He had been here for one purpose and one alone, namely to guard, protect and cherish Christina so long as she might need him.
Half an hour later he was in his room in Panton Street.
A telephone message said that his mother was very ill and that he was to go at once to the Westminster house.
He knew what that meant. The moment had, at last, come. His mother was dying, was perhaps even then dead. As he stood by his shabby little table staring at the piece of paper that offered the message, flocks of memories—discordant, humorous, vulgar, pathetic—came to him, crowding about him, insisting on his notice, hiding from him the immediate need of his action. No world seemed to exist for him as he stood there staring but that thick scented one of Garth and Rafiel and the Westminster house and the Aunts—and through it all, forcing it together, the strong figure of his mother fashioning it all into a shape upon which she had already determined, crushing it until suddenly it broke in her hands.
Then he remembered where he should be. He put on his overcoat again and hurried down the dark stairs into the street. The first of the autumn fogs was making a shy, half-confident appearance, peeping into Panton Street, rolling a little towards the Comedy Theatre, then frightened at the lights tumbling back and running down the hill towards Westminster. In Whitehall it plucked up courage to stay a little while, and bunched itself around the bookshop on one side and the Horse Guards on the other and became quite black in the face peeping into Scotland Yard. Near the Houses of Parliament it was shy again, and crept away after writhing itself for five minutes around St. Margaret's, up into Victoria Street, where it suddenly kicked its heels in the air, snapped its fingers at the Army and Navy Stores, and made itself as thick and confusing as possible round Victoria Station, so that passengers went to wrong destinations and trains snorted their irritation and annoyance.
To Henry the fog had a curious significance, sweeping him back to that evening of Grandfather's birthday, when, because of the fog, a stranger had lost himself and burst in upon their family sanctity for succour—the most important moment of young Henry's life perhaps! and here was the moment that was to close that earlier epoch, close it and lock it up and put it away and the Fog had come once again to assist at the Ceremony.
In Rundle Square the Fog was a shadow, a thin ghostly curtain twisting and turning as though it had a life and purpose all of its own. It hid and revealed, revealed and hid a cherry-coloured moon that was just then bumping about on a number of fantastically leering chimney-pots. The old house was the same, with its square set face, its air of ironic respectability, sniggering at its true British hypocrisy, alive though the Family Spirit that it had once enshrined was all but dead, was to-night to squeak its final protest. The things in the house were the same, just the same and in the same places—only there was electric light now where there had been gas and there was a new servant-maid to take off his coat, a white-faced little creature with a sniffling cold.
She knew him apparently. "Please, Mr. Henry, they're all upstairs," she said. But he went straight into his father's study. There was no human being there, but how crammed with life it was, and a life so far from Christina and her affairs! It was surely only yesterday that he had stood there and his father had told him of the engagement between Katherine and Philip, and afterwards he had gone out into the passage and seen them kissing. . . . That too was an event in his life.
The books looked at him and remained aloof knowing so much that he did not know, tired and sated with their knowledge of life.