Wilbraham, who had more of a clue to Harry's actions than the others, was not without irritation against what at times he set down as mere hard undutifulness. He had great sympathy with Lady Brent, who had so wonderfully sunk her own feelings in acquiescing in the boy's unreasonable determination. She could almost certainly have traced him had she wished to do so. And Wilbraham, at least, knew that he must have been told at the very beginning that he would not be interfered with. Why could he not then have softened the hardship to those who loved him? Granted that the new love that had come into his life was so much more to him than the old; but it was not like him to throw over the old altogether, and indeed his letters showed that he had not done so.
After a time his irritation died away. It could not be so distressing to Harry to be cut off from Royd as it was to them to be cut off from him, but his letters showed that he felt it, and especially the few letters that he wrote to little Jane, in which he seemed to be reaching out after the untroubled innocent happiness of his youth, and the beauty and freedom that had lain all about it. It was the old Harry that appeared in those letters, and here and there in others; the new Harry became more and more evident otherwise—a man doing a man's hard work in hard and uncongenial surroundings, much older than his years, where in some ways he had been so much younger.
He was hard on himself as well as hard upon them. They had given him happiness in his sheltered youth, but the plunge he had taken into a life different from any that could have been anticipated for him can have been none the easier on that account. The ugliness and crudity that other boys might in some measure have been prepared for would bear very hardly upon him, and he would have to fight through it alone. Wilbraham came to see that he might shrink from mixing it up with his home life. Perhaps he was afraid that he might weaken in it if he was subject to any pressure. It would surely have been open to him to have had at least a few days at home before he went abroad; but he had not taken the opportunity.
Had he blamed them for bringing him up in that seclusion? There was nothing in his letters to show it. But it must have been very soon revealed to him how exceptional his life had been, and how much he had missed of what other boys had had. He would not always be capable of gauging the value of what he had missed, when face to face with some situation with which his inexperience had unfitted him to cope lightly. It might take him a long time to acknowledge that what he had gained had been more than what he had missed, and partly arose from it. He would know, too, before long that the immovable seclusion in which his grandmother and mother and Wilbraham himself lived was anything but the normal state of affairs that it had been implicitly represented to him. He would ask himself why they had never left Royd from one year's end to another, and why so few people had ever come there; and he would see that it had all been with reference to him. He would hardly be able to understand it. If he acknowledged the freedom he had enjoyed, the limits of it would still strike him, with his new knowledge of the world's ways. If he had not, since his childhood, been dominated by women, he had certainly been managed, without knowing it. Whether, in the strangeness and disagreeableness and difficulty of much of his new life he was inclined to resent this unduly, or whether he saw behind it enough to admit that there had been wisdom as well as apparent eccentricity, and certainly love, in the steps his youth had been made to tread, it would not be surprising if he made up his mind at an early date that the managing should come to an end. It was for him to direct his own life now. He would run no further risk of influence brought to bear upon it, the clue to which was not in his hands.
In the first spring Wilbraham left Royd to take up work in a Government office in London, for which Lady Brent had asked for him. A few months later Mrs. Brent broke loose from the now insupportable stagnation of Royd, and went to London with the avowed object of nursing. She had had no training and was quite ignorant of the steps to be taken, but Lady Brent arranged an income for her, and made no attempt to direct her movements in any way. She was left alone in the Castle, and stayed there alone for another year. To all outward appearance she was exactly what she had always been, always occupied, always unemotional, though sometimes more unapproachable than at others. The months dragged on.
CHAPTER XXI
SIDNEY
One morning in May Lady Brent unlocked the letter bag, which she never did without anticipations of some news of Harry. It was at least a month since there had been a letter from him, but there at last it was, searched for among all the rest and making them of no value at all.
It was directed to Mrs. Brent, and the envelope bore the stamps and marks of the field from which it had been written. All Harry's previous letters had been redirected from London.
She sat looking at it and turning it over. Once or twice she seemed to be on the point of opening it, and she must have been under the strongest temptation to do so. What could it mean but that he had reached his goal, and the long time of half estrangement was over? Perhaps it was to say that he was coming home.