2
As the days went by I found myself allowed to spend less and less time with Sonia. She had hypnotised herself into believing, as a matter of duty and necessity, that she was ill, tired and suffering at a time when half the amount of persuasion would have made her feel that she had never been more comfortable in her life. It was hardly cowardice, for George had told me anecdotes of her endurance in the hunting-field which shewed that she was capable of supporting pain; but the obsession made her a difficult patient.
"Only three weeks more," I used to be told; "only a fortnight more."
Then she began to count in days, and I saw her face lengthen and her eyes dilate, as though the Wild Ass's Skin were shrinking in her hand. She was morbidly curious to find out from Lady Loring how much unavoidable pain she would have to feel; the doctor was questioned again and again until he warned her that she was preparing the gravest consequences for her child and herself. And it was after he had gone that she whispered a terrible prayer that the baby might be born dead.
When the conversation was reported to me, I felt that drastic steps would have to be taken, if she was to be kept from going mad herself and giving birth to an imbecile. I took George into my confidence and sent him for his week-end at Melton with a string of rhetorical questions and a bulletin which brought O'Rane the same night to London, where he stayed until Sunday evening, while his neglected guest billeted himself on the Headmaster and accepted the hospitality of the Common Room. I was by myself, dozing over a book, when the library door was flung open, a gigantic Saint Bernard ambled in and a drenched and breathless figure demanded if anyone was there.
"What on earth brings you to London?" I asked.
"Sonia. I gathered from George ... I say, something's got to be done, you know."
He stood with his eyes open and set on me, his lips parted to shew a gleam of white, and one hand mopping his coat, more, I think, for distraction than in any hope of drying it.
"I don't quite know what you think you can do," I said dubiously.
"If she's awake——" he began eagerly.
"You'd frighten her out of her wits," I interrupted. "And you can ask Lady Loring, if you don't believe me. What you can do—to-morrow morning,—is to let it be known that you've come up—to lunch with a man or collect some books—and, if she'd care to see you, she can. But I think you've rather acted on an impulse, you know."
"I couldn't stay down at Melton, if there was anything I could do by coming up."
"I'm afraid that you'll find that there isn't."
His underlip curled obstinately.
"We'll see. I took a solemn vow that I'd see her through...."
I said nothing, remembering that he was Irish and a romantic; his simple-minded talk of oaths and obligations belonged to another age and another land.
In the morning I asked Lady Loring whether it would be prudent to let O'Rane see his wife. I was referred to Sonia herself, who received the news of her husband's presence without visible surprise and hesitated for what seemed five minutes before answering. Then she picked up a hand-glass from the table by her bedside, looked long at her reflection and laid it down with a sigh; there was a second spell of indecision before she told me she was not well enough to see anyone.
"I think she's gratified by your coming," I told O'Rane, "but she'd rather not have any visitors at present. It's not hostility to you, but a woman loses her looks to some extent at a time like this, and I think she's sensitive about it."
"But she knows——" He interrupted himself suddenly, and his voice became softly wistful. "D'you appreciate that I've never seen my wife since she was my wife!"
"I don't think she always does," I answered. "But the trouble in her mind won't be removed by your sitting and talking to her sweetly for half an hour, when she doesn't want to see you."
O'Rane's normal composure was breaking down, but he recovered himself with an effort.
"I might have been a rather more civil host to George, at this rate," he murmured.
At dinner that night we talked of a subject which illness and other work had driven into the background. The war had shattered many of my fine boasts of what I would do, if I were a millionaire, and new outlets had to be found for the Lancing fortune. I had already decided that Ripley Court could be put to no better use than as a richly endowed haven of rest for those whom the war had made incapable of ever helping themselves again. There were men, I knew, concealed mercifully for themselves and the world from inquisitive or pitying spectators, who had marched into battle and returned from the operating-theatre blind and without limbs, mere trunks surmounted by sightless heads, yet—I was told—glad to be spared even such life as remained to them. They were to be my first care, and, when the last had died, there would still be sufficient incurable cripples without the adventitious aid of modern warfare to keep my hospital full. There was opportunity, too, for bringing comfort and resignation to the demented, the paralysed and the blind. As I saw O'Rane's interest quickening, I told him that I wanted him to be one of my trustees.
He hesitated until I feared that he was going to refuse.
"One of them?" he asked in doubt.
"I shall appoint several, but they must be all young men; I want the best of their lives."
"If I act," he answered slowly, "I should have to act alone. I'm in the early thirties still——"
"You would find it more than one man's work."
"Ah, but I could give the whole of my life to it." I started to interrupt, but he raised his hand. "And, furthermore, I should allow you to impose no conditions; the money would have to come to me as it came to you, and you would have to let me play ducks and drakes with it as I liked——" He paused to laugh wistfully. "You've had admirable opportunities of observing how satisfactorily I arrange my own affairs; but I couldn't undertake the responsibility otherwise. You see, you might try to impose conditions that I didn't like; and then my heart wouldn't be in the work. Or your conditions might become obsolete with the changing state of society, as has happened with every trust that has been in existence for more than a hundred years. But, above all, you know that, if you want to help your fellow-creatures, you must do it at discretion and not by looking at a deed to see if you're allowed to. Do you know the story of Bertrand's fifty-pound note?" "I don't think so."
O'Rane's eyes lit up with laughter.
"Get him to tell you the full saga; I can only give you a synopsis. Years and years ago some man asked for a loan of five hundred pounds, and Bertrand, to cut the interview short, said he'd present him with fifty. The man said he didn't want it as a gift, wouldn't take it as a gift.
"'Well, please yourself,' said Bertrand; 'you call it a loan, and I'll call it a bad debt; but I'm very busy, and you won't get any more. Good morning.'
"The man talked a good deal about impending ruin, hinted at suicide and told Bertrand that he would be responsible for turning an honest woman on the streets. Bertrand went on with his writing, and eventually the fellow pocketed the note and got up.
"'I hope to pay this back within three months,' he said stiffly. 'It's not what I expected, but I can't afford to refuse it.'
"'Don't pay it back to me,' said Bertrand, who was beginning to feel rather ashamed of himself. 'Hand it on to someone else who's in a tight corner, and, when he's ready to pay it back, he can lend it to his next friend in distress.' Then a little bit of the old Adam peeped out, and he added, 'Remember it's a loan; you must tell the next man so and you've no idea how many men and women we shall save from ruin and suicide.'
"Well, Bertrand never expected to hear another word, but a year or two later, he received a letter of thanks from a young barrister, whose wife had had to undergo an operation; then from a doctor in Sunderland who hadn't known how to pay his rent; then from a girl who'd lost her father and wanted money to pay for learning shorthand and typing. The fifty pounds have been in circulation for about eighteen years, and from time to time Bertrand still gets a letter from some out-of-the-way corner of the world.... Of course, I'm living on charity now, but, when I was competing equally with my fellows, an odd fifty pounds might have come in very handy. That's what I mean by helping people at discretion."
"There's a difference between fifty-pounds and twenty-five million," I pointed out.
O'Rane smiled to himself and then shook his head.
"Not so much as you might think," he said.
"I wonder how you'd use it."
His face became slowly fixed and grim.
"I wouldn't let any boy go through what I've had to face," he murmured. "It may be fortifying for the character, but that sort of thing can be overdone. The Spartan youth who allowed a fox to gnaw his vitals ended up, I have no doubt, with an immensely fortified character but also with a grievously impaired set of vitals. You know, a boy without parents——"
He broke off and began to whistle to himself; then remarked unexpectedly:
"I wonder whether this will be a boy.... But, boy or girl, it must be an awful thing to lie waiting for the birth of a child that you hate in advance, that's got to be hidden——"
He buried his face in his hands and sat without speaking.
"Is that what's happening?" I asked, for Sonia had never consulted me even in her most expansive moments.
He nodded abruptly.
"She doesn't want anyone to know that she's ill or why she's ill; no one else does, and we trust all of you. As soon as the child's born, it's going to be smuggled away.... It will be properly looked after, of course, and all that sort of thing, but it will never be allowed to know its own parents. All the arrangements have been made, and I gather that the doctor has been—most sympathetic and helpful." He smiled with scornful bitterness and sat for a minute without speaking. "I was surprised to find a woman like Violet touching the suggestion with the end of a pole; she was a bit surprised, too, I fancy, because she sort of excused herself and hoped Sonia would relent later on, but it was absolutely necessary to humour her in every way at present.... That kind of thing always sticks in the throat of a man—like a woman who refuses to have a family at all.... I don't know, I suppose I'm superstitious; I should feel that, if I brought a child into the world like that—furtively, shamefacedly, wrapping a blanket round it and carrying it out of the back door in the dead of night.... Wouldn't you, too, Stornaway? Wouldn't you feel that you were putting a curse on the poor little brute? And I can't imagine a woman deliberately doing that to another woman's child—let alone her own. Picture the child—later on-growing up.... Even if it never knows the manner of its birth, wouldn't you rather expect it to learn stealing in a Dickensian slum and to end up on the scaffold? I suppose it's all very fanciful and morbid.... But the other seems so infernally unnatural. I thought it wasn't done. I thought a mother would no more treat her own baby like that, whatever the provocation, than a man would hit a woman in the breast."
At O'Rane's age I might have thought the same thing.
"Doesn't anybody else know?" I asked.
"George may have told the Daintons; I didn't," he answered, smoothing the wrinkles out of his forehead. "We shall all have to rack our brains before the time comes, God knows. Violet says I must make a point of being in the house in case anything happens. If Sonia—dies, I mean, it would look funny my not being with her."
"And if other people have to be told?"
O'Rane's nose came down on his upper lip in a withering sneer.
"I suppose it means one or two trusty and competent nurses, and the child will be kept in another part of the house. And, later on, London air won't suit it, and it will be sent with a governess to the sea, educated abroad.... My God! I was educated abroad!" He coughed apologetically and relieved his feelings by pacing up and down in front of the fire. "Where had we got to?" he asked absently. "Oh, yes! Well, a boy like that—I assume for some reason it's going to be a boy—might owe the whole of his career, his life, his happiness and power of doing good entirely to a chance meeting with some man who chose to pay three hundred a year on his account for so many years. But it's the personal touch, the personal relationship that must be established!" He swung round in his walk and faced me. "All my life I've wanted to be Prince Florizel!" he cried. "I wanted to be able to lend a hand to distressed young Americans who found unexpected dead bodies in their Saratoga trunks, I wanted to find comfortable and remunerative positions at my court for the conscience-stricken survivors of the Suicide Club. But with the untrammelled disposal of your estate——"
"Wouldn't it pall, if you didn't have to make the money before you gave it away?" I asked.
"I don't think my interest in human beings would ever pall," he answered. "There's such a devil of a lot of them, and they're all different. When I got into the House, I stood as a Tory, and George was rather offended, because he said I was the most revolutionary nihilist he'd ever met. I could never call myself a democrat, though, because democrats deal in mobs, and I only see a mob as composed of individuals, all different, all absorbingly interesting—with bodies to be kicked and souls to be damned, if your preference lies that way. I can't deal with people as types. I can't classify them; each one is much too real, too personal. And, if you're like that, you end up as a nihilist, because all government is based on generalisations, mostly inaccurate and wholly inadequate. As we're finding out." He put his watch to his ear and listened. "I must be making my way to the station," he said. "I'm not taking an active party line at present, but I seem to find a growing sense that the old governing classes haven't measured up, haven't made good in their own job. We've had three specimens since the war started.... I always feel that in universal nihilism I should come to my own. Now I must fly! Forgive me for talking so much!"