CHAPTER X.
Vanish every idle thought,
Perish, last of Folly’s ways!
All that pride of eye hath sought,
All that rebel flesh hath wrought,
Utterly reduced to naught,
How can ye outlive these days?
X.
That was how his mother found him when she came in search of him. The lunch-gong had brought no Mark; and no one had seen him, except Maurice, who, from his window, had caught sight of the lovers entering the wood. All the morning she had been secretly anxious. Now she felt certain something was wrong, and telling the others not to wait, she fled out to his favourite haunt, hardly knowing what she expected to find.
He did not hear her till she set foot in the summer-house; and the wild idea smote him—Could it be Bel?
With a start he looked up; and at sight of his face Lady Forsyth’s heart stood still.
‘My darling Boy, what has happened?’
Mark frowned and straightened his shoulders. ‘She’s chucked me—that’s all,’ he said in a dazed voice. ‘They’ve poisoned her point of view between them.’ His eyes challenged hers. ‘Mother, you’ve been right all along. I suppose—you even foresaw—this!’
‘Dear, indeed I didn’t.’ Her hand closed on the rough woodwork. She so longed to gather him to her heart. ‘I was anxious—a little. But I hoped better things of her.’
‘So did I. We were a pair of fools, it seems. And there’s an end of that.’ With a gesture he dismissed the subject, and added, almost in his normal voice, ‘What about the meeting? Any luck?’
‘Yes. People are quite keen. But—you’ll hardly feel like speaking.’
‘Oh, I’ll speak all right. The King’s affairs come a long way first. I’ve had enough of false perspectives this morning. I’ll probably speak all the better for having—flung in everything.’ He sighed. ‘Give me to-morrow, Mums, to pull myself together, and I’ll do any mortal thing that’s required of me. But I can’t show up yet—you understand? And it’s you that must do the telling—as before!’
A spasm of pain crossed his face and she passed a hand over his hair.
He drew back sharply. ‘Oh—not that,’ he murmured; then checked himself and tried to smile. ‘Sorry. I’m feeling—all raw, Mother. I can’t be civil even to you.’ He could not tell her why the feel of a woman’s hand on his hair was unendurable, and would be, for some time to come.
‘I understand, dear,’ she said, and turned to go. ‘Shall I send anything to the studio?’
He shook his head. ‘Later on, perhaps. Dinner time. You might come up yourself.’
‘Of course I will.’
And so she left him.
Lunch was nearly over when she got back. They had kept some hot for her; but she hardly touched it.
Briefly, without comment, she told them her news: and escaped with Keith into the study. To him she could speak more freely. He loved Mark like a brother; a good deal more, indeed, than the average brother: and she knew—though neither had spoken of it—that he had shared her distrust of Bel.
But her thoughts and her words were of Mark only as she stood beside the man who so intimately shared their lives, her small hand clenched upon the edge of the high mantelshelf; tears in her eyes; but none in her voice.
‘He faces trouble so exactly like his father,’ she said, when she had told him of Mark’s refusal to postpone the meeting. ‘But Richard’s phlegm went deeper. Mark, underneath, has all my terrible sensibility; though he won’t let me see it except accidentally.’
Keith said nothing. He was not given to superfluous comment; and on the whole she found his silences more satisfactory than other people’s talk. He knew she was more or less thinking aloud. She was not even looking at him, but at a full-length photograph of her husband—a powerful figure of a man.
‘It’s so strange,’ she went on in the same subdued tone. ‘I sometimes see Richard’s very self looking at me out of Mark’s eyes. When the look comes I seem actually to feel him there. Twice this morning I’ve seen it. Once when Mark spoke of war and again when he spoke of—that wretched girl. Oh Keith—I hate her!’
The low voice broke unmistakably; and she bowed her forehead on the back of her hand.
Macnair stood looking at her, his keen eyes clouded with tenderness. A moment he seemed to hesitate, then deliberately, he laid his hand on her shoulder. ‘Helen, don’t break your heart over it,’ he said. ‘We men pull through these things: and Mark is made of sterner stuff, if I know him, than to let a girl like Miss Alison smash him up for good. More likely to do that by marrying him than by leaving him. There’s a crumb of consolation for you!’
She raised her head now and smiled at him through tears that were not allowed to fall.
‘If there is such a crumb anywhere, trust you to find it! What a blessing you are to us, Keith!’ As his hand slipped from her shoulder she caught and held it a minute. Then her thoughts went back to her son. ‘I wonder—will he ever have eyes for Sheila again, after this?’
‘More likely after this than before. Sheila’s a born mother-woman, a little Sister of Compassion. And we men are such fools, that we’re very apt to overlook the beauty of that type till we’ve suffered a few hard knocks from the other sort. The revulsion from that type, when it comes, is curiously complete. But it takes time. As for our Sheila, whether she would have him, after this, is another matter.’
Helen sighed. ‘I can’t forgive Maurice yet,’ she said. ‘I wonder if he’ll enlist?’ And their talk slid back to the one all-absorbing subject—the War.
As for Mark, he spent that interminable afternoon tramping endlessly, aimlessly over the hills; hoping by the mechanical motion to deaden thought and ease the pain within. Where all memory was intolerable, it hurt him most to recall how cruelly she had tempted him by tone and touch; as it were bribing him to be false to his own convictions. The whole thing bewildered almost as much as it hurt him. There were moments when he came near to hating her; proof, though he did not realise it, that the love she evoked was strongly tinctured with baser metal.
And all the while Bobs, the incurably faithful, trotted to heel or gambolled coquettishly under his master’s eyes without eliciting a word or caress.
Hunger and lengthening shadows drew him back at last to the home he loved yet now acutely desired to avoid. She had poisoned even that. Yet how his heart ached for her! How the unregenerate blood in his veins craved the touch of her lips and hands!
He reached his study without encountering anything more human than a stray housemaid; and there the first thing he lighted on was his own tender and beautiful little Study of Contemplation. Standing just inside the door, he feasted his eyes on the soft, still face, the small head with its close-fitting cap of hair and the long-limbed grace of her figure. Then rage flamed in him. He felt like smashing the thing with a hammer and flinging away the pieces as he had flung away her ring. A mere pulse-beat of hesitation saved him and the artist prevailed over the man. He could not murder the work of his hands. Later on, he would give it to Maurice to wean him from the sin of impressionism. Meanwhile, he lifted it as tenderly as he would have touched the original, put it away in a corner cupboard and turned the key.
He had scarcely done so when he heard his mother outside.
‘Open the door, dear,’ she said. ‘My hands are full.’
He opened it and relieved her of a tray set out with appetising food and wine.
‘Stunning of you, Mums,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry.’
To her delight he ate everything and drank three glasses of wine, while they discussed ways and means; the money they could realise, the men they could raise for England in this most critical hour of her destiny. Except for the absence of laughter and badinage in their talk, it was as if nothing abnormal had happened. But Lady Forsyth did not fail to note the disappearance of his terra-cotta treasure; and she was sinful enough to hope it had been destroyed.
She stayed more than half an hour and left him with a fervent ‘God bless you!’ But this time she attempted no caress. She understood.
Next morning, after breakfast, she lingered in her turret room, wondering what he would do with himself, hoping he would come and let her know. He did come; and her heart ached at the tired look in his eyes.
‘I’m going to take the “Watersprite” up the loch, Mums,’ he told her. ‘And I’ll be away all day. Grant has stocked her well, so I shan’t starve. Don’t be an idiot if I’m late and go imagining I’ve drowned myself. At a time like this, a man’s life is not his own to chuck away. Besides, I’m not the sort. And—there happens to be you,’ he added with a travesty of a smile. ‘On the whole I’d sooner have the honour of being shot by the Germans—’
‘Mark—don’t!’ She drew in a sharp breath.
‘Sorry, Mums. But it’s true. By the way, as I’m wasting some valuable time hadn’t we better stay over Sunday?’
‘That would make things easier,’ she admitted. ‘But I thought—you’d rather get away soon.’
‘My dear Mother, don’t fash yourself with fancies. If it’ll ease things, we’ll jolly well stay. I don’t care a damn.’
The spark of irritation was purely refreshing: and he never apologised to her for ‘language’ accidental or otherwise. So complete was the comrade spirit between them that he prided himself on his habit of speaking to her straightly as man to man. More than once, in University days, he had filled some prospective visitor with envy by the casual remark: ‘Don’t be alarmed if you hear me scrapping with my Mother. She’s the right sort. I can talk to her just exactly as I talk to you.’
Now, in answer to his outburst, she said quietly: ‘Very well, Monday. I’ll tell the others.’
‘That’s all right. And don’t you be a fool about me!’
So he left her and she did her best to obey him; but the faint consolation that his trouble brought him nearer to herself was obliterated by her acute consciousness of his hidden pain and resentment against the cause of it.
That grey, weary Thursday seemed as if it would never pass. Clouds had rolled up out of the West. Scudding showers lashed the loch; and through them she could picture Mark driving the little steam-yacht he loved. Long after sunset he came back wet to the skin; but looking, on the whole, more like himself. He had fought and conquered something out there in the rain and wind. But he spent what remained of the evening in his studio as before.
On Friday evening, when they were gathered in the square hall waiting to start, he strode casually down stairs and nodded his greetings as if he had merely been away for a couple of nights. He had prepared a speech, he said, that ought to make the men of Ardmuir sit up to some purpose: and Keith, watching the little incident from the study threshold, murmured: ‘Well done, old boy!’
A second car had been ordered to accommodate the party; and while they made ready, Mark was left momentarily alone with Sheila in the hall.
Then she took courage and looked up at him.
‘Mark—I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I may say that much, mayn’t I?’
For a second he held her gaze. Then: ‘You may say anything you please,’ he answered, ‘when you look like that! Truth is,’ he paused, ‘she’s never been taught to see things the right way. It was just—that one couldn’t make her understand.’
‘Poor Bel! She must be very unhappy.’
‘Bel—unhappy!’ His astonishment was manifest. But then—Sheila had not seen the look in her eyes. ‘I doubt it,’ he added with a touch of bitterness.
‘I don’t,’ the soft voice persisted. ‘She’s bound to be—if she cares.’
‘But if she cared, how could she—?’
The note of pain in his voice gave her still more courage.
‘You said—she didn’t understand, and that poisons everything.’
Touched to the heart he said impulsively ‘Sheila, what a wise little Mouse you are!’
It was his old nickname for her and she drew in a quick breath. ‘Not so very! But I do know—about caring.’
‘The first best knowledge surely,’ he said: then Keith appeared and bade them hurry up.
But her eyes, shining on him through tears, and her words that gave him a new point of view lingered in his memory. Odd how readily he could speak of Bel to Sheila, how hardly to his mother, with whom he could talk of everything in earth or heaven. And surely no one but Sheila could have been inspired to couple sympathy for himself with so tender and delicate a plea for Bel. If she were right, if Bel were really suffering, the door of hope might still be ajar. Meantime there was his speech; for which he had made comprehensive notes; there were convictions and appeals that he must drive home to the hearts of his hearers; and while he sat smoking in silence beside Keith—who drove the car—words full of vigour and fire came crowding into his brain—
When at length he stood on the platform waiting for his clamorous welcome to subside, the flame of his own conviction burnt away all nervousness, all dread of failure; and for half an hour he spoke as none had imagined he could speak, himself least of all.
‘First rate,’ Keith said quietly as he sat down amid a storm of cheers.
‘Heaven knows how I did it!’ he answered under cover of the noise. ‘Wish I could bolt now.’
But the Provost had risen and was praising him to his face; a far worse ordeal than the one he had so triumphantly weathered. The recruiting result, in figures, was not sensational: but Ardmuir was obviously impressed. It begged leave to distribute Sir Mark’s ‘great recruiting speech’ as a leaflet; and Sir Mark, privately overwhelmed, gave gracious consent, with the air of one who made brilliant speeches as easily as he ate his breakfast.
‘Really, old boy, you ought to stand for Parliament,’ Keith said as they drove home. ‘If that speech of yours is well distributed, the men will soon be tumbling in. One has to give them time up here. The Radical spirit is so strong in our beloved country.’
‘And the beauty of it is that the bulk of ’em, if they only knew it, remain Radicals just because they’re so conservative!’ Mark retorted with a flash of his mother’s humour. ‘But Parliament—no thanks; not yet awhile.’
Saturday was given over to rounding up his own men and business connected with his mother’s small estate. That evening he conquered, not without difficulty, a temptation to stroll down into the village and discover whether the Rowans was yet empty of its treasure; and when the last post came in he knew.
Glancing through half a dozen envelopes, he came suddenly on Bel’s handwriting. His mother, who was watching him, saw, without appearing to see, that he pocketed all his letters unopened and, after a reasonable interval, rose and left the room. It was easy to guess what had happened; and she rated herself for the horrid sinking at her heart. She could not sleep till she knew; but as Mark did not reappear, she went up early and, in passing, knocked at his door.
‘Good-night, dear,’ she said.
He opened it and stood before her—transfigured.
‘Come along in, Mums.’ Drawing her forward he closed the door behind her. ‘Read that!’
He thrust a faintly scented sheet of note-paper into her hand, and she obeyed.
Bel’s communication was brief, moving, and very much to the point.
‘Are you generous enough to forgive me—and come to me?’ she wrote without preamble. ‘If you can keep it up—I can’t. I saw and heard you at Ardmuir. You are brave. As for me, I’m bitterly sorry and ashamed. I hate it all still. But if you wish it, I am yours—unconditionally, Bel. I shall be alone here after 10.30. I can’t face Inveraig.’
Lady Forsyth had to read that note more than once before she could feel sure of her voice. To her it seemed studied, consciously written for effect: and the writing itself was equally studied, with the same touch of hardness in it that showed in the level line of eyelids and brows.
‘Well?’ Mark was growing impatient.
‘You can forgive her?’ she asked, looking steadily up at him.
‘Of course I can. And you must too. She’s sorry. She—cares. Isn’t that enough for anyone?’
‘But she’s not convinced.’
‘I’ll convince her, in time. I hope she’ll come south with us to-morrow.’
Lady Forsyth drew in her lips and at once his hands came down on her shoulders.
‘Look here, Mums, I won’t have you antagonising and doubting her any more—after this. It spoils everything. You might make an effort if only for my sake. It’s beyond belief getting her back; and your attitude’s the only flaw in my happiness. Has been all along.’
She was silent a minute, then she put her two hands on his breast. ‘Dear, I will make an effort for your sake. I refuse to be the flaw in your happiness! It’s a degrading position for a mother.’
He stooped and kissed her for the first time since Wednesday morning. ‘Bless you!’ he said. ‘Good-night.’
Alone in her room, confronting this new, unwelcome development, she realised how, through all the pain of his grief, she had been upheld by the secret conviction that his loss was gain; some day he would know it. Now the old miserable uncertainty was nagging at her afresh. In her heart, she distrusted the sincerity of the whole incident. But she had given her word to Mark, and Bel should have the benefit of all the doubts in creation.
Mark’s watch was three minutes short of the half-hour when he stood outside the square grey house perched on the hillside above the road. A white curtain fluttered; and a glimpse of Bel’s face signified that the coast was clear.
When he entered the homely sitting-room and closed the door she did not run to meet him as a simpler woman would have done. She remained standing near the mantelpiece on the farther side of the square table, smiling her cool provocative smile.
‘Mark!’ she said softly. ‘I’ve been wondering and wondering would you really come?’
By that time the square table was no longer between them and Mark was holding her as if he could never let her go.
‘Would you have broken your heart, if I hadn’t?’ he asked at last.
‘Very nearly!’ she admitted, with the slowest possible lift of her lashes.
‘But, Bel—if you cared, how could you pull it through? How could you look at me with your eyes like bits of glass?’
‘You forget,’ she said, ‘I can act. It was because—I cared so much; because I couldn’t bear the idea of your taking part in that horror out there; and because you were so obstinate, that in the end I put on the strongest screw I could think of—and it wasn’t so strong as I supposed. That’s the inner history of the last three days.’
He regarded her searchingly, taking it all in. ‘Women are queer things,’ he said. ‘Did you really suppose I’d capitulate—under the screw?’
‘I half hoped so—till I heard your speech. Then I began to see that I’d never known the real Mark: only Bel’s lover.’
‘And—did you approve of the real Mark?’
She laughed and kissed him.
‘Honestly, I found him rather alarming. Too big altogether for a mere Bel. But I wanted him more than ever. And now I know he’s still mine, I can’t let him go!’
For Mark there was only one flaw in those first raptures of reunion: and for that flaw his mother was unwittingly responsible. Nothing would induce Bel to come up to Inveraig or to travel south with the Forsyths on Monday.
‘I can’t face them yet awhile,’ she persisted, ‘specially your Mother. She won’t easily forgive me for hurting you so. No real mother could. Besides, she was probably thanking her stars for your escape; and now I’ve turned up again, like a bad penny!’
‘Bel!’
But she laid her hand upon his lips.
‘Hush and listen to me. It wouldn’t be fair on Harry either; stranding her with those two. In ten days, we can both come south and a regenerate Bel can dare to pay you a visit. Their minds will be full of such big terrible things by then that they’ll take me for granted. As for you—the real Mark will be so swamped with his responsibilities that there would be no time for love-making, even if I came.’
In the end he was forced to admit that she was right. Three days of fighting himself had not been without a steadying effect on his impatient spirit: and so the matter was settled.
Rain and wind had ceased. They spent all the afternoon and evening together on the water; and on Monday the Forsyth party travelled down to Wynchcombe Friars.
At no time could Lady Forsyth leave Inveraig without a pang: and never had it been sharper than on that 10th of August with the glory and anguish of Belgium’s gallant stand beating on her brain, and the poignant question at her heart—when, and in what circumstances, would they four see that grey rugged house and the lochs and hills of Scotland again?