She slipped into sight the volume with which she occasionally beguiled the devout labours of her knitting. With a gentle little air of excellence she laid it down again unostentatiously, but so that the gilt lettering showed along its cover. It was the ‘Life of Bishop Boffatt,’ by Three Nieces, with a ‘Foreword’ from Archdeacon Widge.

CHAPTER XX

All this clearly indicated that Gundred’s interference was urgently needed in the cause of holiness. Day by day she watched the situation, feeling more and more certain that her mission was the rescue of her husband. He, meanwhile, bore hourly, with increasing pain, the tantalizing torments of his paradoxical proximity to the thing he had so long looked for and now had found in vain. Ivor Restormel wondered at his good fortune, and only occasionally noticed the crochets of Kingston and Gundred. Of the two, Gundred had by far the more tactful temperament. Her dislike, now fast verging towards religious horror, was not to be discerned except by an eye far more keen than Ivor Restormel’s. A serene gravity, a cool calm were so much the dominant characteristics of her nature that the exaggeration of her gravity, the additional chill in her calm passed unnoticed by one so little practised in observation. The restless eagerness of Kingston was more plain and more distressing. Ivor Restormel sometimes wondered what it was that he did or failed to do that so roused disappointment and annoyance in this friend who never really seemed a friend, and yet had gratuitously done so much for him. However, he was not of a temper to let such matters oppress him. He put them behind him, and disregarded any tension that he might ever be inclined to discern in his relations with his employer or his employer’s wife.

So the days passed unsatisfactorily by, until the time came for the family’s removal to Ivescar. Deep in his heart Kingston had a dim hope that the sight of Ivescar might once more rekindle a flash of memory in the boy. It was with trembling anxiety that he watched the first impressions that Ivor received from his first sight of the Yorkshire moors. Would the veil lift again, for even the briefest glance from the soul that dwelt behind? Brakelond had roused the sleeping personality in the boy; surely it was only to be expected that Ivescar, where so much had happened, could do no less? And Ivor gratified Kingston’s hope up to a certain point—only, as before, in doing so to rouse a keener desire. For from the first sight he instinctively loved the mountain-country, entered into its charm, appreciated the solemn majesty of it. He felt, he said, as if he had known it all his life, as if he and the hills were friends of long standing. And Kingston, hearing this, listened with quiet face but with a heart agonized in suspense. The door seemed to be drawing ajar for a greater revelation. The very next moment might bring some recognition. Kingston would not admit to himself the hopelessness of his hope. Eagerly he waited for what the boy might say next. And the door opened no further, but closed again as fast as ever. Never again could that hidden consciousness of Ivor’s wake to know itself. The expectation that it ever would was groundless, tormenting, delusive as all the pleasures held out by false desire. Kingston suffered more than ever, as each fresh disappointment grew more painful than the last, though more and more surely anticipated. The boy knew nothing; no veil could be lifted from his eyes; he enjoyed his surroundings simply, boyishly, without any sense of deep memories out of which they were built.

And then, into the midst of these unhappy combinations was precipitated the new element of Jim Darnley’s presence. Jim Darnley at fifteen was unfeignedly glad to find a companion not so very much ahead of him in years. Ivor Restormel was young for his age; Jim Darnley, as an only son, was inclined to be older than his; and the instant fellowship that was established between the two set the last seal on Gundred’s righteous indignation. Kingston did not care whom or what the earthly Ivor Restormel might care for, so long as his company might still hold out hopes of glimpses from the past. Moreover, he was glad that Jim should have a companion, and should, by taking so comfortable a fancy to him, justify his father in the choice of a secretary. As a man, and as a man already preoccupied with other matters, he had no sort of inclination to be jealous of his son’s friendships. With Gundred, however, the case was altogether different. She loved her only child with the fierce and almost savage affection often felt by a woman who cannot understand the object of that affection. Naturally the fact was the last thing that she would allow her soul to face, but in the jealousy with which she regarded all new factors in his life might be read her unacknowledged fear that her intimacy with him might not be as strong as she made a point of believing it to be. She was one of those women who are by nature more mother than wife, and in the fullness of uneventful years had insensibly come to transfer a good deal of her old urgent passion for Kingston to the child that she had borne him. In connection with Gundred, mild and cool, ferocity and passion are words that sound oddly, and yet, under the suave mildness, the dispassionate decorum of her manner, her feelings for her son had a certain definite passion, and even ferocity. That the boy never knew it was the misfortune of his mother’s training; she would not betray the fact of her love, and had no thought that by so betraying it she might be able to supplement, in his eyes, the deficiencies of her understanding.

For Gundred was incapable of any true companionship with her son. He admired her, he loved her distantly and diffidently, but he shrank from her, and had nothing intimate or warm to say. That she was not conscious of this flaw in their relation may be called the compensating mercy of that weakness in herself which had developed that flaw. She was by now almost entirely devoid of intuitive intelligence. Or, rather, perhaps, she had so diligently trained herself that, in the long course of time, she had drilled her mind out of any faint tendency to perceive and analyze that it may ever have possessed. Her sense of decency commanded her to live entirely on the surface of things; prying into secret motives and feelings she considered vulgar and indecent. Accordingly, if lip-kisses were properly exchanged, and superficial affection reigned, she made a point of considering that the soul-relations thus symbolized must be eminently satisfactory. She looked no further than the symbol, and disliked the idea that kisses and terms of endearment may, after all, not stand for the love whose emblems they are—may even, at a pinch, be used to disguise the lack of that love. And yet her hidden, shamefaced jealousy may be taken to have been the last flickering phantom of the natural woman’s insight into domestic relations. All his life she had grudged her son his friendships, gently nipped them with the frost of her criticism, sedulously taught him to find fault and be captious.

The education had borne no fruit in Jim, except a bitter one for Gundred. His nature was too warm and sunny to have any real communion with his mother’s frosts, and as soon as he found that she always had something coldly unpleasant to say of everyone he liked, he had responded, not by discarding his friends, but by drawing farther and farther away from his mother. With the merciless clear-sightedness of the young, so vivid, if so limited, he had judged his mother by her own precepts long since, and found her wanting. She endlessly preached the loveliest morality, the tenderest forbearance towards all the world, the most sedulous avoidance of harsh or censorious comment. And yet she was always sure to pick some fatal flaw in all his friends, to discover and expose some blemish, to insist on some fault or weakness. And the very fact that her criticisms were always more or less just militated, in the end, against her influence. For Jim found that he liked his friends more than he disliked their failings, and, taking their side accordingly, he gradually came to look upon his mother’s unerring eye for other people’s shortcomings as the worst enemy of his own happiness. Thus pitiably, by the exaggeration of her own virtues, through the keenness of her own maternal love, Gundred laid up for herself inevitable disappointment in regard to the one thing that her heart desired, and innocently prepared for herself a dark version of the mother’s tragedy. By now Jim had his friends and his life to himself; outside that precinct, walled and guarded, stood his mother, alone, too proud to admit that she stood outside, too wilfully blind to see the unbroken wall that fronted her, and, in any case, too proud to clamour for admittance.

But the friendship that immediately arose between Jim and Ivor Restormel was to Gundred as a sudden light of revelation, laying bare the fact of her exclusion from her son’s life. Characteristically, even to herself, she would not admit what she saw, but attributed the novel pain to her anxiety for Jim’s welfare. That Jim should have friends of his own age had been grudgingly conceded as an odious necessity, to be cavilled at and snubbed, but impossible to deny. Now, however, that the pernicious influence that had so mysteriously gripped her husband threatened to enthral her son as well, Gundred told herself that all her maternal duties, no less than her conjugal, commanded her to take the field against the powers of darkness. Her jealousy masqueraded as pure motherly zeal, and its very bitterness was masked from her own sight by the disguise of duty. Her feeling, too, was intensified by the failure of all her usual weapons to discredit Ivor Restormel in the eyes of his new friend. Jim generally sat and answered her in submissive affirmatives, while she gently dissected his friends and pointed out how entirely unworthy they all were of approval, though not, of course, of pity; now, however, he could not even give her criticism the courtesy of apparent acquiescence.

He rose up in defence of Ivor, instead of, as usual, listening pleasantly and then going his own way undeterred—a course which long experience had taught him was the wisest, especially as his mother was quite unable to notice that her advice was disregarded, if only her advice had been politely received. In vain she pointed out to him that Ivor Restormel’s mind was cheap and crude; that his orthodoxy was tepid, his manners unnecessarily enthusiastic, his whole deportment lacking in finish and refinement. Jim could not listen in respectful silence; he protested, he pleaded. He had become all of a sudden disloyal and treacherous to his mother. Gundred regarded all opposition from her son as unfilial, and could not conceive the possibility of his having any right to hold an opinion at variance with hers. She claimed to provide him with all his thoughts, henceforth and for ever, on the ground of having in the distant past provided him with a body to hold them. That her son was an individual she could never recognise, and on the rare occasions of his overt revolt, felt the indignant astonishment of Balaam when he discovered that his ass had a voice of its own. Accordingly, if Jim now opposed her criticisms, it was only a treason and a sin engendered in him by this evil spirit that had captured him, and every word that he said in Ivor’s favour only served to deepen his mother’s feeling that she was certainly called upon to rid her son and her husband of this threatening danger that had already produced such dire results in the disaffection of her nearest and dearest.