VI
Rose, her hands tightly locked together, heard her son, a prisoner in the dock, plead Guilty on three counts to stealing goods to the total value of £60 from various college rooms.
She heard Maurice Lucian, his voice and his bearing alike schooled to professional impassivity, give testimony as to the boy’s instability of mind.
She heard Ford Aviolet, far less unmoved than the doctor, his slightly nasal voice low and indistinct, undertake on his father’s behalf that full restitution should be made, and the culprit “placed under proper restraint.”
At that Rose started forward, her hands clenched, but she made no sound.
She heard a clear, monotonous voice from the Bench:
“Have you anything to say, Aviolet?”
Cecil’s reply was inaudible.
There was a moment’s pause, and then the clear, monotonous voice was raised again.
“Your crime has been great, Aviolet, and of a very determined character. You have brought shame on to the old and honoured name of your family, and you cannot possibly plead either ignorance or poverty to excuse your actions. Every advantage of education and upbringing has been yours, and yet you have committed a dastardly theft for which in ordinary circumstances I should probably sentence you to three months’ imprisonment in the Second Division. Not content with theft, you have also had the almost incredible baseness and folly to try and pass yourself off as a subject for admiration on account of your skill and strength at games, your popularity with your fellows, and the like, by means of entirely fictitious inscriptions, composed by yourself, and engraved at your own expense on your stolen trophies. A more senseless, pointless, and idiotic fraud was never perpetrated, and I can only hope that your present humiliation and shame may cure you for ever of what seems to be a form of megalomania.
“For the sake of your unhappy relatives, Aviolet, who have undertaken to make the fullest restitution possible on your behalf, and because of the plea so earnestly put forward, that you are not wholly responsible for your actions, I am prepared to deal with you very leniently.
“You are young, and you have friends to help you. This is a moment when every man in England has a chance of proving his worth. My advice to you is to enlist at once. Are you prepared to do so, if I allow you to leave this Court a free man?”
Cecil raised his head for the first time.
Ford made a movement as though to intervene and Rose saw the doctor lean forward and grip him by the arm. In the lightning interval during which the eyes of the two men met, Cecil spoke:
“Yes, sir.”
The tears rushed to Rose’s eyes, blinding her.
“Very well. Try and redeem your character in the Army. You have been dealt with very mercifully, as I hope you fully realize, but you have also got to realize that you are now, to a certain extent, a marked man. If you fail to make good, if your name comes before the authorities again in the same capacity—then you need not hope for anything but the very strictest justice. And that, let me tell you, will be neither more nor less than prison.
“Now go, and I hope that your future record may wipe out your past.”
Cecil turned away, and at the same moment the doctor was beside Rose.
“This way——” He guided her.
“Ces?”
“Coming at once. You’ll want to go back to your rooms.”
“And pack up and leave the place for ever,” said Rose, recovering her wonted energy.
“It’s largely thanks to you, Lucian, that the boy is free to come with us,” said Ford’s cool tones behind them. “Frankly, I thought this morning that we should leave this place without him.”
“I suppose it would have been possible, in all good faith, to condemn Cecil to prison, but if actions were to be judged by results—which, mercifully, they are not—then it would be a poor look-out for human justice. Prison would be just about the surest way in the world to break the boy for good and all. Thank the Lord, that fellow had the sense to see it.”
“Better luck than the boy deserved,” muttered Ford between his teeth. “Will you look after my sister-in-law, while I go and send a telegram to them at home? I’ll join you at the hotel.”
“Don’t bother,” said Rose, suddenly facing round. “We can manage, Ces and I. There’s nothing to be done, after all, except pack up and go away, and I did most of the packing last night.”
“I’m afraid the situation can hardly be dealt with so off-handedly, Rose,” said her brother-in-law. “The present relief is enormous, I grant you, but we still have to consider the future. I’ve no doubt my father will wish to meet us in London and discuss what is to be done next.”
Rose was neither hearing nor heeding. Her eyes were fixed on Cecil, advancing towards them.
The boy’s face was white and blind, horrible to see.
Lucian took his hand and wrung it.
“It’s over now, Cecil. There’s a car waiting. Take your mother to the hotel, and I order you, as your medical adviser, to have a stiff drink directly you arrive there. Rose, you’ll see he carries that out. We’ll meet at the station in time for the two o’clock train to town.”
Rose nodded.
She and Cecil went away together.
Ford Aviolet, who had viewed Maurice Lucian’s initiative with his habitual faint air of supercilious detachment, seemed nevertheless to be waiting, indifferently rather than of conscious volition, for the doctor’s next move.
“Are you going to find a telegraph office?” said Lucian abruptly.
“I suppose so. If you’ve nothing else to do, perhaps you’ll come my way. Between us, we may think of some pretty way of wording the pleasing intelligence that my nephew has escaped the three months’ imprisonment that he so richly deserves, and is to be hustled into the uniform of a private soldier. No doubt the news will be extremely gratifying to the local postal authorities at home.”
“Nobody is thinking of anything but this war, here or anywhere else.”
“Are you going abroad?”
“No,” said the doctor baldly.
He felt no inclination whatever to put before Ford Aviolet his reasons for the decision.
“I should have thought that a knight-errant like yourself would be——”
Lucian stopped dead. “Look here, I make all allowance for the strain you’ve been under over this wretched business, and the rest of it. But one word more of this, and I swear I’ll kick you into the gutter.”
“You may try,” said Ford Aviolet contemptuously.
The doctor looked at him, and laughed shortly, regaining his temper.
“That was an uncivilized speech of mine, I’ll admit. It’s the Jingo atmosphere we’re living in, now-a-days.”
“You know I’m supposed to have an unsound heart? Half a dozen damned doctors have refused me already,” said Ford bitterly.
The doctor understood why he had been asked whether he meant to go abroad.
“Bad luck!”
“A friend of mine has sworn to get me a job in the War Office, but that isn’t what one wants. The whole thing is a farce—boys like this young rotter of a nephew of mine sent out, and men with experience—fellows who went through the Boer war, like myself—left at home.”
“H’m!”
The sound emitted by the doctor was intended to convey a certain sympathy, but for the life of him he could have found no genial words. Nothing surprised him more than the unexplained tendency that Ford Aviolet had at intervals evinced for years, to expose his soul in short, embittered glimpses to a man by whom he certainly knew himself to be disliked. It threw light, the doctor cynically reflected, on the limitations of Ford Aviolet’s habitual surroundings.
At the post-office, Ford savagely chewed at the end of his silver pencil. Finally he scribbled a message, and handed it silently to the doctor. It was addressed to Lady Aviolet.
“Cecil with us; joining father in London to-day; probably return home to-morrow.”
“I should add two words to that: ‘All well.’”
“I object to clichés,” coldly said Ford. “Nor do I consider that such an expression would be in any way justified by the circumstances.”
Lucian shrugged his shoulders.
Forded handed in his telegram, together with a still more laconically worded one to his father, and the doctor solaced himself with a small retaliation.
He wrote out a lengthy telegram, pushed it across the counter without showing it to Ford, and only remarked, as they left the office:
“I know my sister will want to know what’s happened, and I have not your scruples in regard to clichés in the present case.”
Lucian never forgot that afternoon’s journey to London. Cecil, dazed and white and speechless, sat in a corner seat of the railway carriage, his hands hanging loosely between his knees, his eyes, with the look in them that the doctor had most dreaded to see there, fixed vacantly on space.
Rose, who looked utterly tired out, seemed unable to sit still and moved restlessly in her seat, first opening the window and then shutting it, shifting her dressing-bag from one place to another, and occasionally pulling articles down from the rack apparently for the mere purpose of replacing them.
No one spoke, but the atmosphere was charged with misery until the very air seemed to rock with it, and beneath all, the doctor, at least, was acutely conscious of the steady, relentless undercurrent of cold, passionless hostility and contempt that was soundlessly sent forth by Ford Aviolet. He thought that Rose, too, was aware of it.
At the terminus it was raining, and very cold. Cecil’s teeth were chattering. It seemed the crowning touch to the utter forlornness encompassing him.
“A bag is missing,” said Ford. “Mine, of course. It’s of no account, but I shall have to make the usual fuss. Curse these fellows.”
His face was livid, and he looked angrier than Lucian had ever seen him.
“We’d better go on,” said Rose drearily.
Ford turned round upon her and very nearly snarled: “No! Wait where you are. I shall be back presently.”
Hardly had he turned his back before the doctor felt Rose’s clutch upon his arm.
“Get a taxi,” she urged breathlessly. “Never mind him. He can go to Sir Thomas. I shall take Ces home to Ovington Street. He can’t see his grandfather now, he isn’t fit for it. You can see he isn’t fit for it.”
Her eyes pleaded with him and commanded him.
“Wait a minute. Hadn’t he better get it over, Rose, my dear? He’ll have to see his grandfather sooner or later, and it’s due to the old man, too. Ask the boy what he thinks, Rose.”
She stamped her foot with impatience, her great eyes blazing.
“Can’t you see for yourself that he’s stunned? He doesn’t know what’s happening to him, hardly.”
“I know,” said the doctor gently. “And that’s one reason why it would be better for him to go to Sir Thomas now. There’s bound to be a reaction, later on. Let him get it over.”
She flung herself round, but when she spoke to Cecil her voice was full and soft and gentle.
“Shall we go to the Langham now, to meet Grandpapa, Ces, or would you rather come to Uncle A.’s? You needn’t see any one there unless you want to.”
The boy’s bewildered eyes stared piteously, first at his mother and then at Lucian.
“I’m so cold,” he stammered. “Can’t we go where there’s a fire?”
“I told you so,” Rose flashed at the doctor.
“Cecil,” said the doctor, “will you come and meet your grandfather at once? It’ll be over then, and I don’t fancy it will be very bad. He wants to settle with you what had better be done next.”
Very unexpectedly, Cecil suddenly rallied.
“I’m going to the recruiting office to-morrow,” he suddenly said.
Rose whitened.
At the same moment they saw Ford’s tall figure making its way towards them through the groups of people and the hurrying porters on the platform. His lean, brown face was pinched with cold and drawn with vexation. He was speaking in short, clipped sentences to an argumentative station official at his side.
It was almost incredible that the tiny incident of the mislaid portmanteau should so immensely add to the wretchedness of them all.
To Ford, it was quite evidently the last and culminating exasperation, destroying his habitual control of manner and temper.
The official resented his satirical comments, and was baffling in meaningless and unhelpful replies.
Cecil shivered and shivered.
“Get a cab, for the Lord’s sake, and put us into it,” scolded Rose.
The doctor silently complied.
“Are you coming with us?” she demanded fiercely.
“Do you want me to come or not?” he retorted with equal abruptness.
Cecil looked out from the gloomy depths of the closed taxi.
“Come,” he said.
Ford, with a last, cutting observation to the contemptuous-looking official, directed the driver to the Langham Hotel, and took his place beside Cecil.
They drove in absolute silence through streets that seemed singularly cheerless, with rain beating wildly against the windows, so that they were obliged to close them both.
The warmth and artificial lighting in the big hotel came as a sudden, intense relief.
“Sir Thomas Aviolet?”
“Yes, sir, in a private sitting-room. This way, if you please.”
“Don’t leave me,” Rose whispered to Lucian. “I’m sorry I was so cross at the station.”
Sir Thomas, waiting for them in the ugly, airless room, was not alone. Lady Aviolet sat by the fireless grate, her knitting in her hands.
“Was your train late?” said Sir Thomas, seeming to find an outlet for nervousness in partly-simulated anger.
“How do you do, Rose my dear?” said Lady Aviolet.
She very gently bumped her face against her daughter-in-law’s, in bestowal of her usual perfunctory greeting.
Then she shook Cecil’s hand, without looking at him.
“Ford, my dear boy, how cold you look! Shall I have the fire lit?”
Lady Aviolet rang the bell, ordered the lighting of the fire, and asked that tea should be brought.
Lucian noticed the heavy lines beneath her eyes, the sodden pallor of her face, and the weary, aged look that told of sleepless nights and corroding grief. It was astonishing to him to feel the tense apprehension, the seething emotions of the others, steadied by the mere weight of her composure.
Even Sir Thomas’s bluster died away into a muttered inquiry as to the delay in arrival.
“My luggage has been lost—a gross piece of carelessness. It was properly labelled, and I saw it put in myself. Either it was deliberately taken out again—stolen, in fact—or someone was allowed to walk away with it on arrival. In any case, I shall hold the railway company responsible, as I told them.”
“Scandalous mismanagement,” said Sir Thomas, making use of a phrase which Lucian had very often heard him apply to the minor inconveniences of life.
“Tea,” said Lady Aviolet.
She sat at the round table in the middle of the small room and poured out the tea, and they all, almost automatically, drew chairs to the table and sat down also.
It was Lady Aviolet who held emotion at bay. She made inquiries regarding milk and sugar, and complained gently of the blackness of hotel tea, and desired Ford to ring the bell for more hot water.
“They never bring a proper supply in these places—never.”
She asked about the journey, carefully addressing herself to the doctor.
“It’s turned so very chilly, all of a sudden. You must have found it quite cold.”
“Yes.”
The doctor glanced at Cecil, who still looked chilled through and through.
“Drink some hot tea, Cecil,” said his grandmother.
Her voice was always so utterly inexpressive that it was impossible to say whether or not it denoted constraint, but again she avoided looking at the boy.
“Look here, Ford, I want to know——” began Sir Thomas.
“Just one moment, dear. I want a piece of plain bread and butter. This sort of cake is always poisonous. Dear me, how glad I shall be to get home again!”
Lucian seconded her evident desire to gain time.
“When did you come up from Squires?”
“Yesterday.” She lowered her voice. “Sir Thomas’s letters made me rather uneasy about him, and I thought I should prefer to be with him. He has felt the—the anxiety most terribly.”
“The worst of it may be safely called over, now.”
“I suppose so,” said Lady Aviolet, her face in no way relaxing.
The voice of Sir Thomas, stubborn and inflexible, broke out loudly from the other side of the table.
“Now look here, Catherine, it’s no good shirking the point; we’ve got to settle what’s to be done next. Cecil, I don’t want to say more to you than I need. I daresay—and I may say I—I hope—you’ve gone through something already, in the way of shame and sorrow, for the disgrace you’ve brought upon yourself and upon us all.”
“He was leniently dealt with,” said Ford. “We owe a good deal to Lucian’s evidence, in one sense. I can go into that with you some other time, Father, if you prefer it.” He glanced at Rose.
“But the gist of the matter is this. Cecil, not to put too fine a point upon it, ought to have got six months in prison. Instead of that he was told to go to the nearest recruiting office and enlist. The advice was seasoned with some very pungent observations which I will spare you.”
“Good Lord,” groaned Sir Thomas.
“I presume you haven’t got my telegram, Mother,” said Ford. “I sent one to Squires, having no idea you were up here.”
“Diana will have opened it. She’s there, you know. She waited on, most kindly, to see what the plans would be.”
“You’ll be able to go home to-morrow.”
“Yes,” said Lady Aviolet doubtfully. “If no one will have any more tea, shall we ring and have the things taken away?”
With each postponement of the inevitable crisis, Lucian saw that all of them, except perhaps Cecil, were regaining a measure of poise. Lady Aviolet, indeed, had never lost hers. The avoidance of display had, with her, become an instinct.
The table was cleared, and the formal circle of chairs broken up. Cecil was next to his mother, staring into the fire, and the tragic, fatigued gaze of Rose never left him.
“Now, Cecil, you’ve got out of this—this mess, a good deal more easily than you had any right to expect. But I don’t want you to think that the whole thing ends here. We’ve a right to some sort of explanation, and if you’ve anything to say, now’s your time,” said Sir Thomas.
Cecil, for the first time, looked up, and his white lips moved, but he said nothing at all.
“What made you do it?” asked Ford. His tone was one of utter detachment.
Cecil shook his head.
“Speak up!” ordered his grandfather, with sudden wrath.
“It isn’t fair,” cried Rose passionately. “Why do you torment him with questions now? It can’t undo what’s happened, to talk about it.”
“It can be of very material assistance in preventing its ever happening again, however,” retorted Ford swiftly.
Cecil winced as though he had been struck.
“You know the Ten Commandments, Cecil,” said his grandmother in her slow fashion. “You have heard them often enough in church, I’m sure, and you were taught them as a little boy. ‘Have mercy upon us, O Lord, and incline our hearts to keep this law.’ I’m sure you’ve said those words many a time, with all the rest of us. And if there’s one Commandment more plainly worded than another, surely it is: ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ I could understand it, if you’d never been taught right from wrong. But you have.”
She stressed her inconclusive conclusion with mournful perplexity.
“Well, well, I suppose we none of us think much about church unless we’re inside one,” said Sir Thomas simply. “We don’t want to bring religion into the thing, you can talk about that with your grandmother or your mother later on. But there are certain things that a decent feller doesn’t do, you know—things that put him beyond the pale. Cheating at cards, and that sort of thing, for instance. There have been fellers who’ve blown their brains out for less than what you’ve done, I can tell you.”
The doctor made an irrepressible movement.
“A coward’s form of reparation,” said he. His detestation of generalities was as intense as is that of most precisians in thought, but he was intent only upon Cecil Aviolet, and his possible reactions to the peculiar form of penalization that he was being made to undergo.
“I hope,” said Cecil in a low voice, “that someone else will blow my brains out for me, when I’m sent to fight.”
A sound, just short of open scoffing, came from Ford.
“Heroics are terribly easy, my dear boy. You’ve not gone yet, and, in any case, it’s a pretty nearly certain thing that the fighting will be all over long before you’ve been taught how to hold yourself on parade. You lads are all the same—prating of Death and Glory before you’ve learnt how to hold a rifle.”
Cecil turned his head and glanced at Ford. There was neither resentment nor surprise in his look, but cowed, bewildered misery, like that of a tortured animal.
Lucian set his teeth.
“There’s no question of glory,” said Sir Thomas heavily. “If you do enlist, the circumstances are not such that we need boast about it.”
“If!” cried Rose. “He’d have gone anyway. I know that.”
“That’s neither here nor there, my dear, is it?” said Lady Aviolet mildly.
“If I may make a suggestion,” said Lucian, “it would be that Cecil should find out the nearest recruiting office to-morrow morning, and enlist in a London regiment. That will avoid local gossip best.”
“You might have had a commission in our own Yeomanry, Cecil. All the young men in the county have joined up, practically,” said Lady Aviolet.
“There aren’t nearly enough commissions to go round,” said Rose rather wildly. “Some of them have got to be private soldiers, and everyone knows it’s much harder than just being an officer. And I agree with Dr. Lucian about a London regiment being the best for Ces, as things are.”
Sir Thomas growled assent.
“It’s a most shameful, unhappy business, and we must do the best we can with it. I suppose some of those damned Press fellows were in court?”
“They were,” said Ford. “We shall have the pleasure of seeing the whole thing reported in the evening papers, I’ve no doubt.”
Sir Thomas rang the bell violently.
“Bring me the evening papers,” he demanded.
“Oh, my dear Thomas, please——” Lady Aviolet’s remonstrance was almost emphatic.
“I’d rather know,” said her husband gruffly.
The others sat silent while he scanned the printed sheets. Two he threw aside with a sort of mutter that might have denoted relief. The third one was in Ford’s hands.
“Here you are,” he said quietly, and adjusted his pince-nez.
“‘Undergraduate’s Thefts.... Baronet’s heir pleads guilty.... False inscriptions on stolen goods....’ Oh, Lord, have they got hold of that?”
“What?” said his mother, distressed and obtuse.
Ford read aloud in a rapid undertone:
Some extraordinary inscriptions had been engraved upon the stolen trophies, setting forth the prisoner’s wonderful prowess at games and sport. These were totally untrue and had been engraved at the accused’s own expense. It was stated that a document, in the prisoner’s own handwriting, was found, purporting to represent an inscription: “To Cecil Aviolet, Esq., in most grateful recognition of his daring achievements, splendid leadership, and indomitable courage and devotion to duty, this cup is presented in grateful admiration by the members of the School Cadet Corps.” This was entirely false, and was no doubt destined to take place eventually amongst the other fictitious engravings devised and paid for by the accused.
Sir Thomas violently banged the table with his open hand, making his wife start.
“That’s what you’ve got to explain, you boy, you. That senseless, idiotic game of pretence ... making a fool of yourself——”
“Hush, Thomas,” pleaded Lady Aviolet, as his voice rose almost to a shout.
Ford’s was in marked contrast, as he interposed. “You were always a braggart, Cecil, even as a small boy. I remember the imaginary stories about yourself that you used to tell, by way of boasting. It’s a common failing, of course, but most people outgrow it after seven or eight years old.”
“Stop it,” said Rose suddenly. “If you’ve any more to say, any of you, say it to me. I’m Cecil’s mother, I brought him up, and if he’s got this failing, as Ford says he has, that other boys outgrow, then it’s because I’ve not dealt rightly with him.”
Dr. Lucian, never taking his eyes off Cecil, saw that his lips formed the word “No.” Searching desperately for whatever should break through the boy’s utter despair, he recollected the child at Squires, many years ago, who had been punished by his grandfather’s heavy hand, and had made no sound. The doctor had long gauged the depths of the vanity that had made that endurance not only possible, but almost inevitable, to Cecil. Bending forward, he eagerly sought to appeal to that vanity now.
“Cecil, be a man! You’ve plenty of pluck. Don’t let your mother face the music for you. Any one may make a false step. The fellow who’s respected is the one who fights his way up again.”
Cecil turned and looked at him, with frightened, lack-lustre eyes.
The atmosphere vibrated oddly to Maurice Lucian’s tense, impassioned earnestness. “Tell them you’re going to live it down. You’ve got a splendid chance before you. Every man-jack will be wanted before this war’s over, it’s my belief, and you’re going to be one of the very first to go. No one ever had a better chance of wiping out old scores. Tell them you’re going to make the most of it.”
“Yes, I am,” said Cecil, his voice shaking. His face had suddenly begun to work.
Rose was on her feet, standing between her son and the others. “There isn’t anything more to talk about. He’ll go to the recruiting office to-morrow.”
“Then, my dear, you must come down to Squires with us. We are willing enough to give Cecil another chance, and it’s most important he should spend any leave he may get with us. People will know, then, that there’s no question of casting him off or anything dreadful of that kind. I am sure Sir Thomas agrees with me.”
The doctor saw Rose turn to her son, with a question in her face.
“Please go to Squires, Mummie,” he said to her, still in that uncontrollably quavering voice.
On his last word, the childish name that he did not now very often pronounce, Cecil Aviolet’s stunned apathy suddenly gave way, and he began to cry, in loud, gulping sobs.
“Oh!” cried Lady Aviolet, shocked and disturbed. Instinctively she moved to the door, as though to escape proximity with all that most contravened her every instinct.
Sir Thomas’s exclamation held more of disgust, and less of distress. He, too, moved to the door, and after a second of hesitation, opened it for his wife. The two old people passed out together.
Ford stood stock-still, gazing at his nephew.
His lips parted, as though to speak.
Dr. Lucian laid a most unfaltering grip upon his either shoulder, pushed Ford Aviolet out of the room, and turned the key in the lock.