"Your devoted
MMother."
The last lines wavered and ran together. In spite of her injunction, tears would come. Chill and unheeded, they slipped down his cheeks, while he folded his treasure, and put it away with the other, that went to his head, a little, as she had foreseen; though in the event, it had been overshadowed by her own, than which she could have left him no dearer legacy. In life she had been an angel of God. In death, she was still his angel of comfort and healing. She had bidden him share her belief; and he never had felt altogether alone. Sustained by that inner conviction, he had somehow adapted himself to the strangeness of a life empty of her physical presence. The human being, in a world of pain, like the insect in a world of danger, lives mainly by that same ceaseless, unconscious miracle of adaptation. Dearly though he craved a sight of his father and Christine, he had not asked for leave home. There were bad moments when he wondered if he could ever bring himself to face the ordeal. He sincerely hoped they understood. Their letters left an impression that it was so. Jeffers obviously did.
And Tara——? Her belated letter, from the wilds of Serbia, had revealed, in every line, that she understood only too well. For Tara, not long before, had passed through her own ordeal—the death, in a brilliant air fight, of her second brother Atholl, her devotee and hero from nursery days. So when Roy's turn came, her fulness of sympathy and understanding were outstretched like wings to shield him, if might be, from the worst, as she had known it.
For that once, she flung aside the veil of grown-up reserves and wrote straight from her eager passionate heart to the Bracelet-bound Brother, unseen for years, yet linked with her by an imperishable memory; and now linked closer still by a mutual grief.
The comfort to Roy of that spontaneous, Tara-like outpouring had been greater than she knew—than he could ever let her know. For the old intimacy had never been quite re-established between them since the day of his tactless juvenile proposal—for so he saw it now. They had only met that once, when he was home for Christmas. On the second occasion, they had missed. Throughout the War they had corresponded fitfully; but her letters, though affectionate and sisterly, lacked an unseizable something that affected the tone of his response. He had been rash enough, once, to presume on their special relation. But he was no longer a boy; and he had his pride.
He wondered sometimes how it would be if they met again. Would he fall in love with her? She was supreme. No one like her. But he knew now—as she had instinctively known then—that his conviction on that score did not amount to being in love. Conviction must be lit and warmed with the fire of passion. And you couldn't very well fall in love across six thousand miles of sea. Certainly none of the girls he had danced with and ridden with since his arrival in India had affected him that way. And for him marriage was an important consideration. Some day he supposed it would confront him as an urgent personal issue. But there was a tremendous lot to be done first; and girls were kittle cattle.
Unsuspected by him, the ultimate relation with his mother—while it quickened his need for woman's enveloping tenderness and sympathy—held his heart in leash by setting up a standard, to which the modern girl rarely aspired, much less attained.
And now she was gone, in some strange, enthralling way, she held him still. At rare intervals, she came again to him in dreams; or when he hovered on the verge of sleep. Dreams, or visions—they persisted as clearly in memory as any waking act; and unfailingly left a vivid after-sense of having been in touch with her very self. More and more conviction deepened in him that she still had joy in 'the blossom and fruit of his life'; that even in death she was nearer to him than many living mothers to their sons.
A strange experience: strangest of all, perhaps, the simplicity with which he came to accept it as part of the natural order of things. The intuitive brain is rarely analytical. Moreover, he had seen; he had felt; he knew. It is the invincible argument of the mystic. Against belief born of vivid, reiterate experience, the loquacity of logic, the formulæ of pure intellect break like waves upon a rock—and with as little result. The intensity and persistence of Roy's experience simply left no room for insidious whispers of doubt; nor could he have tolerated such scepticism in others, natural though it might be, if one had not seen, nor felt, nor known.
So he neither wrote nor spoke of it to any one. He could scarce have kept it from Tara, the sister-child who had shared all his thoughts and dreams; but the grown-up Tara had become too remote in every sense for a confidence so intimate, so sacred. To his father he would fain have confided everything, remembering her last command; but Sir Nevil's later letters—though unfailingly sympathetic—were not calculated to evoke filial outpourings. For the time being, he seemed to have shut himself in with his grief. Perhaps he, of all others, had been least able to understand Roy's failure to press for short leave home. He had said very little on the subject. And Roy—with the instinct of sensitive natures to take their tone from others—had also said little: too little, perhaps. Least said may be soonest mended; but there are times when it may widen a rift to a gulf.