Maradick at Forty: A Transition

by Hugh Walpole

“There scarcely seems time for sentiment exactly!” Tony laughed to himself at the absurdity of it and stepped out into the garden. He didn’t want to see the family just at present. They would grate and jar. He could be alone; later, he would talk to Maradick.

And Lady Gale, for the first time in her life, avoided him. She did not feel that she could talk to him just yet; she must wait until she had thought out the new developments and decided on a course of action. The day had filled her with alarm, because suddenly two things had been shown to her. The first, that there was no one in the world for whom she really cared save Tony. There were other people whom she liked, friends, acquaintances; for her own husband and Rupert she had a protecting kindliness that was bound up intimately in her feeling for the family, but love!—no—it was Tony’s alone.

She had never realised before how deeply, how horribly she cared. It was something almost wild and savage in her, so that she, an old lady with white hair and a benevolent manner, would have fought and killed and torn his enemies were he in danger. The wildness, the ferocity of it frightened her so that she sat there in the dark with trembling hands, watching the lights of the ships at sea and, blindly, blindly praying.

She had known, of course, before, that he was everything to her, that without him life would lose all its purpose and meaning and beauty, but there had been other things that counted as well; now it seemed that nothing else mattered in the least.

And the second thing that she saw, and it was this second revelation that had shown her the first, was that she was in danger of losing him. The relationship of perfect confidence that had, she fondly imagined, existed until now between them, had never been endangered, because there had been nothing to hide. He had not told her everything, of course; there must have been things at Oxford, and even before, that he had not told her, but she had felt no alarm because they had been, she was sure, things that did not matter. And then he had, so often, come and told her, told her with his charming smile and those open eyes of his, so that there could be no question of his keeping anything back.

She had studied the relationship of mother and son so perfectly that she had had precisely the right “touch” with him, never demanding what he was not ready to give, always receiving the confidences that he handed her. But now for the first time he was keeping things back, things that mattered. When she had spoken so bravely to Maradick a fortnight ago, on that day when she had first caught sight of the possible danger, she had thought that she was strong enough and wise enough to wait, patiently, with perfect trust. But it was not possible, it could not be done. She could not sit there, with her hands folded, whilst some strange woman down there in that dark, mysterious town caught her boy away from her. Every day her alarm had grown; she had noticed, too, that their relationship had changed. It had been so wonderful and beautiful, so delicate and tender, that any alteration in its colour was at once apparent to her. He had not been so frank, there had been even a little artificiality in his conversations with her. It was more than she could bear.

But, although the uncertainty of it might kill her, she must not know. She saw that as clearly, as inevitably as ever. Let her once know, from his own confession, that he loved some girl down there in the town, and she would be forced to stop it. The horizon would widen, and bigger, louder issues than their own personal feelings would be concerned. The family would be called into the issue, and she could not be false to its claims. She could not be untrue to her husband and all the traditions. And yet it was only Tony’s happiness that she cared for; that must be considered above everything else. Maradick would know whether this girl were, so to speak, “all right.” If she were impossible, then he assuredly would have stopped it by now. Maradick was, in fact, the only clue to the business that she had got.

But it was partly because she was losing her trust in him that she was unhappy now. His guard over Tony had, for to-day at any rate, been miserably inadequate. He might feel, perhaps, that he had no right to spend his time in hanging on to Tony’s coat-tails, it wasn’t fair on the boy, but he ought to have been with him more.

She was sitting now with Alice on the seat at the farther end of the garden overlooking the town. The place seemed hateful to her, as she stared down it acquired a personality of its own, a horrible menacing personality. It lay there with its dark curved back like some horrible animal, and the lights in the harbours were its eyes twinkling maliciously; she shuddered and leant back.

“Are you cold, dear?” It was the first time that Alice had spoken since they had come out. She herself was sitting straight with her head back, a slim white figure like a ghost.