On that point, Burke was hardly so clear as John’s mother expected. Helen was able to convince her, all the same, that in the year 1680 her fathers had settled in Virginia, and that her own parents were still living on the banks of Rose River in a house which had been built by the original pioneer, Douglas Graeme Sholto.
XXI
THE next day, which was Sunday, began with a surprise for Helen. When she came downstairs, exactly two minutes after the clock chimed half past eight, she found the servants to the number of sixteen kneeling in the hall and Lady Elizabeth reading prayers in a rigid evangelical manner. Suddenly, the heart of Helen took a leap across the Atlantic. The wanderer was back in her own home; she saw and heard her own mother, who alone of created beings she suspected of practicing this ritual. The flat voice, with its curious, low monotone, the stiffness of the central figure and those around it, even the soft play of light from the diamond panes upon the wonderful Tudor paneling, brought back her childhood with a rush. As Helen knelt in the midst of these people she was once again among her own.
John had had a fairly good night. His temperature was back to normal, and his Spartan parent had given a tardy consent that, provided Dr. Evans, who was expected in the course of the morning, confirmed it, the patient should come down to luncheon and eat roast beef. “Of course, my dear, he ought to stay in bed until to-morrow, but Dr. Evans is a weak man so he’s sure to get round him. However, we mustn’t let that keep us from church.”
For church they set out accordingly twenty minutes before the doctor was due; and Lady Elizabeth, helped by stout boots, a short skirt, and an ebony cane, walked an honest three quarters of a mile across the beautiful park with a practical strength of spirit that Helen could but admire. Again it might have been her own mother in her own home, except that Lady Elizabeth was older than her mother by twenty years.
Sustained by the hope of John at luncheon, Helen did not find the service, although in itself decidedly uninspired, so hard to bear as otherwise it might have been. She hoped she was not guilty of the sin known to the Greeks as hubris, but she could not kill a feeling that John and she lived in another time, another mental atmosphere, another world. This handful of bovine rustics, stiff and uncomfortable in their Sunday clothes, listening vacantly to a string of clichés which they didn’t comprehend and for which they would have been none the better had they been able to do so, how pathetic they were! And the “pi-jaw” delivered falsetto in the high voice known to Victorian days as an appanage of “the Oxford manner,” how incongruous, how outworn it was!
The church itself, however, was another affair. It was an exquisite piece of early Gothic, nearly perfect of its kind, an authentic bit of the Middle Ages. While the old lady sat rigidly upright in her high-backed pew facing the chancel, her eyes fixed upon the clergyman, her ears struggling to catch and hold every one of the rapid, slovenly, half meaningless words that fell from his lips, the living alert mind by her side could not help reflecting that human nature did not change through the centuries. The Lady Elizabeth and her feudal retainers of six hundred years ago must have been like these! The same shibboleths, the same arcana, the same crude paraphernalia to enable one to make the best of this life and the next!
On Helen’s return to the house, full of a sense of duty stoutly performed, she was rewarded by the sight of John. He was sitting in the bow of the drawing-room window to catch the fugitive warmth of an October sun. A bandage was round his head and she was a little shocked to see how pale, how shattered, he looked. But as soon as he saw her he got up at once and took a quick step towards her, both hands held out like an eager, impulsive child.
If she had ever doubted her feeling for him, or had not weighed it adequately, their coming together now, in these tragic circumstances, seemed to define it anew. He was looking weak and ill, but apart from that he was much changed in three short days. Since the evening of Thursday, just before he received the enemy’s first blow, he looked older by twenty years. Something had passed out of his nature, something had crept in.
He was possessed now by a sense of frustration, anger, defeat. Fully, even whimsically, he was conscious of the unhappy bedfellows who had entered his brain. “It is wonderful,” he said, “how a knock on the head may change a man. The short way to madness, I daresay.” He spoke with a bitterness that did not belong to his nature.