"Sleep well," said Helena from the door. "I hope the housemaid's put enough on your bed, and given you a hot water-bottle? If anything scares you in the night, wake me—that is, if you can!" She disappeared.
Outside Mrs. Friend's door the old house was in darkness, save for a single light in the hall, which burnt all night. The hall was the feature of the house. A gallery ran round it supported by columns from below, and spaced by answering columns which carried the roof. The bedrooms ran round the hall, and opened into the gallery. The columns were of yellow marble brought from Italy, and faded blue curtains hung between them. Helena went cautiously to the balustrade, drew one of the blue curtains round her, and looked down into the hall. Was everybody gone to bed? No. There were movements in a distant room. Somebody coughed, and seemed to be walking about. But she couldn't hear any talking. If Cousin Philip were still up, he was alone.
Her anger came back upon her, and then curiosity. What was he thinking about, as he paced his room like a caged squirrel? About the trouble she was likely to give him—and what a fool he had been to take the job? She would like to go and reason with him. The excess of vitality that was in her, sighing for fresh worlds to conquer, urged her to vehement and self-confident action,—action for its own sake, for the mere joy of the heat and movement that go with it. Part of the impulse depended on the new light in which the gentleman walking about downstairs had begun to appear to her. She had known him hitherto as "Mummy's friend," always to be counted upon when any practical difficulty arose, and ready on occasion to put in a sharp word in defence of an invalid's peace, when a girl's unruliness threatened it. Remembering one or two such collisions, Helena felt her cheeks burn, as she hung over the hall, in the darkness. But those had been such passing matters. Now, as she recalled the expression of his eyes, during their clash at the dinner-table, she realized, with an excitement which was not disagreeable, that something much more prolonged and serious might lie before her. Accomplished modern, as she knew him to be in most things, he was going to be "stuffy" and "stupid" in some. Lord Donald's proceedings in the matter of Lady Preston evidently seemed to him—she had been made to feel it—frankly abominable. And he was not going to ask the man capable of them within his own doors. Well and good. "But as I don't agree with him—Donald was only larking!—I shall take my own way. A telegram goes anyway to Donald to-morrow morning—and we shall see. So good-night, Cousin Philip!" And blowing a kiss towards the empty hall, she gathered her white skirts round her, and fled laughing towards her own room.
But just as she neared it, a door in front of her, leading to a staircase, opened, and a man in khaki appeared, carrying a candle. It was Captain Lodge, her neighbour at the dinner-table. The young man stared with amazement at the apparition rushing along the gallery towards him,—the girl's floating hair, and flushed loveliness as his candle revealed it. Helena evidently enjoyed his astonishment, and his sudden look of admiration. But before he could speak, she had vanished within her own door, just holding it open long enough to give him a laughing nod before it shut, and darkness closed with it on the gallery.
"A man would need to keep his head with that girl!" thought Captain
Lodge, with tantalized amusement. "But, my hat, what a beauty!"
Meanwhile in the library downstairs a good deal of thinking was going on. Lord Buntingford was taking more serious stock of his new duties than he had done yet. As he walked, smoking, up and down, his thoughts were full of his poor little cousin Rachel Pitstone. She had always been a favourite of his; and she had always known him better than any other person among his kinsfolk. He had found it easy to tell her secrets, when nobody else could have dragged a word from him; and as a matter of fact she had known before she died practically all that there was to know about him. And she had been so kind, and simple and wise. Had she perhaps once had a tendresse for him—before she met Ned Pitstone?—and if things had gone—differently—might he not, perhaps, have married her? Quite possibly. In any case the bond between them had always been one of peculiar intimacy; and in looking back on it he had nothing to reproach himself with. He had done what he could to ease her suffering life. Struck down in her prime by a mortal disease, a widow at thirty, with her one beautiful child, her chief misfortune had been the melancholy and sensitive temperament, which filled the rooms in which she lived as full of phantoms as the palace of Odysseus in the vision of Theoclymenus.
She was afraid for her child; afraid for her friend; afraid for the world. The only hope of happiness for a woman, she believed, lay in an honest lover, if such a lover could be found. Herself an intellectual, and a freed spirit, she had no trust in any of the new professional and technical careers into which she saw women crowding. Sex seemed to her now as always the dominating fact of life. Votes did not matter, or degrees, or the astonishing but quite irrelevant fact, as the papers announced it, that women should now be able not only to fit but to plan a battleship. Love, and a child's clinging mouth, and the sweetness of a Darby and Joan old age, for these all but the perverted women had always lived, and would always live.
She saw in her Helena the strong beginnings of sex. But she also realized the promise of intelligence, of remarkable brain development, and it seemed to her of supreme importance that sex should have the first innings in her child's life.
"If she goes to college at once, as soon as I am gone, and her brain and her ambition are appealed to, before she has time to fall in love, she will develop on that side, prematurely—marvellously—and the rest will atrophy. And then when the moment for falling in love is over—and with her it mayn't be a long one—she will be a lecturer, a member of Parliament perhaps—a Socialist agitator—a woman preacher,—who knows?—there are all kinds of possibilities in Helena. But she will have missed her chance of being a woman, and a happy one; and thirty years hence she will realize it, when it is too late, and think bitterly of us both. Believe me, dear Philip, the moment for love won't last long in Helena's life. I have seen it come and go so rapidly, in the case of some of the most charming women. For after all, the world is now so much richer for women; and many women don't know their own minds in time, or get lost among the new landmarks. And of course all women can't marry; and thank God, there are a thousand new chances of happiness for those who don't. But there are some—and Helena, I am certain, will be one—who will be miserable, and probably wicked, unless they fall in love, and are happy. And it is a strait gate they will have to pass through. For their own natures and the new voices in the world will tempt them to this side and that. And before they know where they are—the moment will have gone—the wish—and the power.
"So, dear Philip, lend yourself to my plan; though you may seem to yourself the wrong person, and though it imposes—as I know it will—a rather heavy responsibility on you. But once or twice you have told me that I have helped you—through difficult places. That makes me dare to ask you this thing. There is no one else I can ask. And it won't be bad for you, Philip,—it is good for us all, to have to think intimately—seriously—for some other human being or beings; and owing to circumstances, not your own fault, you have missed just this in life—except for your thoughts and care for me—bless you always, my dear friend.