“PASSING THE LOVE OF WOMEN”
“You sent for me, mother?”
“Yes, child; I sent for you to say good-bye. I am going away for some time.” The woman spoke deliberately in the monotonous voice of one giving a piece of information tedious to give.
Angus did not express any surprise, or regret. The nine years he had spent with his mother had not helped him to know her. Without in the least understanding wherein lay her strange aloofness, he was conscious that he was supremely uninteresting to her. He wondered why it should be so, and his honest boyish soul was sometimes troubled. But children submit readily to the inevitable, and Angus had his compensations.
Vera Warden looked at her son with more interest than was usual with her. He was certainly a handsome lad, tall and well built, with blue eyes that were both kind and honest. She had been long in making her decision. Now that it was made she did not regret: she only wondered if, somehow, she had missed something that more commonplace women find easily.
“Angus, dear, you must take care of father. You and your father are so much alike—understand each other so well—that it will be easy for you. You must be especially good to him, now.”
There was a curious little catch in Vera’s voice as she said the “now.”
“Why are you going, mother?” questioned Angus, feeling that here was something even more puzzling than usual in his mother’s manner. “When are you coming back? Father will miss you.”
“Will he?” asked Vera wistfully. “And you, Angus, will you miss me at all?”
Angus was profoundly astonished. He would like to have kissed his mother just as he kissed dad, but he did not dare. He only grew red, and fidgeted awkwardly, as he answered: “Of course I shall miss you, mother—at meals.”
It was not greed that prompted the child’s definition, but the fact that he seldom saw his mother, except at breakfast and lunch.
Vera Warden did not care for children, and said so—frequently.
The carriage came to the door, good-bye being said without much emotion on either side. As she was driven out of the big stone gates, Vera gave herself a little shake, saying: “And now for life!”
An hour later Thomas Warden returned from a fishing expedition on the other side of the Dale. The oak trees in the avenue had burst into gold-green leaf. The big chestnut on the lawn—the only chestnut on the estate—was covered with cones of pinky blossom. The May sunset touched the grim grey house with rosy light, and Thomas Warden felt a welcome in it all.
Laying down his rods and fishing-baskets in the hall, he went straight to his study. There on his blotting-book lay the letter he had both dreaded and expected.
His sunburnt face looked grey as he took it up. He sat down heavily; then, with shaking hands, opened the letter and read:
“I have burnt my boats; there is no going back. I warned you that it would come to this: that I would bear the monotony no longer. I have given you ten years of my life—the ten best years. Now I owe it to myself to live—it may be ten years more—but anyway, to live. Marriage and maternity have, for me, proved uninteresting; but I have endured them for your sake, and for the sake of the boy—while he was quite young. Had he been in any way an unusual boy I might have found life more tolerable. To develop his mind would have been an interest for me; he might have shared, in some degree, my aspirations after a fuller intellectual life. But he is a healthy, handsome, quite commonplace boy, who will grow into what you would call ‘an honest, God-fearing man’ without my help. He has an excellent governess, and your good mother will doubtless come frequently to worship you both. I wish I could free you of me altogether, and that you could marry again and be happy. But you are not the sort of man to bear with equanimity any sort of scandal or publicity, and you have my promise that the life I lead shall be such as can give you no cause for offence other than the fact that I lead it away from you. For your never-failing courtesy and kindness I thank you. Believe me, I shall always have the sincerest affection and respect for you. The fact remains, however, that I cannot lead your life, and you can lead no other. Let us then separate, and go our different ways in peace.
“In every conventional and actual sense, I am and will be your faithful wife,
“Vera Warden.”
There was nothing in the letter that she had not said to him, many times, during the last six months.
Now, she had actually carried out her so often announced intention, and was gone; and the realization stunned him. He felt cold and numbed. The roar of the beck, in which he had stood all morning, was in his ears, and he gazed out into the gathering twilight, seeing nothing—only conscious that it was dark and chill everywhere.
There was a knock at the door, and a servant came in, saying: “Please, sir, Master Angus is ready, and would like you to come to him, if you are not too tired.”
Dragging himself out of his chair, he passed his hand across his dazed, strained eyes. Then he went out of the room and up the wide old staircase to his dressing-room, where Angus slept.
“I’ve got a new nightsuit, dad, just like yours. Look—pocket and trowsies, and all!” exclaimed the child, displaying the latter garments with great pride. “Miss Taylor had them made for me in York. Aren’t they nice?”
“Yes, my boy, yes—very!” but the voice was absent, and Angus felt that there was a something lacking, something that he generally found there.
The child felt frightened. Was dad, too, going to hold himself “aloof”? Would he, too, take to looking over people’s heads, and answering in a far-away voice? The thought was one full of omen.
Angus gazed into his father’s face, as he sat wearily on the edge of the little bed. The child, if commonplace, was quick to understand those who loved him. In a moment he acquitted his father, and came and knelt beside him, rubbing his curly head against his knees. He said his prayer with devoutly folded hands, as Grannie had taught him. Then, climbing into Warden’s arms, put his own round his neck.
“Shall I sing my psalm, dad? Or are you too tired?”
His father held him very close. “Sing it, laddie. Sing Grannie’s psalm.”
Grannie was Scotch. When she came she taught Angus the psalms in metre. She taught him other things that he learned more easily than the psalms; chief among them a great love and trust in her, and through her, for everything Scotch.
Shortbread was Scotch, and it was good. Scones were Scotch, and they were good, especially with currants. Edinburgh rock was excellent; therefore the psalms, too, were probably superior in the Scotch version. Angus learned all Grannie’s favorites, the first of which was the twenty-third:
My table thou hast furnished,
In presence of my foes.
The child always pictured a long table, covered with a fair white cloth, and plentifully plenished with plates piled high with scones and shortbread. He wondered what “foes” were, for he hadn’t any; he thought they must be the servants who handed round the plates.
“Goodness and mercy all my life shall surely follow me.” The sad, patient tune Grannie had taught him sounded almost triumphant, as the child’s strong treble voice rang out. When he had finished, his father leant his head against the little rounded shoulder, and there was silence save for the man’s quick breathing.
“Good-night, dad!” said Angus at last, turning himself to see his father’s face.
Thomas Warden rose hastily; he laid the boy in his little white bed, kissed him, and blessed him, and went down and sat in the study again. But a man cannot dine in his fishing boots; so he went upstairs, had a bath, and while he dressed, Angus discoursed cheerfully to him through the half-open door.
The silence was unbearable; it was so lonely. Thomas Warden could not sleep. He got up and walked about his room. Only one o’clock! The night had hardly begun.
The moon shone brilliantly, but the wind blew shrewdly through the open casement. May nights are cold in the North country.
He went into the dressing-room and looked at Angus. “If she had only loved the boy—if she had only loved the boy.” He could have forgiven her all the rest. A just and tolerant man, he knew his own limitations. He granted to the full his wife’s intellectual superiority; but she might have loved the boy.
“Goodness and mercy all my life shall surely follow me.” Why did those lines ring in his head? and then, there always followed the sentence in his wife’s letter: “I cannot live your life, and you can live no other.”
It was true: he could live no other. But the boy—why did she not love the boy?
He drew up the blind, and the mellow moonlight fell on the sleeping child. Surely he was a goodly child, so comely, and kindly, and honest. As he looked at the boy his heart went out to him. He did not stoop and kiss him as a woman would have done; he reverenced too much this fair sleep which wrapped him round. He went back to his own room and got a pillow. Then, laying his long length on the floor beside the little bed, and with the child’s psalm still sounding in his ears, he too slept.
The room was flooded with moonlight when Angus awoke. There was a sound of regular and heavy breathing. Angus felt puzzled; puzzled, but not in the least afraid. Such breathing must come from a man, or a dog; from men and dogs the child had experienced nothing but kindness.
He sat up, and listening, looked about to see where the sound came from. He shook his hair back from his forehead, and rubbed his eyes. Yes! he was not mistaken, it was his father who lay there on the floor beside his bed.
Angus rose softly, and touched his father’s bare feet; they were very cold. “Poor dad,” he said to himself—“and him so tired!”
Then suddenly he remembered his mother’s words: “You must take care of father.” It was bad to sleep without a covering, Grannie had told him that. He pulled his little quilt off his bed, and laid it lightly on his father. To his delight the sleeping figure never stirred, but the quilt was short, and Thomas Warden was long—by no amount of stretching would it cover both his shoulders and his feet—poor cold feet! Then Angus was seized by an inspiration, which even his mother could not have called quite commonplace. He lay down at his father’s feet, and unbuttoning the jacket of the new sleeping suit, he cuddled up so that the cold feet rested on his own warm breast. Then he, too, fell asleep.
The kindly moon shone in upon them, and it was very still.
When Thomas Warden awoke the moonlight had changed to pearly dawn. He was no longer cold, and when he realized why, he was no longer lonely.