent, whereas to Hazel Tregaskis they were non-existent, myths designed for the wanton frightening of children.

Rosamund recognized the absolute sincerity of Hazel’s point of view, and sometimes found herself wondering what Sir Guy’s might be. One day, very soon before the marriage, she held an odd little conversation with him, standing in the wintry sunshine of the terrace. Frederick Tregaskis was ahead of them, grimly poking with a walking-stick at a little drain that was choked with leaves.

“He’s been very kind to me,” said Sir Guy abruptly, indicating with a gesture the odd little figure.

“I think that he really likes you very much,” said Rosamund. “And though he would be very angry at being told so, I have always known that Cousin Frederick adores Hazel.”

Sir Guy nodded with full comprehension.

“Yes, of course. She knows that, too. It’s been the best thing in her life so far--that and having you and your sister here.” He paused for a moment or two. “You know,” he said slowly, “I want to try and make up to her for everything that she hasn’t had, so far. She ought to have everything. She seems, somehow, so made for happiness.”

“I have never seen Hazel sad,” said Rosamund, rather surprised. “I think she is happy by nature.”

“Yes, though an atmosphere which might perhaps seem an unsympathetic one----”

He left the sentence unfinished, and it required no effort on Rosamund’s part to conjecture his meaning. Sir Guy resented, none the less implacably that his resentment was expressed by implication only, the attitude of Mrs. Tregaskis towards her daughter. That Hazel herself had never resented it, and had only opposed to it the bright glancing hardness of her impenetrable self-confidence, did not, Rosamund felt, in any way diminish his perfectly silent ire. Mrs. Tregaskis herself would be forced to recognize that in this man fifteen years her senior, Hazel had found champion as well as lover, knight as well as comrade.

Rosamund turned away with an aching heart, wondering dimly whether her need had not been greater than Hazel’s.

After the formal consent given by Frederick Tregaskis, there had been no further discussions between Sir Guy and Mrs. Tregaskis. She accepted her defeat with the sort of grim gallantry that would always be characteristic of her, and, as far as Rosamund knew, attempted no appeal to Hazel. But she aged more perceptibly in the weeks before Hazel’s marriage than during all the five years that Rosamund had passed at Porthlew.

No other indication that her guardian recognized defeat was evident to Rosamund’s eyes. Her manner to her daughter was what it had always been--kindly, authoritative, at times possessive. She admitted Sir Guy’s claims to much of her daughter’s time, and even seemed disposed, gradually, to concede to him rights which he had not tried to arrogate for himself.

“You mustn’t let this little person be too much in London,” she observed, with a hand upon Hazel’s shoulder. “We’re very excitable, and it knocks us up. I had to be a very strict mamma and bring her home long before the dances had come to an end last year.”

“If we take the St. James’ Square flat, there is no reason why we shouldn’t spend all the week-ends Hazel likes at Marleswood.”

“Well, I don’t know about week-ends,” said Bertha doubtfully. “They’re not very restful. I think a home in the country and an occasional fling in London must be Hazel’s programme.”

She spoke with her customary matter-of-fact assurance and kindly good sense.

Sir Guy fixed his objectionable monocle more firmly.

“That,” he observed in a detached manner, “is a decision which I shall leave entirely to my wife.”

If Mrs. Tregaskis found it necessary to readjust her forces after this, the readjustment was made silently and without delay. But it was very shortly after that, when it only wanted a week to Hazel’s wedding-day, that Rosamund again found Cousin Bertha in the library, struggling with hard, choking sobs. Hazel hung over her, caressing her with most unwonted demonstrativeness and with tears in her own pretty eyes. But that they were tears of the merest surface pity and tenderness was abundantly obvious even without the gently mournful observation which she made to Rosamund that evening.

“Poor mother! I hate to see her minding it so, but you know, Rosamund, I _can’t_ feel as unhappy as I ought.”

“Don’t you wish--sometimes--that you’d waited, as they begged you to? It would have been the same for you in the end.”

“The same for me, and the same for them,” returned Hazel crisply. “They wouldn’t have liked it any better ten years hence--at least mother wouldn’t. I believe daddy’s reconciled already. Mother wants me to be happy, but in _her_ way.”

“Are you really happy, when you know she is miserable?” spoke Rosamund with more curiosity than compassion. Hazel coloured, but faced her cousin with unflinching honesty.

“Yes,” she said, “I am. It’s of no use to pretend, Rosamund. I am happier than I have ever been in my life. Of course, I should have preferred it if everything had been straightforward, and there hadn’t been all this fuss, and having to extort a consent--but it would have been just the same if they hadn’t given it. Do you know, that’s the pathos of it, to my mind--they couldn’t do anything. Guy and I would have married without their consent, just as much as with it.”

“He asked you to, I suppose,” said Rosamund, as though stating a fact.

Hazel pushed her curling tawny hair from her forehead.

“He asked me if I would, if it came to that, and of course I said yes. But we both knew it wouldn’t come to that, and that mother would have to give in. I used to think that if one’s parents forbade a thing, it became impossible _ipso facto_, but it doesn’t. _They just can’t do anything at all._”

To Rosamund, Hazel had summed up the situation in that sentence.

They could not do anything at all.

The wedding took place quietly at Porthlew, and they said good-bye to Hazel, radiant-eyed, and clinging in an unwonted embrace to her father at the last moment.

Then she drove away with her husband, and Miss Blandflower, in a piping soprano, remarked to Rosamund:

“It’s like a death in a house, isn’t it? But we must all try and take her place, now.”

The suggestion drove Frederick, snarling disgustedly, into the study.

Frances went quietly to put away some of the litter in Hazel’s room, while Rosamund, feeling herself useless and in the way, yet hung helplessly in the vicinity of Nina Severing, who had remained with Bertha in the drawing-room after the departure of the few guests.

But no word of Morris reached her.

Nina was murmuring consolation to her friend who, for once inactive, sat gazing heavily into the fire.

“After all, dearest, the young birds will fly out of the old nest and leave it desolate. It’s nature.”

Bertha groaned.

“It’s not the selfish loss to myself that I mind, Nina, but the thing she’s done. If I were giving her to some simple, honest boy of her own age, how gladly I’d see her go. We mothers don’t ask more than that, after all--just to see the children happy.”

“I know,” breathed Mrs. Severing. “It’s all one lives for.”

“I’ve no plans or wishes for myself--it’s all for them,” muttered Bertha disjointedly. “What else has one to care about--an old gargoyle....”

Nina straightened herself slightly.

“‘Having outlived hope, fear, desire....’” she quoted softly, at the same time turning her long neck so that the firelight fell upon her burnished hair and exquisite, appealing profile.

“A man she’s only known a few months,” pursued Bertha bitterly. “And she’ll disobey her parents, the mother who’s loved and guarded and cherished her all her life, and break their hearts, for his sake.”

“God grant the poor child may not regret it bitterly one day,” breathed Nina piously.

There was a long pause.

“Well!” said Bertha, and slowly stood up. “There’s a lot to be done.”

“Do let me help you, dearest.”

“Thanks, Nina, if you would. The girls are somewhere, I suppose.”

“Ah, they’ll be a comfort to you, I hope. They who owe you even more than Hazel does, if possible.”

“One does what one can. It seems to me that it’s all give, give, give on our side, and take, take, take on theirs. I feel rather like an unfortunate pelican feeding its young, sometimes.”

With the words, and the curt laugh that dismissed them, Bertha Tregaskis regained possession of herself.

IX

Rosamund, though unhappy, was not as unhappy as she would have liked to think herself. The defection of Morris Severing, although gaining in poignancy by contrast with Hazel’s serene happiness, was a sorrow of the emotions only, and a certain fierce sincerity of outlook prevented Rosamund from rating it otherwise.

But she felt that she could have borne it better had the disappearance of her quondam lover touched the mainsprings of her life, and left that life dignified by a lasting grief, instead of merely rendered unprofitable and savourless from an unrecognized sense of vague discontent.

“I don’t know what Rosamund’s grievance _is_!” her guardian was exasperated into exclaiming, nearly a year after Hazel’s marriage. “I don’t believe she knows herself.”

And, in so saying, diagnosed the case.

Rosamund Grantham, after the manner of the modern generation, had yet to find herself, and suffered accordingly.

It need scarcely be added that she did not confine her sufferings to herself.

Frances, overwhelmed by the difficulties of reconciling responsiveness to Cousin Bertie’s bracing councils of self-reliance, with submission to Rosamund’s intensely protective and rather overpowering solicitude, sought more frequently than ever the soothing society of Nina Severing.

That gentle soul was passing through a period of storm of which she presently confided the outline to Frances.

“Sometimes, darling, as I sit here alone through the long evenings, I wonder if my life might have been different if I’d been a more religious woman. You see, Francie, I married very, very young. I wasn’t much older than you are now. My husband was not a man who believed in any very definite creed, and I was young enough to be altogether influenced by him.”

It was ever Nina’s custom to lay the errors and omissions of her past at the door of Geoffrey Severing and her youthful marriage.

“Should you like to be a Roman Catholic?” asked Frances suddenly.

“It’s a very beautiful religion, and of course beauty is a religion in itself, to an artist,” said Nina thoughtfully. “Why do you ask?”

“I’ve often thought,” said Frances very shyly, “that I should like it myself. It seems such a thorough-going sort of religion. When we were little, my mother had a Catholic maid--an Irish girl--and she used to tell us a lot about it. And she was so particular about not eating meat on certain days and going to Mass every Sunday. She had to walk quite a long way, but I don’t believe she ever missed going. Of course she was very superstitious, and used to want us to wear medals and charms and things, but some of the prayers she taught us were nice. My mother was a Catholic by birth, too, though she never went to church or anything.”

“If I were anything, I should certainly be a Catholic,” said Nina with extreme conviction in her tone. “It’s the only creed which appeals to me in the slightest degree. It is so beautiful--all that music and those touching ideas about the Virgin and everything.”

“But--don’t you believe?--isn’t the Church----?” murmured Frances, embarrassed.

“Dear child, I am afraid the orthodox forms mean very little to me. I would never wilfully cause pain to any human being, and I try to help the sadness of the world with my little songs, but that is all. But I would never shatter the innocent faith of another soul, although I have outgrown the need of form and ritual myself.”

“Does one outgrow it?” wistfully asked Frances, whose whole nature unconsciously craved the discipline which is inseparable from any creed, faithfully followed out in practice.

“Not all of us,” tenderly said Nina, conscious of the exquisite contrast between the matured, self-reliant soul, made strong through suffering, and the innocent, inquiring child at her knee. “Not all of us, dear. Some plants need a support round which to cling, whilst others stand alone--always alone.” Her voice deepened slightly as she mused broodingly for a moment on the pathos and beauty of this horticultural parable. It came as a slight shock when Frances, generally the most sympathetic of listeners, observed in unmistakably self-absorbed accents:

“I think that I shall always want a support. It seems to me that I am meant to live by rule--not by my own judgment at all. That’s why I like the Roman Catholic idea of the Church being infallible. It would be such a guide.”

Nina was aware that to no one else would Frances have spoken so unreservedly, and the reflection was soothing, but it did not prevent a slight stiffening of tone in her reply.

“Really, dear? But the surest guide in the world is the golden rule which I have tried to live up to all my life--_Never think of yourself at all_. Somehow, if one gives all one’s thoughts and time to other people, one finds that God takes care of the rest.”

Nina was herself rather surprised at the beauty of the sentiment as she put it into words, and it served to restore her not very deeply ruffled serenity.

“I will lend you some books, Frances, if you really want to know something about various creeds. The religion of Buddha is, to my mind, the most beautiful of them all,” reflectively said Nina, who had once read portions of Sir Edwin Arnold’s translation of the “Light of Asia,” and was persuaded that she had studied it deeply. “It was the foundation of the Roman Catholic religion, of course--they borrowed a great deal from it.”

“I should like to read it very much.”

Frances wanted to read anything which spoke, however indirectly, of Roman Catholic doctrines. If Nina guessed as much, however, she did not impart her surmise to the vigorously orthodox Bertha Tregaskis.

That this discreet reticence had been justified was made superabundantly evident when Mrs. Tregaskis first became aware of the Romanistic tendencies of her ward.

“People of seventeen must do what they’re told,” she said serenely, but with an undercurrent of severity. “When you’re one-and-twenty, Francie, we’ll talk about it again, and meanwhile I strongly advise you not to think about the subject. You are much too young to decide such a matter without knowing a great deal more about it, and from your own showing all this simply arises from restlessness and desire for excitement. Religion is too serious a matter to be played with, my dear little girl.”

A certain look of flintlike impenetrability came over Frances’ young face as she looked at her guardian, and she said nothing more. But Mrs. Tregaskis was much too acute to suppose that her silence denoted submission.

“Take her to London,” growled Frederick, when his wife, in her perplexity, put the case before him. “You ought to get her away from that silly woman’s influence.”

Bertha did not ask “What silly woman?” since she rightly recognized that her husband thus denoted her dearest friend, but she decided to follow his advice.

“We’ll have a month in London, and see all the sights,” she cried. “Just you and I and Rosamund, Francie, and be regular country cousins, and go to the National Gallery and British Museum, and a theatre or two from the dress-circle. Never mind about planting the bulbs, dear--no, I don’t mind leaving them to Grant, and the garden must just get on without me for a week or two.”

She stifled a sigh heroically.

“This trip is absolutely for the sake of the girls,” she told Nina Severing. “Neither of them takes any natural healthy interest in gardening or in the animals and things, as Hazel used to do, so I must try what London will do for them. Really, girls _are_ a problem.”

“Nothing to a boy,” sighed Nina. “There’s Morris wandering half over Europe, in the most unsatisfactory manner, pretending that he is studying languages, and really doing nothing at all except loaf. I’ve told him he ought to come back and look after the place in earnest, but he makes one excuse after another----”

“It’s too bad,” said Bertha sympathetically. “Perhaps if he came back, now that he and Rosamund are a little older and have rather more sense....”

“Oh, my dear! he’s got over that nonsense long ago. I always told you it wouldn’t last. ‘Weak and unstable as water,’ that’s what my poor Morris is.”

Bertha did not remind Mrs. Severing that everything had been done to insure the instability of Morris in this particular case. She only said affectionately:

“Well, good-bye, Nina darling. Don’t forget to take pity on my old man, since I can’t drag him to London.”

“He must come and cheer me up some afternoon, if he will,” cordially responded Nina. Both ladies were perfectly aware that Frederick Tregaskis would do nothing of the sort, and that there were few things less conducive to the cheering up of either than an encounter between him and Mrs. Severing. But they exchanged their fallacious hopes with an air of affectionately reassuring one another.

“I’ve one comfort,” declared Bertie, “I’m hoping to see a very old friend of mine in town: Sybil Argent. I believe she and her son are there for a few weeks.”

“Didn’t she become a Catholic?” asked Nina, with a sudden air of intense interest, which provoked Bertha to a display of extreme nonchalance instantly.

“Let me see--did she? Oh yes. I believe she _has_ become a Roman. Silly woman! Got under the influence of some priest or other, I fancy. She was never over-wise, though a dear, sweet thing.”

“There is a wisdom which is not of this world,” said Nina, upraising her eyes, and with an air of quotation.

Bertha laughed heartily.

“My dear Nina! It’s really too funny to hear you quoting Scripture. Or is it only some mystical poet of the new set? Anyhow, poor Sybil Argent has been a Romanist for some years now, I fancy, and of course one wouldn’t say anything about it, though I quite expect to have it all poured out to me--my friends have the quaintest knack of confiding in me. I rather fancy I know more secrets than most people.”

“That comes of always having your eyes and ears open,” declared Nina with playful sweetness, “instead of keeping your head in the clouds, as I’m afraid mine too often is.”

“I shall have to tell you not to get the stares, as I do the children when they sit gaping at vacancy,” pleasantly replied her friend, and took her departure under this agreeable analogy.

“Poor dear Nina’s affectation of mysticism is really _too_ absurd,” she told herself, and added quite illogically: “No wonder Francie is infected by it. It will be a comfort to talk to a rational woman again--which I suppose Sybil still is, in spite of having allowed herself to be bitten by the Romanist craze.”

But Mrs. Tregaskis was not destined to probe the measure of her friend’s rationality. Lady Argent had already left London when she arrived, and she was obliged to be content with inviting Ludovic Argent to dinner.

“Can you remember him, Rosamund?” she inquired with kindly interest.

“Of course,” curtly retorted her ward, with the offended intonation which implied that Cousin Bertie had forgotten the number of Rosamund’s years.

“We weren’t so very little when we went over to Lady Argent’s,” apologetically said Frances. “I was nine, and I can remember her and the son quite well.”

“Of course,” said her guardian. “I wonder if he will have forgotten you.”

Ludovic had not forgotten Rosamund and Frances. He looked forward curiously to seeing what the years had made of the little girl whom he had found crouching outside the door of the library.

His first impression was of pleasure at her undeniable beauty, and he was glad to find himself placed between her and Mrs. Tregaskis at dinner. Frances and a couple of negligible young men completed the party.

The whole-hearted virility of Mrs. Tregaskis dominated the conversation, which at first was general, but Ludovic noted with a certain surprise that she no longer provoked in him anything but a detached amusement. That it was far otherwise with Rosamund he felt convinced. There was latent hostility in her every glance and gesture, and she diffused an atmosphere of discontent that affected Ludovic strangely.