CHAPTER IX
LIKE TO LIKE
IT was in May, 1916, that Waldo got a severe wound in the right shoulder, which put him out of action for the rest of the war and sent him, after two or three months in a hospital, back to Cragsfoot. He had done very well, indeed distinguished himself rather notably; had fortune been kinder, he might have expected to rise to high rank. The letters which I received—I was far away, and was not at the time able to get leave, even had I felt justified in asking for it—reflected the mingled disappointment, anxiety, and relief, which the end of his military career, the severity of his wound, and his return home—alive, at all events!—naturally produced at Cragsfoot.
Sir Paget wrote seldom and briefly, but with a quiet humor and an incisive touch. Aunt Bertha’s letters—especially now that she had only me to write to, and no longer spent the larger part of her epistolary energy on Waldo—were frequent, full, vivid, and chatty. But she was also very discursive; she would sandwich in the Kaiser between the cook and the cabbages, Waldo’s wound between Bethmann-Hollweg and Mr. Winston Churchill. It was, however, possible to gather from her, aided by Sir Paget, a pretty complete picture of what was going on both at Cragsfoot and at Briarmount.
For at Briarmount too anxiety reigned, and the times were critical. As might be expected of him, Mr. Jonathan Frost had wrought marvels during the war. The whole of his vast establishments had been placed at the disposal of the Ministry of Munitions; he had effected wonders of rapid adaptation and transformation, wonders of organization and output; he “speeded up” a dozen Boards and infused his own restless energy into somnolent offices. But two years of these exertions, on the top of a life of gigantic labor, proved too much even for him. He won a peerage, but he gave his life. In the September of that same year he came back to Briarmount, the victim of a stroke, a dying man. His mind was still clear and active, but he had considerable difficulty in speaking, and was unable to move without assistance. His daughter, who had sedulously nursed him through his labors, was now nursing him through the last stage of his earthly course.
But there was also a newcomer at Briarmount, a frequent visitor there during the last months of its master’s life, one in whom both Aunt Bertha and Sir Paget took considerable interest. This was Captain Godfrey Frost. Lord Dundrannan (he took his title from a place he had in Scotland) was old-fashioned enough not to approve of confiding to women the exclusive command of great interests; they lacked the broad view and the balance of mind, however penetrating their intuitions might on occasion be! And too much power was not good for them; he even seemed to have hinted to Sir Paget that they were quite masterful enough already! That he meant to leave his daughter handsomely, indeed splendidly, endowed, was certain; but he was minded to provide himself with an heir male in the person of this young man. It would have been natural, perhaps, to suspect him of planning a match between the cousins, but this did not seem to be in his head—perhaps because such personal matters as marriages held a small place in his mind; perhaps because he suspected that his daughter’s ideas on that subject were already settled; perhaps because his nephew was somewhat too young and—from a social point of view—unformed to be a good mate for his accomplished daughter.
Captain Frost was, in fact, inexperienced and backward, shy and rather silent, in society; but unquestionably he had a full share of the family business ability—so much so that, when Lord Dundrannan “cracked up,” he was brought back from the front (against his protests, it is only fair to add), and put in charge, actual if not always nominal, of a great part of the important activities on which his uncle had been engaged. His disposition appeared to be simple, amiable, and unassuming. He was pleasantly deferential to Sir Paget, rather afraid of Aunt Bertha’s acute eyes, cordial and attentive to Waldo. Towards Nina he was content to accept the position of pupil and protégé; he let her put him through his social paces; he regarded her with evident respect and admiration, and thought her worthy to be her father’s daughter—more than that he could not do! There was no trace of any sentiment beyond this, or different in kind from it. There was, in fact, to be detected in Aunt Bertha’s letters an underlying note of satisfaction; it might be described in the words, “He’s quite nice, but there’s nothing to fear!”
But if such a note as that were really to be heard in Aunt Bertha’s letters, it could mean only one thing; and it marked a great change in her attitude towards Nina. It meant that she was looking forward with contentment, apparently with actual pleasure, to a match between Nina and Waldo. Other signs pointed in the same direction—her mention of Nina’s frequent calls at Cragsfoot, of her kindness to Waldo, of her devotion to her father, of her praiseworthy calm and level-headedness during this trying time. The change had perhaps started from a reaction against Lucinda; after the first impulse of sympathy with the distracted fugitive (a very real one at the time) had died down, Lucinda’s waywardness, her “unaccountability,” presented themselves in a less excusable light. But the main cause lay, no doubt, in Waldo himself. Aunt Bertha was—passing impulses apart—for Waldo and on his side. Any shifting of her views and feelings in a matter like this would be certain to reflect a similar alteration in his attitude.
In November a letter from Sir Paget told me of Lord Dundrannan’s death, at which, by chance, he was himself present; evidently moved by the scene, he recounted it with more detail than he was wont to indulge in. Hearing that his neighbor was worse, he went to inquire; as he stood at the door, Nina drove up in her car—she had been out for an airing—and took him into the library where her father was, sitting in a chair by the fire. It was very rarely that he would consent to keep his bed, and he had insisted on getting up that day. “Godfrey Frost was there” (my uncle wrote) “and Dr. Napier, standing and whispering together in the window. By the sick man sat an old white-haired Wesleyan minister, whom he had sent for all the way from Bradford, where he himself was born: he had ‘sat under’ this old gentleman as a boy, and a few days before had expressed a great longing to see him. The minister was reading the Bible to him now. It looked as though he had foreseen that the end was coming. He had had a sort of valedictory talk with Nina and young Frost a week before—about the money and the businesses, what they were to do, what rules they were to be guided by, and so on. That done, he appeared to dismiss worldly affairs, this world itself, from his thoughts, and ‘took up’ the next. I am not mocking; yet I can hardly help smiling. He seemed to have ‘taken it up’ in the same way that he would have inquired into a new, important and interesting speculation; and he got his expert—the old minister from Bradford—to advise him. He was not afraid, or agitated, or remorseful; his feelings seemed, so far as his impaired speech enabled him to describe them to his family, those of a curious and earnest interest in his prospects of survival—he eagerly desired to survive—and in what awaited him if he did survive. The fact that he had neglected religion for a great many years back did not trouble him; nor did ‘How hardly shall a rich man——’ He seemed confident that, if immortality were a fact, some place and some work would be found for Jonathan Frost. Whether it was a fact was what he wanted to know; he hated the idea of nothingness, of inactivity, of stopping!