III
To Rose Aviolet’s way of thinking, Cecil’s public-school days slid past as might a dream. They had, to her, much of the intangible quality of dream things. She went down to see him many times, in those years, but she never received, either from her visits or from Cecil, any impression of the place other than superficial ones.
There was something withdrawn, strangely colourless about the boy’s personality, that seemed to nullify any possibility of the assimilation of an atmosphere.
He and Rose for the most part spent the holidays at Squires. There Cecil was more eager and more natural, except when Ford was present.
His old, childish admiration for his uncle had entirely disappeared, but in its place was a silent hostility that rather frightened Rose, betraying as it did a depth of bitterness entirely foreign to her own outspoken, abusive dislike.
She once said to Cecil, “You don’t like Ford, do you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Well, he’s rather a beast, I think,” said Cecil slowly. “He sneers at me.”
“I know. He’s always been like that.”
“He’s a beast to you, too, Mummie. Sometimes I want to knock him down when he looks at you with that smile of his, turning down the corners of his mouth.”
“Darling!” cried Rose impulsively.
She was acutely touched by his championship of her.
But when one day Cecil boasted to her that he “had given Uncle Ford a piece of his mind” on the same subject, Rose knew well enough that none of the story was true, and her heart sank within her.
“I simply said to him, ‘Look here, Uncle Ford, I think you forget that I’m practically a man now. You can’t speak like that to my mother in front of me, you know——’”
“Shut up, Ces,” she said wearily.
“What’s the matter? Don’t you think I ought to have said it?”
“You never did say it, Ces, and you know that as well as I do.”
“Mother, if you’re not going to believe what I say, you’ll put an absolute end to all confidence between us. I thought I could always depend on you, at least.”
“So you can, as you very well know,” cried Rose indignantly. “But not to swallow stories that I know perfectly well haven’t got a word of truth in them from start to finish. What’s the sense of it, Cecil?”
“What I told you was perfectly true,” he said coldly.
“That you said that to your uncle? When?”
“It was yesterday, after tea. No—let me see—it was before tea, to be absolutely accurate. In the garden.”
She knew perfectly well that he was lying, but she asked herself whether Cecil knew it.
Before he went back to school for his last term there, Diana Aviolet came to stay at Squires without her husband. She looked pale and drawn, and the slim lines of her figure were sharpening into a middle-aged angularity.
“Cecil has improved a lot,” she said to Rose, soon after her arrival. “He takes so much more interest in things—seems so much keener, somehow.”
“I think he’s very well,” said Rose coolly. “Last year he was growing too fast.”
“I daresay he was. You’re lucky, Rose, to have a son.”
Rose softened in an instant. “Poor Di! It’s rotten bad luck. Have you been to a doctor to see if anything can be done?”
“Oh, my dear!” Diana coloured faintly and prudishly.
“Well, it might be worth while. They have all sorts of dodges now-a-days, I believe. There was a woman I knew—at least I only saw her about once, but she’s a friend of Uncle A.’s—well, she’d been married sixteen years and never a sign of a baby, and she wanted one most dreadfully. And at last she went to a doctor, and made her husband go as well, and he told them——”
Diana broke in hurriedly, “Please, Rose, I’d really rather you didn’t.”
“All right. But she had twin girls, the very next year, perfect ducks, and as healthy as you please, both of them.”
“It’s a boy that Ford wants, of course,” sighed Diana.
Rose, trying to imagine Ford in a paternal role, found herself obliged to maintain a careful silence upon the resultant picture.
“I think it’s very disappointing for a man, if his wife doesn’t have children, don’t you?” Diana asked wistfully.
“It’s just as disappointing for her—in fact more, very likely.”
“Of course, nearly every woman wants a baby, I suppose, but men do seem to feel they’d like someone to live on after them, to carry on the name. At least, that’s what Ford says.”
“Does he say it often?” Rose inquired drily, and felt ashamed when her sister-in-law replied simply and unresentfully:
“Yes, he does.”
“I wish you had got a child,” she said helplessly. “It’s awfully hard on you, especially if Ford——”
Rose stopped abruptly.
“Oh, Ford’s all right. He and I understand one another,” said Ford’s wife rather drearily. “Only of course children are always such a tremendous bond between married people, aren’t they? One misses that.”
“Poor Di,” said Rose gently.
She very often forgot altogether her old animosity towards Diana. In these days, for all Diana’s position as Ford’s wife, her security of moderate wealth and position, her unimpeachable ancestry, it sometimes seemed as though the maturity that had come late to Rose held a deeper significance, a greater stability of poise, than the surface serenity of breeding that had always characterized Diana. Beneath the serenity was an unacknowledged disappointment, a growing boredom, that threatened slow, but very complete, devitalization.
It was quite true that Cecil, as Diana said, had improved.
When he came home from school for the last time, it seemed as though a weight had been removed from his shoulders. He had suddenly acquired an assurance of demeanour that was in odd contrast to his previous morose habit of silence, and self-confidence was no longer lacking in his manner.
In discussing the boy’s future, old Sir Thomas Aviolet expressed himself as being better satisfied with him than he had dared to hope.
“There was a sort of hang-dog look about the lad that I didn’t like, not so very long ago. But he’s taken a turn for the better, I’m glad to see—eh, Rose? He’ll do us credit yet.”
Sir Thomas, like Uncle Alfred, was seldom enthusiastic as Rose understood the word. But she met his very modified praises half-way.
“I always said he’d buck up in time,” she triumphantly declared.
“He seems quite keen on the idea of going to the ’Varsity. I think it’s a good scheme. Completes a fellow’s education, don’t you know? And he might travel for a bit, after that. We’ll see, we’ll see.”
“Travelling is a good thing,” said Rose. “Opens one’s eyes a bit, I mean. But it costs money.”
“That’s my affair,” said Sir Thomas very curtly indeed.
His wife added more gently: “We should like our grandson to see something of the world, my dear, before he settles down to the estate. It seems fairly certain now, humanly speaking, that Cecil will come after Ford at Squires.”
She sighed gently.
“Cecil is growing into a very dear boy, but still—one can’t help feeling for poor Ford’s disappointment at not having a son of his own. I must say, I should never have thought it of Diana.”
“Well, she can’t help it, can she?”
“Give me that ball of wool, my dear, if you can reach it without disturbing yourself. Thank you.”
Rose understood that the subject of Mrs. Ford Aviolet’s ability or inability to continue the direct line of succession to Squires was not one to be pursued.
She had become very much more amenable to such hints with the passing of time.
Cecil himself was pleased and eager at the prospect of going to Cambridge. His new-born enthusiasm reminded Rose of his childish days, and she thought thankfully that the original Cecil had returned to her.
“You see, Mother, I shall make a lot of new friends there, I expect, as well as meeting fellows from school. But I like meeting new people.”
She had noticed that he did, and also, strange development of his one-time timidity, that Cecil now talked more freely and with more animation, when he was in the company of people other than his own immediate circle.
The Marchmonts were invited to lunch at Squires in the course of Diana’s stay, and Rose, at first with gratification, heard Cecil volubly replying to the General’s friendly questionings about his schooldays.
A faint anxiety was beginning to displace the gratification by the time they had entered the dining-room and she had found herself seated next to General Marchmont. Cecil was at the further end of the table.
“Your boy’s growing up very fast. A fine young fellow,” said the old man kindly.
Rose flushed deeply with pleasure and surprise. “I was afraid I heard him laying down the law, just now,” she admitted bluntly.
“No more than is natural and proper at his time of life, I assure you. He seems a clever fellow, too. What’s that he was telling me about a scholarship?”
Rose felt the happy flush ebbing from her face, and bit her lip sharply. “What?”
“Something about his having passed out of school with a fine scholarship to his credit. That’ll stand him in very good stead, you’ll find, whatever line he takes up later on. We want a few brains in the country just now, and the coming generation is where we look for ’em. There isn’t a man in the Government to-day——”
He was launched on a favourite topic, and Rose, not attempting to listen, gave herself up for a moment to her sense of utter dismay.
How could Cecil be such a fool, she asked herself furiously. The silly, boastful lie was predestined to certain contradiction. Only her own passionate instinct of safe-guarding her boy from the contempt and condemnation of others had saved her from an instant denial of the preposterous figment of the scholarship. Not one of the others—Sir Thomas, Lady Aviolet, Diana, any of them—would have either the wit or the charity to leave the old General under his deception, should it occur to him to mention it to them.
She could see, in furious imagination, the blank glance and open-mouthed repudiation with which any one of them would receive such an allusion.
Was it possible that Cecil could not see that too? Rose momentarily lacked the moral courage to face the issue involved in that question. But as time went on, she was forced to consider it.
Cecil, now-a-days voluble and ready to please and be pleased, was attractive to older people by reason of his good looks and his youthfulness. Contemporaries of his grandparents, and even of his mother, liked the boy at first sight, and showed him kindly attention, as had old General Marchmont. He always responded readily, with an evident eagerness to be liked and thought well of that seemed mysteriously to have sprung from the ashes of his schoolboy apathy and dejection. Rose knew that the Aviolets, Lady Aviolet especially, were pleased at this development. She felt sure that they did not perceive that of which she herself was becoming sharply and painfully aware, that sooner or later these kindly people seemed to lose touch with Cecil. They became indifferent, or faintly puzzled, and they no longer sought him out.
Cecil himself appeared to be oddly inured to such shifting relationships. He seemed to pass on, equally eager and hopeful, in search of other friends to whom he might present a more appealing aspect.
For he was acutely preoccupied with his own presentment of himself. Of that Rose, forced into psychological analysis as unfamiliar to her as it was difficult of achievement, had at last become conscious. He recounted imaginary achievements for his own glorification, and related unlikely experiences or future projects obviously intended to render himself interesting to his hearers.
“But everybody does that more or less,” Rose angrily assured herself.
At the back of her mind, unformulated, hung uneasily the sense that Cecil did not pose merely in the foolish, superficial manner habitual to youth. He invented—but he did not delude himself. And he appeared strangely unawakened to the probability that neither did he, at any rate for long, succeed in deluding others.
As in the case of his imaginary scholarship, exploited to General Marchmont, Rose often found that he was incredibly reckless to the certainty of detection.
“Either he doesn’t care—or he doesn’t realize,” she thought, bewildered and wretched.
It seemed to her that, of the two alternatives, one must imply moral, the other mental, deficiency.
She was glad when he went up to Cambridge, hoping against her own innermost certainties that the new environment might produce a miracle. But it produced instead a new perplexity. Cecil began to ask her for money.
He had never been extravagant before, and he received a very adequate allowance from his grandfather.
“What’s the matter? Is it bills?”
“Well, it is, and it isn’t. There are expenses at college that a lady can’t understand, quite, but——”
“Rubbish, Ces! Don’t try and come that gammon over me,” said Mrs. Aviolet forcibly. “Tell me right out what you want money for, like a good boy.”
“I’ve told you that you wouldn’t understand,” said Cecil in an offended voice.
“Then you’d better go to somebody that will,” retorted his mother.
“Mother, I didn’t mean to vex you. The fact is, I got a lot of books and prints for my room when I first went up, and—and the tradesmen are beginning to bother me a bit. They’re threatening—some of them—to write to grandfather.”
Rose had not sufficient experience of the ways of tradesmen in a university town to reject the explanation, although she instinctively doubted it.
“Give me the bills, and I’ll write a cheque—if it’s not more than I’ve got at the bank, which it very well may be.”
“I haven’t got the bills here. You’d better make the cheque out to me.”
“Cecil, do you take me for a fool?” said Rose, looking straight at him.
“If I pay in cash, there’s a considerable discount,” said Cecil with dignity. “That’s the only reason why I suggested it. But if you won’t help me, Mother, then I suppose I shall have to have it out with grandfather.”
“Yes, and I know what that means! The whole thing put into Ford’s hands, and him making a bad matter worse with his sarcasms.... I know. Ces, I’ll help you this once. How much is it?”
“Oh, Mummie darling! Twenty-five pounds. I’ll never be such an ass again....”
He kissed her.
Cecil was always affectionate.
“I wish to goodness you’d tell me, Ces, if there’s anything at the back of this. You ought to know by this time that I shouldn’t let you down, whatever it was.”
“I’ve told you all it is, Mother—on my word of honour I have,” said Cecil, lifting his eyes to hers.
She would not allow herself to disbelieve it. He did not ask her for money again, but some months later, when she had returned to London, and Cecil, at his own desire, was still at work, although the Long Vacation had already begun, she was sent for one evening by the old pawnbroker.
“What mischief has this boy of yours been getting into?” Uncle Alfred demanded, without preamble.
“What’s the matter?”
“The matter is that the lad has written to me for money. I should have thought he knew me better, but he seemed fairly desperate. I can only suppose that some lewd woman has enticed him.”
“Good gracious, Uncle A., what a way you do put things!” Rose protested in vigorous counter-attack.
“The language of Scripture is good enough for me, Rose. Let the squeamish stop up their ears like the adder that is deaf, it will not alter facts. Your son has written and asked me for what he is pleased to call a loan. Needless to say, he offers no security.”
“Well, you’ve got his word, poor child. I’m sure he means to repay it, whatever it is.”
Rose was temporizing, trying to gain command of herself in the new dismay that had come upon her.
“I have not built up a successful business to the glory of God and to the satisfaction of my old age by giving loans to ‘poor children’ on the strength of their intentions of repaying them,” observed Uncle Alfred witheringly. “I have here Cecil’s letter. Do you wish to see it?”
“Yes—no. I daresay he’d much rather I didn’t. I can guess what he says, well enough.”
“I doubt if you can,” said her uncle drily. “It may even surprise you, as much as it did me, to learn that Cecil is entirely disinterested in his request. He merely requires thirty or forty pounds to help a friend out of his difficulties.”
“What friend?”
“Precisely.” Uncle Alfred’s tone was bland. “What friend? I ask myself the same question, Rose. And the answer that occurs to me is to the effect that your son’s friend is of the same family as the friends on whose behalf so many genteel souls, who never—dear me, no, never—contemplate entering a pawnbroker’s establishment on their own account, try to dispose of worthless trinkets in exchange for solid cash. Any one in my way of business gets to know those friends very well indeed. I’ve known ladies bargain quite violently on behalf of the friend. They seem to find it easier than if it was for themselves, somehow. I’m not deceived, and they know I’m not deceived, and yet they go on doing it. The human heart is deceitful, and, above all things, desperately wicked, Rose.”
Uncle Alfred seemed inclined to lose himself in the contemplation of depraved humanity. A knock at the door came to rouse him.
“May I come in?” said Dr. Lucian.
The old pawnbroker welcomed him cordially. He enjoyed the doctor’s games of backgammon, a regular institution now whenever Lucian was in London, and found him excellent company.
He was even prepared to dismiss Rose upon the instant, in the security that a masculine tête-à-tête would be as welcome to his visitor as to himself.
“Don’t let me detain you any further, Rose. Backgammon is not the recreation to you that it is to me—and, moreover, you make a very poor hand at it,” he remarked candidly.
The doctor cast a glance at Rose, but he said nothing. She looked tired, and it might very well be that she was glad of any excuse that should free her from the not always easy task of entertaining Uncle A.
“I’ll go by-and-bye. I’d rather finish this business first, and Dr. Lucian can help, very likely. He knows all about Cecil.”
“What is it?” said the doctor.
“Ces has been playing the fool. I don’t know why, or how. And he’s written to Uncle Alfred to lend him money.”
“He means give, of course,” interjected Uncle Alfred.
“Does he give any reason for wanting money?”
Rose looked at her uncle.
“He writes that he wishes to help a friend who is in great difficulties. Presumably he supposes that I shall believe it.”
Uncle Alfred’s tone left little doubt as to the inaccuracy of the conjecture.
“Yes, I think we might discount that,” said Lucian thoughtfully. “Is this the first time he’s been hard up for money?”
There was a moment’s silence and then Rose said shortly, “No.”
“Do you know—can you guess—what he wants it for?”
“I can’t, indeed.”
“Some Jezebel, no doubt,” was Mr. Smith’s verdict.
“I was wondering about that. Will you let me speak with—er—professional plainness?”
“Of course,” said Rose, opening her brown eyes.
The doctor smiled at her. It was for the sake of Uncle Alfred’s possible susceptibilities that he thus prepared the way. Between Rose and himself, he knew well enough that no artificial barriers to fullness and sincerity of speech could exist.
“About women. Has Cecil had any experiences of that sort at all, so far as you know?”
“None,” said Rose instantly.
Uncle Alfred made a slightly derisive sound, and she turned upon him.
“Oh, I know he wouldn’t tell me about it, if he had. But there are a few things that a boy’s mother knows by instinct, and that’s one of them. And I know that Ces, so far, is as inexperienced in that particular way as any baby.”
“I think you’re probably quite right,” said Dr. Lucian.
But there was no elation in his tone, rather was there something which made Rose cry out anxiously and incoherently:
“Why—what is it?”
“It’s only that I’d rather hear anything, however discreditable, about Cecil, so long as it was normal, than something which, when all’s said and done, is slightly abnormal.”
“You take a low view of human nature, doctor,” remarked Uncle Alfred.
“A low view and a practical one are often synonymous, I find; if by low, you mean natural as opposed to idealistic,” said the doctor drily.
“The human heart is——”
“For goodness gracious’ sake, Uncle A., don’t say that again!” his niece cried.
The pawnbroker looked at her and then nodded significantly to the doctor.
“Very much overwrought,” he observed sententiously.
“And I’ll thank you to let me speak for myself,” said Mrs. Aviolet, tossing her head.
“Your mother over again, Rose. You never got this independent temper from the Smiths, let me tell you. Irreligious my poor brother may have been, and was, in consequence of which he failed in business, and went through the Bankruptcy Court—for unless the Lord buildeth the house, how shall it stand?—but there was no temper about him. And no vice either.”
“Ah, that’s interesting. You understand,” said the doctor, “that these things have a very direct bearing upon Cecil’s case.”
“Do you mean heredity?” Rose asked.
“Certainly I do.”
“The Spirit bloweth where it listeth,” Uncle Alfred automatically quoted, and at once proceeded, in his usual business-like fashion, to the point at issue. “No, my poor brother was a very quiet, well-disposed fellow. Weak, that was his only trouble. Couldn’t say ‘No.’”
“He wasn’t an imaginative, highly-strung person?”
“Nothing of the kind,” Uncle Alfred declared, with a rather offended intonation.
“Cecil is both, you know,” the doctor gently pointed out.
Rose leaned forward, looking earnestly at Dr. Lucian. “I want you to tell me something. Is Ces morally responsible for the things he does?”
Lucian hesitated for a long while before he replied. At last he said: “Honestly, I don’t think he is. Wait——” as she moved, as though uncontrollably. “I don’t mean that he’s of unsound mind. Remember that there’s a great difference between someone who doesn’t know right from wrong and someone who may know it, but has not the strength of mind to control the desire which prompts him towards wrong. The first state implies a deficiency in perception; the second, a deficiency in control. To a certain extent we all, at one time or another, unless we definitely belong to the first group, come under the second. But there are always resistances within ourselves—urgings towards the good. We can call them the promptings of conscience, or the risk of detection, or the fear of consequences. One or other of these motives will serve to deter us, quite frequently, from doing wrong. But I believe, personally, that there are certain individuals in whom those resistances are either non-existent, or else of so feeble a nature that they have no chance of acting as deterrents. Such a deficiency is congenital, for the most part.”
Rose was silent.
The old pawnbroker was gazing into the fire, his shrewd, lined face as expressionless as ever.
Rose Aviolet looked deadly tired.
“Won’t you let me take you home? You look so tired,” said Dr. Lucian gently.
“I’d rather get this settled first. What are you going to say to Cecil’s letter, Uncle?”
“I shall remind him that though his sins be as scarlet, they can be washed white as snow in the Blood of the Lamb. Also I shall point out to him that a man of my business experience is not the person to be approached with foolish and unbusiness-like suggestions of a loan, when what is really meant is a gift.”
“And you won’t send him any money?”
“Certainly not.”
“Well, you’re right,” said Rose, drawing a deep breath. “I can’t say anything else. You’re right.”
“Rose,” said the doctor, “would you like me to go to Cambridge and see the boy? I’ll try and find out what’s wrong, and I’ll come and report to you as soon as I get back.”
“That’s exactly like you! How good you are,” cried Rose, her whole face lightening.
“That’s settled, then. Come along, now, and let me see you home. I’ll come back for our game, Mr. Smith.”
“By all means. The Underground Railway will be your best way to travel.”
It was perfectly understood that by the best way Uncle Alfred invariably intended to denote the cheapest way.
Lucian took Rose downstairs.
“Good-night, Mrs. Aviolet,” said a timid voice.
“Oh, good-night, Felix.”
“Will you wait a moment, while I get a taxi?” said the doctor.
“But we can go by Underground.”
“No. You’re much too tired.”
Felix volunteered to fetch a taxi, was thanked and was heartily shaken hands with by Rose through the window, when he had shut the door of the cab upon them.
They left him gazing from the doorstep as they drove away, his eternal feuilleton in his hands.
“That boy worships you, Rose.”
“Poor Felix!” she said leniently. “I shall never forget what a brick he was, years ago, when Ces was ill with croup in the middle of the night.”
“Yes,” said the doctor, rather bitterly, “that’s the way you remember all of us, by what we did, or didn’t do, for Cecil.”
It was very seldom that he allowed himself such an allusion, and the next moment he was ashamed of it.
“I’m sorry—dear.”
“I suppose it’s quite true,” said Rose simply.
When next he spoke, it was in reference to his visit to Cambridge.
“I’ll leave it to you to do whatever seems best,” Rose said. “Poor little Ces! It was a mistake, his going to a public school and university, and all that. He ought to have been put to work young, like the people he comes from.”
He noticed often that now-a-days she was no longer violent in her denunciations of those who had helped to arbitrate in Cecil’s destiny. Time was teaching Rose Aviolet to conform.
Just before they parted, she reverted to what Lucian had said earlier in the evening, as though it had been in her thoughts ever since.
“What you said about motives for not doing wrong having practically no weight at all with some people: well, a thing that’s always puzzled me with Ces is that he never seems to jib at telling a lie even when it’s absolutely certain to be found out. You’d think most people told lies for the sake of deceiving, wouldn’t you? Well—he doesn’t. He tells them when anybody in the world would know that they couldn’t deceive a cat. So it seems,” she turned to face him, and he saw that she was crying, “it seems that what you said is right: the ordinary deterrents don’t exist for Ces. But I do think it isn’t him that ought to go to hell for his sins, but those who brought him into the world what he is.”