So Michael left it to Serena, and in the weeks which followed she guided her father-in-law, with the endless tenderness of a mother teaching a child to walk, round some very sharp corners, which nearly cost him his life, which, so deeply was her heart wrung for him, she almost hoped would cost him his life.
With a courage that never failed him, and which awed her, he learned slowly that he was eighty years of age, that his wife had died ten years ago, at sixty, that Michael was his son, and that he had a very clever grandson called John after him, one of the ablest delegates of the National Congress, and a grand-daughter called Catherine. She tried to tell him how they had lost a few months earlier their eldest son, Jasper, one of the pioneers of a new movement which was costing as many lives as flight had cost England fifty years earlier.
“He failed to materialise at the appointed spot,” said Serena, “I sometimes wonder whether his Indian instructor kept back something essential. The Indians have known for generations how to disintegrate and materialise again in another place, but it does not come easy to our Western blood. Jasper went away, but he never came back.”
John Damer looked incredulously at Serena, and she saw that he had not understood. She never spoke of it again.
As the days passed John, fearful always of some new pang, nevertheless asked many questions of Serena when he was alone with her.
“Tell me about my wife. She was just twenty when I left her.”
“She grieved for you with her whole heart.”
“Did she—marry again? I would rather know if she did. She would have been right to do so in order to have someone to help her to bring up Michael.”