“When I think of her, Fitz—you know who I mean—Letty,—when I think of her sweetness and patience and goodness, and when I remember all the pretty tender ways she had with that little fellow!—and when—after all these years, he came to visit her to-day, and I saw her looking wistfully at him to see if he had the smallest pulse of affection beating in his hard young heart for her, I could have cried! Yes, I could! I’m an old fool of course,—you can call me one if you like and have done with it. But that’s how I felt. Of course years have gone by,—he was a child when she saw him last—but I should have thought—yes, I should certainly have thought, that if he had any recollections of his childhood at all, he would at least have remembered her—and how she loved him!”
Whereupon Fitz roused himself to utterance.
“There’s where you were wrong, Dick”—he said. “You have made the same fatal mistake we all make when we think that love—love of any kind—will last!”
The Major looked at him steadfastly, but did not interrupt him.
“It’s the same thing everywhere. Men and women fall in love,—swear eternal fidelity—and by-and-by we find them figuring in the divorce court. Other men and women resign themselves gracefully to the monotony of each other’s companionship for life, and God sends them children to cheer up the dullness a little, and they think those children are perfect paragons, who will grow up to love them in their old age. Not a bit of it! Not nowadays. Old folks are voted a bore,—and the young cub of the present day may often be heard declaring that the ‘Governor’ has had ‘too long an innings,’ and ‘doesn’t know when to die.’ As for Boy,—Miss Letty’s pet Boy,—from all you tell me, he has gone; there’s only a young cub left now—a cub who doesn’t care, and doesn’t mean to care about anything or anybody but himself. That’s the supreme result of modern training,—it is ’pon my soul! Boys are brought up in the code of selfishness from the very beginning. Their mothers spoil them and foster all their bad points instead of their good ones,—and as soon as they begin to go about in the world, a lot of idiotic girls and women—the kind of women who must have a masculine thing to pay court to them, whether he be a raw youth or a seasoned old stager—get hold of them and make shameless love to them. And their heads are of course turned the wrong way round,—they think they are the most precious and amazing objects in all creation,—and instead of paying court to women, and learning to be chivalrous and reverential, they expect to be courted themselves and admired, as if they were full-blown heroes from the classic world of conquest. That’s the way of it. Boy has no doubt caught the fever of conceit. He probably expected Miss Letty to kneel down and kiss his boot-ties.”
“Part of your argument may be right,” said the Major,—“but part of it is entirely wrong. You said in the beginning that we all of us make a mistake when we think that love—love of any kind—will last. Did you not?”
“I did,” admitted Fitz, looking slightly shame-faced under the calm stare of the Major’s eye.
“Well, you know that’s d——d nonsense!” pursued the Major bluntly. “You know as well as I do that I—I, for example, have loved the same woman ever since I was thirty, and there’s no change in me yet. And Letty—Letty has loved the same ne’er-do-weel all her life, though he’s a corpse and not a very entire one by this time I should say, though she thinks, God bless her, that he’s a sort of angel-King on a throne in Heaven—which is a pleasing and pretty picture enough, only it doesn’t seem to quite fit Harry Raikes. However, there you are, you see,—love does last—when it is love!”
“When it is—yes—but when is it?” asked Fitz, with the smile which so beautifully altered his features beginning to illumine his deep-set eyes. “You see, you and Miss Leslie are old-fashioned! That’s what it is! You’re old-fashioned, sir!” he repeated, getting up and prodding a finger into the Major’s waistcoat. “You belong to the last century, like one’s grandmother’s old china! You are a part of the days when, if a married woman entertained a score of lovers apart from her own husband, she was considered a disgrace to her sex. All that is altered, my boy! She is now a ‘queen of society’! Ha, ha, ha! You believe in God’s blessing on true love! But, my dear fellow, the present generation doesn’t care whether there’s a God to bless anything or not, or whether love is false or true. It isn’t love, you see. It’s something else. Love has gone out with the tinder-boxes and stage-coaches. It’s all electricity and motor-cars now—flash and fizzle through life at a tearing pace, and leave a bad smell behind you! Ha, ha! You’re old-fashioned, Dick! I like you for it because I’m a bit old-fashioned myself—but we’re out of it,—we’re old stumps of trees that can’t understand the rank and quickly withering weeds of youth that are growing up around us to-day—weeds that are going to choke and poison the destinies of England by-and-by!”
The Major got up, possibly moved thereto by the pressure of his friend’s fingers in the middle of his waistcoat.