That was how his mother found him when she came in search of him. The lunch-gong had brought no Mark; and no one had seen him, except Maurice, who, from his window, had caught sight of the lovers entering the wood. All the morning she had been secretly anxious. Now she felt certain something was wrong, and telling the others not to wait, she fled out to his favourite haunt, hardly knowing what she expected to find.
He did not hear her till she set foot in the summer-house; and the wild idea smote him—Could it be Bel?
With a start he looked up; and at sight of his face Lady Forsyth’s heart stood still.
‘My darling Boy, what has happened?’
Mark frowned and straightened his shoulders. ‘She’s chucked me—that’s all,’ he said in a dazed voice. ‘They’ve poisoned her point of view between them.’ His eyes challenged hers. ‘Mother, you’ve been right all along. I suppose—you even foresaw—this!’
‘Dear, indeed I didn’t.’ Her hand closed on the rough woodwork. She so longed to gather him to her heart. ‘I was anxious—a little. But I hoped better things of her.’
‘So did I. We were a pair of fools, it seems. And there’s an end of that.’ With a gesture he dismissed the subject, and added, almost in his normal voice, ‘What about the meeting? Any luck?’
‘Yes. People are quite keen. But—you’ll hardly feel like speaking.’
‘Oh, I’ll speak all right. The King’s affairs come a long way first. I’ve had enough of false perspectives this morning. I’ll probably speak all the better for having—flung in everything.’ He sighed. ‘Give me to-morrow, Mums, to pull myself together, and I’ll do any mortal thing that’s required of me. But I can’t show up yet—you understand? And it’s you that must do the telling—as before!’
A spasm of pain crossed his face and she passed a hand over his hair.
He drew back sharply. ‘Oh—not that,’ he murmured; then checked himself and tried to smile. ‘Sorry. I’m feeling—all raw, Mother. I can’t be civil even to you.’ He could not tell her why the feel of a woman’s hand on his hair was unendurable, and would be, for some time to come.
‘I understand, dear,’ she said, and turned to go. ‘Shall I send anything to the studio?’
He shook his head. ‘Later on, perhaps. Dinner time. You might come up yourself.’
‘Of course I will.’
And so she left him.
Lunch was nearly over when she got back. They had kept some hot for her; but she hardly touched it.
Briefly, without comment, she told them her news: and escaped with Keith into the study. To him she could speak more freely. He loved Mark like a brother; a good deal more, indeed, than the average brother: and she knew—though neither had spoken of it—that he had shared her distrust of Bel.
But her thoughts and her words were of Mark only as she stood beside the man who so intimately shared their lives, her small hand clenched upon the edge of the high mantelshelf; tears in her eyes; but none in her voice.
‘He faces trouble so exactly like his father,’ she said, when she had told him of Mark’s refusal to postpone the meeting. ‘But Richard’s phlegm went deeper. Mark, underneath, has all my terrible sensibility; though he won’t let me see it except accidentally.’
Keith said nothing. He was not given to superfluous comment; and on the whole she found his silences more satisfactory than other people’s talk. He knew she was more or less thinking aloud. She was not even looking at him, but at a full-length photograph of her husband—a powerful figure of a man.
‘It’s so strange,’ she went on in the same subdued tone. ‘I sometimes see Richard’s very self looking at me out of Mark’s eyes. When the look comes I seem actually to feel him there. Twice this morning I’ve seen it. Once when Mark spoke of war and again when he spoke of—that wretched girl. Oh Keith—I hate her!’
The low voice broke unmistakably; and she bowed her forehead on the back of her hand.
Macnair stood looking at her, his keen eyes clouded with tenderness. A moment he seemed to hesitate, then deliberately, he laid his hand on her shoulder. ‘Helen, don’t break your heart over it,’ he said. ‘We men pull through these things: and Mark is made of sterner stuff, if I know him, than to let a girl like Miss Alison smash him up for good. More likely to do that by marrying him than by leaving him. There’s a crumb of consolation for you!’
She raised her head now and smiled at him through tears that were not allowed to fall.
‘If there is such a crumb anywhere, trust you to find it! What a blessing you are to us, Keith!’ As his hand slipped from her shoulder she caught and held it a minute. Then her thoughts went back to her son. ‘I wonder—will he ever have eyes for Sheila again, after this?’
‘More likely after this than before. Sheila’s a born mother-woman, a little Sister of Compassion. And we men are such fools, that we’re very apt to overlook the beauty of that type till we’ve suffered a few hard knocks from the other sort. The revulsion from that type, when it comes, is curiously complete. But it takes time. As for our Sheila, whether she would have him, after this, is another matter.’
Helen sighed. ‘I can’t forgive Maurice yet,’ she said. ‘I wonder if he’ll enlist?’ And their talk slid back to the one all-absorbing subject—the War.
As for Mark, he spent that interminable afternoon tramping endlessly, aimlessly over the hills; hoping by the mechanical motion to deaden thought and ease the pain within. Where all memory was intolerable, it hurt him most to recall how cruelly she had tempted him by tone and touch; as it were bribing him to be false to his own convictions. The whole thing bewildered almost as much as it hurt him. There were moments when he came near to hating her; proof, though he did not realise it, that the love she evoked was strongly tinctured with baser metal.
And all the while Bobs, the incurably faithful, trotted to heel or gambolled coquettishly under his master’s eyes without eliciting a word or caress.
Hunger and lengthening shadows drew him back at last to the home he loved yet now acutely desired to avoid. She had poisoned even that. Yet how his heart ached for her! How the unregenerate blood in his veins craved the touch of her lips and hands!
He reached his study without encountering anything more human than a stray housemaid; and there the first thing he lighted on was his own tender and beautiful little Study of Contemplation. Standing just inside the door, he feasted his eyes on the soft, still face, the small head with its close-fitting cap of hair and the long-limbed grace of her figure. Then rage flamed in him. He felt like smashing the thing with a hammer and flinging away the pieces as he had flung away her ring. A mere pulse-beat of hesitation saved him and the artist prevailed over the man. He could not murder the work of his hands. Later on, he would give it to Maurice to wean him from the sin of impressionism. Meanwhile, he lifted it as tenderly as he would have touched the original, put it away in a corner cupboard and turned the key.
He had scarcely done so when he heard his mother outside.
‘Open the door, dear,’ she said. ‘My hands are full.’
He opened it and relieved her of a tray set out with appetising food and wine.
‘Stunning of you, Mums,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry.’
To her delight he ate everything and drank three glasses of wine, while they discussed ways and means; the money they could realise, the men they could raise for England in this most critical hour of her destiny. Except for the absence of laughter and badinage in their talk, it was as if nothing abnormal had happened. But Lady Forsyth did not fail to note the disappearance of his terra-cotta treasure; and she was sinful enough to hope it had been destroyed.
She stayed more than half an hour and left him with a fervent ‘God bless you!’ But this time she attempted no caress. She understood.
Next morning, after breakfast, she lingered in her turret room, wondering what he would do with himself, hoping he would come and let her know. He did come; and her heart ached at the tired look in his eyes.
‘I’m going to take the “Watersprite” up the loch, Mums,’ he told her. ‘And I’ll be away all day. Grant has stocked her well, so I shan’t starve. Don’t be an idiot if I’m late and go imagining I’ve drowned myself. At a time like this, a man’s life is not his own to chuck away. Besides, I’m not the sort. And—there happens to be you,’ he added with a travesty of a smile. ‘On the whole I’d sooner have the honour of being shot by the Germans—’
‘Mark—don’t!’ She drew in a sharp breath.
‘Sorry, Mums. But it’s true. By the way, as I’m wasting some valuable time hadn’t we better stay over Sunday?’
‘That would make things easier,’ she admitted. ‘But I thought—you’d rather get away soon.’
‘My dear Mother, don’t fash yourself with fancies. If it’ll ease things, we’ll jolly well stay. I don’t care a damn.’
The spark of irritation was purely refreshing: and he never apologised to her for ‘language’ accidental or otherwise. So complete was the comrade spirit between them that he prided himself on his habit of speaking to her straightly as man to man. More than once, in University days, he had filled some prospective visitor with envy by the casual remark: ‘Don’t be alarmed if you hear me scrapping with my Mother. She’s the right sort. I can talk to her just exactly as I talk to you.’
Now, in answer to his outburst, she said quietly: ‘Very well, Monday. I’ll tell the others.’
‘That’s all right. And don’t you be a fool about me!’
So he left her and she did her best to obey him; but the faint consolation that his trouble brought him nearer to herself was obliterated by her acute consciousness of his hidden pain and resentment against the cause of it.
That grey, weary Thursday seemed as if it would never pass. Clouds had rolled up out of the West. Scudding showers lashed the loch; and through them she could picture Mark driving the little steam-yacht he loved. Long after sunset he came back wet to the skin; but looking, on the whole, more like himself. He had fought and conquered something out there in the rain and wind. But he spent what remained of the evening in his studio as before.
On Friday evening, when they were gathered in the square hall waiting to start, he strode casually down stairs and nodded his greetings as if he had merely been away for a couple of nights. He had prepared a speech, he said, that ought to make the men of Ardmuir sit up to some purpose: and Keith, watching the little incident from the study threshold, murmured: ‘Well done, old boy!’
A second car had been ordered to accommodate the party; and while they made ready, Mark was left momentarily alone with Sheila in the hall.
Then she took courage and looked up at him.
‘Mark—I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I may say that much, mayn’t I?’
For a second he held her gaze. Then: ‘You may say anything you please,’ he answered, ‘when you look like that! Truth is,’ he paused, ‘she’s never been taught to see things the right way. It was just—that one couldn’t make her understand.’
‘Poor Bel! She must be very unhappy.’
‘Bel—unhappy!’ His astonishment was manifest. But then—Sheila had not seen the look in her eyes. ‘I doubt it,’ he added with a touch of bitterness.
‘I don’t,’ the soft voice persisted. ‘She’s bound to be—if she cares.’
‘But if she cared, how could she—?’
The note of pain in his voice gave her still more courage.
‘You said—she didn’t understand, and that poisons everything.’
Touched to the heart he said impulsively ‘Sheila, what a wise little Mouse you are!’
It was his old nickname for her and she drew in a quick breath. ‘Not so very! But I do know—about caring.’
‘The first best knowledge surely,’ he said: then Keith appeared and bade them hurry up.
But her eyes, shining on him through tears, and her words that gave him a new point of view lingered in his memory. Odd how readily he could speak of Bel to Sheila, how hardly to his mother, with whom he could talk of everything in earth or heaven. And surely no one but Sheila could have been inspired to couple sympathy for himself with so tender and delicate a plea for Bel. If she were right, if Bel were really suffering, the door of hope might still be ajar. Meantime there was his speech; for which he had made comprehensive notes; there were convictions and appeals that he must drive home to the hearts of his hearers; and while he sat smoking in silence beside Keith—who drove the car—words full of vigour and fire came crowding into his brain—
When at length he stood on the platform waiting for his clamorous welcome to subside, the flame of his own conviction burnt away all nervousness, all dread of failure; and for half an hour he spoke as none had imagined he could speak, himself least of all.
‘First rate,’ Keith said quietly as he sat down amid a storm of cheers.
‘Heaven knows how I did it!’ he answered under cover of the noise. ‘Wish I could bolt now.’
But the Provost had risen and was praising him to his face; a far worse ordeal than the one he had so triumphantly weathered. The recruiting result, in figures, was not sensational: but Ardmuir was obviously impressed. It begged leave to distribute Sir Mark’s ‘great recruiting speech’ as a leaflet; and Sir Mark, privately overwhelmed, gave gracious consent, with the air of one who made brilliant speeches as easily as he ate his breakfast.
‘Really, old boy, you ought to stand for Parliament,’ Keith said as they drove home. ‘If that speech of yours is well distributed, the men will soon be tumbling in. One has to give them time up here. The Radical spirit is so strong in our beloved country.’
‘And the beauty of it is that the bulk of ’em, if they only knew it, remain Radicals just because they’re so conservative!’ Mark retorted with a flash of his mother’s humour. ‘But Parliament—no thanks; not yet awhile.’
Saturday was given over to rounding up his own men and business connected with his mother’s small estate. That evening he conquered, not without difficulty, a temptation to stroll down into the village and discover whether the Rowans was yet empty of its treasure; and when the last post came in he knew.
Glancing through half a dozen envelopes, he came suddenly on Bel’s handwriting. His mother, who was watching him, saw, without appearing to see, that he pocketed all his letters unopened and, after a reasonable interval, rose and left the room. It was easy to guess what had happened; and she rated herself for the horrid sinking at her heart. She could not sleep till she knew; but as Mark did not reappear, she went up early and, in passing, knocked at his door.
‘Good-night, dear,’ she said.
He opened it and stood before her—transfigured.
‘Come along in, Mums.’ Drawing her forward he closed the door behind her. ‘Read that!’
He thrust a faintly scented sheet of note-paper into her hand, and she obeyed.
Bel’s communication was brief, moving, and very much to the point.
‘Are you generous enough to forgive me—and come to me?’ she wrote without preamble. ‘If you can keep it up—I can’t. I saw and heard you at Ardmuir. You are brave. As for me, I’m bitterly sorry and ashamed. I hate it all still. But if you wish it, I am yours—unconditionally, Bel. I shall be alone here after 10.30. I can’t face Inveraig.’
Lady Forsyth had to read that note more than once before she could feel sure of her voice. To her it seemed studied, consciously written for effect: and the writing itself was equally studied, with the same touch of hardness in it that showed in the level line of eyelids and brows.
‘Well?’ Mark was growing impatient.
‘You can forgive her?’ she asked, looking steadily up at him.
‘Of course I can. And you must too. She’s sorry. She—cares. Isn’t that enough for anyone?’
‘But she’s not convinced.’
‘I’ll convince her, in time. I hope she’ll come south with us to-morrow.’
Lady Forsyth drew in her lips and at once his hands came down on her shoulders.
‘Look here, Mums, I won’t have you antagonising and doubting her any more—after this. It spoils everything. You might make an effort if only for my sake. It’s beyond belief getting her back; and your attitude’s the only flaw in my happiness. Has been all along.’
She was silent a minute, then she put her two hands on his breast. ‘Dear, I will make an effort for your sake. I refuse to be the flaw in your happiness! It’s a degrading position for a mother.’
He stooped and kissed her for the first time since Wednesday morning. ‘Bless you!’ he said. ‘Good-night.’
Alone in her room, confronting this new, unwelcome development, she realised how, through all the pain of his grief, she had been upheld by the secret conviction that his loss was gain; some day he would know it. Now the old miserable uncertainty was nagging at her afresh. In her heart, she distrusted the sincerity of the whole incident. But she had given her word to Mark, and Bel should have the benefit of all the doubts in creation.
Mark’s watch was three minutes short of the half-hour when he stood outside the square grey house perched on the hillside above the road. A white curtain fluttered; and a glimpse of Bel’s face signified that the coast was clear.
When he entered the homely sitting-room and closed the door she did not run to meet him as a simpler woman would have done. She remained standing near the mantelpiece on the farther side of the square table, smiling her cool provocative smile.
‘Mark!’ she said softly. ‘I’ve been wondering and wondering would you really come?’
By that time the square table was no longer between them and Mark was holding her as if he could never let her go.
‘Would you have broken your heart, if I hadn’t?’ he asked at last.
‘Very nearly!’ she admitted, with the slowest possible lift of her lashes.
‘But, Bel—if you cared, how could you pull it through? How could you look at me with your eyes like bits of glass?’
‘You forget,’ she said, ‘I can act. It was because—I cared so much; because I couldn’t bear the idea of your taking part in that horror out there; and because you were so obstinate, that in the end I put on the strongest screw I could think of—and it wasn’t so strong as I supposed. That’s the inner history of the last three days.’
He regarded her searchingly, taking it all in. ‘Women are queer things,’ he said. ‘Did you really suppose I’d capitulate—under the screw?’
‘I half hoped so—till I heard your speech. Then I began to see that I’d never known the real Mark: only Bel’s lover.’
‘And—did you approve of the real Mark?’
She laughed and kissed him.
‘Honestly, I found him rather alarming. Too big altogether for a mere Bel. But I wanted him more than ever. And now I know he’s still mine, I can’t let him go!’
For Mark there was only one flaw in those first raptures of reunion: and for that flaw his mother was unwittingly responsible. Nothing would induce Bel to come up to Inveraig or to travel south with the Forsyths on Monday.
‘I can’t face them yet awhile,’ she persisted, ‘specially your Mother. She won’t easily forgive me for hurting you so. No real mother could. Besides, she was probably thanking her stars for your escape; and now I’ve turned up again, like a bad penny!’
‘Bel!’
But she laid her hand upon his lips.
‘Hush and listen to me. It wouldn’t be fair on Harry either; stranding her with those two. In ten days, we can both come south and a regenerate Bel can dare to pay you a visit. Their minds will be full of such big terrible things by then that they’ll take me for granted. As for you—the real Mark will be so swamped with his responsibilities that there would be no time for love-making, even if I came.’
In the end he was forced to admit that she was right. Three days of fighting himself had not been without a steadying effect on his impatient spirit: and so the matter was settled.
Rain and wind had ceased. They spent all the afternoon and evening together on the water; and on Monday the Forsyth party travelled down to Wynchcombe Friars.
At no time could Lady Forsyth leave Inveraig without a pang: and never had it been sharper than on that 10th of August with the glory and anguish of Belgium’s gallant stand beating on her brain, and the poignant question at her heart—when, and in what circumstances, would they four see that grey rugged house and the lochs and hills of Scotland again?
Wynchcombe Friars was a singularly perfect relic of the Tudor period. It rambled, it blossomed into irrelevant gables, it took you to its heart. The lordly spaciousness of an eighteenth-century mansion seemed dull, featureless, by contrast with its individuality, its friendly charm. And of all its beautiful old rooms was none more individual than Mark’s studio, with its oak-panelled walls, deep window-seats and leaded casements that opened upon the sea of pinetops he had described to Bel. For him and his mother, it was the soul of the house; and in nothing was their intimacy more evident than in the fact that this, his holy of holies, was hers also. A certain square bay window that caught the last of the sun upon the pines held her armchair of dull blue brocade, her book-case and elbow table. Blue prevailed also in the window-seats, the casement curtains and the Turkish rugs on the polished floor.
The studio itself contained little beyond Mark’s paraphernalia, his writing-table and a few pieces of priceless old furniture. The spirit of Michael Angelo pervaded the place:—models of his statues and groups, sepia studies by Mark from the great friezes; and a portrait of the Florentine’s rugged head occupied the place of honour above the mantelpiece. The blue-tiled fireplace beneath was flanked by Mark’s first two essays in statuary: symbolic figures of Triumph and Defeat. Triumph, a splendid nude, stood poised upon a rock; arms uplifted, head flung back. Defeat, a fallen Lucifer, still sullenly defiant, leaned upon his battered sword; a figure of sombre strength. The Viking, who accompanied Mark on his moves, was set in a dark oak niche that served for frame and threw him into strong relief.
Still, beneath all the beauty and friendliness of the room, there lurked the same unobtrusively ascetic note that had been more marked in the simpler studio at Inveraig.
So at least thought Maurice Lenox, who lounged smoking in an armchair, wondering, secretly, how Mark could bring himself to leave it all, patriotism or no. He, personally, had found it quite enough of a wrench to shut up his modest rooms in Chelsea—till when? God, or the devil, alone could tell.
He had gone straight from Inveraig to his home in Surrey, wondering what possible use there could be for such as he in this terrible galère:—he, who had small knowledge of firearms and so heartily detested taking life that he could not even find pleasure in fishing. Mark had suggested enlisting in the Artists’ Rifles: a suggestion since confirmed by Sir Eldred Lenox, with a blunt admonition to look sharp about it. Sir Nevil Sinclair, of Bramleigh Beeches, commanded them. He would send the boy’s name up for a commission the moment he was reasonably fit for it: and on the whole Maurice found it a relief to have the question of choice taken out of his hands. He had stipulated for a few days of his promised visit to Wynchcombe Friars, before taking the plunge; and those few days—with Macnair for the only other guest—had laid the foundation of a genuine friendship with Forsyth, whose finer qualities shone out notably in this hour of crisis.
Whereas at Inveraig he had at times seemed selfish and a trifle dictatorial, here, as responsible landowner, his mastery and force of character showed in a new light. And as for selfishness—his whole mind seemed set upon the welfare of his people and his place in the coming time of stress. Now, at the very moment when he was most needed, and most longed to be on the spot, he was cheerfully and actively engaged in transferring the reins of government into other hands. To Maurice—a man of random moods and many points of view—such strength and singleness of purpose seemed enviable as it was admirable; and the fact that Forsyth had remained unshaken even by Miss Alison’s defection had made a deep impression on the lighter nature of his friend. Since then, he had learnt a good deal more, not only of Sir Mark in a fresh manifestation, but of England’s greatest asset—sadly misprized in a democratic age—the hereditary lords of the land.
To-day his brief respite was over.
At the moment, he and Mark had effected their escape from the infliction of war-talk, as perpetrated by Mrs. Melrose and the Vicar’s wife, at the tea-table on the terrace. Sir Mark’s sudden engagement, by the way, had been a severe shock to Mrs. Melrose, who suspected that Sheila must have played her cards remarkably ill. But that, after all, was how one might expect her to play cards of any worldly value. She was her Melrose grandmother all over. Not a drop of Burlton blood in her veins. But the war had dwarfed that personal disappointment: and the good lady was brimming with benevolent schemes for herself and the whole neighbourhood.
Meantime the Vicar’s wife held the field. Having come in quest of a subscription, she had stayed to murmur decorous and very premature lamentations over the undesirable features of billeting and of the Territorial camps: the sort of thing that reduced Lady Forsyth to speechless exasperation. Mark, divided between sympathy and amusement, had watched her holding herself in, till the assertive voice of Mrs. Melrose created a diversion and dubious murmurs were drowned in a flood of propositions for the local housing of Belgians and the conversion of Wendover Court into a luxurious hospital for officers.
‘You, Lady Forsyth, with this heavenly place, ought to specialise on convalescents or nerve-cases’—Mrs. Melrose dearly loved making other people’s plans—‘If we all take a distinctive line, there’ll be no muddle or overlapping. And of course dear little Lady Sinclair will devote herself to the Indians—when they come.’
Privately Helen reflected that if her neighbours continued so to afflict her, the first nerve-case for Wynchcombe Friars would be its own mistress.
It was at this point that Mark had given up waiting for the Sinclairs. Not even the presence of Sheila—who had come over with her mother and was staying on to discuss ‘War plans’—could detain him, once Mrs. Melrose held the field. Basely deserting Lady Forsyth he left word that Sir Nevil, if he should turn up, would be very welcome in the studio.
Now, while Maurice lounged and reflected, he sat at his littered writing-table, a pipe between his teeth, two deep furrows in his forehead. Beyond that littered table the room held no other signs of work. Easel and modelling pedestal stood empty. A woeful tidiness prevailed, and Mark himself looked older, Maurice thought. Small wonder, seeing all that he must forgo at a stroke when his name appeared in the ‘Gazette.’
So, throughout Great Britain, in the same casual unemotional fashion, men of every grade were making the supreme sacrifice, cheerfully putting behind them all that made life worth living—possessions, talents, hardly earned distinction, cherished hopes and still more cherished homes. No doubt many of them, like Maurice, privately rebelled; but they, too, were carried forward by the infection of brave example, if by no higher motive. In Mark’s company, Maurice had felt that infection strongly: but on this his last evening of freedom the artist in him raged afresh against the hideousness and waste and cruelty of modern war.
For ten minutes Mark had been smoking steadily and silently. He had a difficult letter on his mind. Maurice, who had the horrors of Tirlemont on his nerves, felt suddenly impelled to more candid speech than he had hitherto indulged in, lest he be misjudged.
‘I don’t know what your private feelings are, Forsyth,’ he plunged boldly; and Mark started as if he had been waked from a dream. ‘But the more I look at this business of enlisting and going out to slaughter Germans—not to mention the chance of their returning the compliment—the more heartily I hate the whole thing. It’s nothing so simple as mere funk. And it’s not that I’m shirking—you understand.’
‘Oh, yes. I understand,’ Mark rejoined, setting his teeth on the stem of his pipe.
But he did not seem disposed to enlarge on his understanding of his private feelings; and Maurice, whose mixed emotions were clamouring for expression, went on: ‘Mere funk would at least give one something to tackle and overcome. It’s this cursed inferno going on inside one’s head that does the damage. And the beastly thing seems quite independent of one’s thoughts or attention. Just keeps on automatically at the back of my brain. Even when I’m reading or talking, I can hear those infernal guns and shells. I can see the mangled fragments that once were men—the wounds—the blood—the slopes of the Liége forts—’
‘Damn you! Shut up!’ Mark leaned forward suddenly, a spark of anger in his eyes. ‘D’you suppose you’re the only one that’s plagued with an imagination?’
Maurice sighed.
‘Sorry, old chap,’ he said, disappointed, but contrite. ‘It’s a relief all the same. And I thought—you understood—’
‘Of course I do: a long sight too well.’ Mark’s tone was gentler now. ‘If it’s relief you’re after, you’ll get that most effectively by going out yourself; seeing things with your actual eyes: doing things with your actual hands that’ll give you no time for cinematographs in your head. You can thank your stars you’re a man. It’s the women given that way who’ll have the devil’s own time of it. My mother’s one, worse luck; and it’ll come hard on her—when I’m gone.’
Maurice ventured no comment on a subject so poignantly intimate as Lady Forsyth’s anxiety for her one remaining son; nor did Mark seem to expect any. He took a few pulls at his pipe, then reverted to generalities.
‘Don’t write me down an unfeeling brute, Maurice,’ he said with his friendly smile. ‘War’s the roughest game on earth and we’ve got to be a bit rough with ourselves if we’re to play it to any purpose. I’m horribly well aware that the “sorrowful great gift of imagination” is the very deuce on these occasions. A shade less of it in us, who have to do the killing, and a shade more of it in our Westminster Olympians—who have to do the foreseeing and forestalling—would be a pleasanter business for ourselves and a better look-out for the country. They’re an agile crew with their tongues; and if words were bullets, we might be in Berlin the week after next! Personally, I’d like to see most of ’em scrapped “for the duration of the war.” Kitchener paramount, with a picked Council, would pull us through in half the time. But that’s not my business nor yours. It’s for us to play up all we can; thank God for one real Man, and not waste our precious energies in grumbling. There’s a sermon for you. And you brought it on yourself!’
Maurice rose, flung away his cigarette end, and strolled down the length of the room and back.
‘It’s done me a power of good being here,’ he said, coming to a standstill by the mantelpiece and contemplating Mark’s ‘Triumph.’ ‘You’re a man as well as an artist, Forsyth; and the bulk of us are not; I, personally, am cursed with too much of Uncle Michael in my composition.’
Mark laughed.
‘Confound your Uncle Michael! You run along and enlist and kill every German you can lay hands to and your composition will take care of itself. A wee bit stiffening’s all you want; and a wee bit taste of red-hot reality will put some backbone into your studio-bred art, that ennobles nothing and nobody and doesn’t even want to make itself understood. It’s just on the cards that this war—when we’re through with it—may give us an altogether saner and more robust revival of art that will spring naturally from a more robust conception of life: an art that will genuinely reflect the spirit of the age, as Michael Angelo reflects the Renaissance. Our present age of machinery and money-getting has precious little spirit to reflect. No collective convictions. Practically no faith, except in success. Consequently life has no vital use for art: and we’re ousted by the cinematograph. A few, like myself and Sinclair, still hang on to beauty and the classics. The rest, like the bulk of your advanced friends, say “Ugliness, be thou my beauty” and proceed to make a little hell of their own in the Grafton Galleries! Just at present, Maurice, the mere artist is the most superfluous creature on God’s earth....’
He suddenly laughed and checked himself. ‘Off on my hobby-horse again! Why the deuce don’t you chuck a book at me, old chap? Too much spouting at these recruiting shows will make me an infliction to my friends. Ah—there goes Mrs. Melrose! Joy for Mother! Likewise the devout Mrs. Clutterbuck, who thinks to advertise her own virtue by maligning better folk than herself. Come on down. We’ll get the tail-end of tea and the poor dears will need cheering up.’
They found the poor dears in very fair spirits—considering. Helen was delighted at recapturing Sheila; and the girl herself made no secret of her distaste for the restless superficial activities of her own home. A telegram from Sir Nevil Sinclair explained his non-appearance and begged Mark not to fail him at the Bramleigh meeting next day. Then, tea being removed and the others dispersed, Mark found himself alone with Sheila, whom he had scarcely seen since the day of Bel’s regeneration.
‘It’s good to get you back again, Mouse,’ he said, with brotherly directness: and as she merely smiled without looking up, he allowed his eyes to linger on her face. ‘But I’m not sure I approve of the massage plan, specially if it means careering off to France with Miss Videlle.’
Sheila hesitated. ‘I thought—if you married—there might be Bel. But if Mums really needs me, I’d leave anything, anyone ... for her. She knows that.’ The girl’s voice throbbed with feeling and a faint colour showed in her cheeks. ‘I’m very doubtful, though, whether she could or would stay here long—without you.’
Mark started and frowned.
‘She must! She’ll be safe here; and there’s no end of useful work for her on the spot. All the same—’ he paused, looking deep into the heart of the wood, at pine-stems rosy with shafts of light. ‘I believe you know best. She won’t stop. She’d break her heart. War comes cruel hard on the women.’
Sheila said nothing: but the set of her lips showed a faint line of strain that he had not noticed before. ‘Come for a quarter-deck prowl with me, Mouse,’ he said.
They paced the wide-flagged terrace, veined with moss, till near dinner-time; and only at the last did Mark speak the thought uppermost in his mind. They had reached the far end when he came to a standstill and faced her squarely.
‘Sheila—it goes against the grain asking favours for Bel, even of you and Mother; but you were such a brick before; and now—it’s a bit of an ordeal for her facing you all after—what happened up there. Otherwise she’d have been here sooner. Of course I’ll make her speak to Mums straight away, which may clear the air, between them. But I want you all to be ever so kind and not let her feel a shadow of awkwardness. Just pick up the threads again as if nothing had happened. Will you—for my sake?’
Sheila was leaning now against the balustrade, her hands pressed palm downwards on the stone work.
‘Yes, Mark,’ she said in an odd, contained voice, ‘I’ll do anything I can for your sake. But in my heart—’ she suddenly looked up at him with her clear honest eyes, ‘I can’t forgive her—ever!’
‘You?’ His surprise brought the blood to her cheeks. ‘But when it happened you were so—understanding. It was you who took the edge off my bitterness.’
‘Because then—I didn’t understand,’ Sheila explained with difficulty. ‘I thought she had really lost you through her own blindness; and—I was sorry for her. But afterwards, one couldn’t help suspecting it was all ... that perhaps she was simply ... putting on the screw.’
‘She admitted as much,’ he said, looking away across the rose garden.
‘Mark! How could she?’ Her low tone vibrated like a smitten harp-string.
‘That’s the mystery to a masculine brain. It hurt—considerably. But it seems women do these things.’
Sheila checked a natural impulse to repudiate the sweeping assertion. She saw him deliberately erecting a screen for Bel, at the expense of others; but she had already been candid enough, and she would not permit herself to insinuate disparagement.
Her enigmatical silence urged Mark to add: ‘Bel’s had her share of unhappiness, anyhow. She didn’t enjoy those three days much more than I did and she’s lost more than a week down here. So just be good to her, you deceptive little bit of adamant—and I’ll bless you from my heart.’
‘That’s bribery!’ Sheila said laughing, and straightening her shoulders. ‘I don’t take payment for my services. But it’s time to go and dress for dinner!’
As they strolled back to the house she caught herself reflecting quite philosophically on the impunity with which the Bels of this world may steal horses, while their less privileged sisters dare not cast a glance over the hedge.
But in spite of her excuse about dressing for dinner, she seemed in no such hurry after all. A sudden longing came over her to see the studio, to sit alone for a few minutes in that shrine of blessed memories: and, having seen Mark safely vanish into his bedroom, she made bold to venture in.
Sinking into Lady Forsyth’s armchair, she let the crowding memories sweep through her brain, while her eyes ranged from picture to picture, from statue to statue, as it were learning them by heart, because in future the right of entry she so prized would belong to another. For her, Mark and his art were one and indivisible; and, by an unerring instinct, she dreaded the effect of Bel’s demoralising influence on both.
Dearly she loved the virile figure of Triumph; more dearly still, the Viking. Him, she saw and felt as Mark had hoped that Bel might see and feel him. She had been at Wynchcombe Friars during those wonderful days when he came to life under Mark’s hands; and in her private heart she saw him as the symbol of his creator’s unquenchable spirit.
In all these children of his hand and brain, she found the quintessence of the man, and it was her instinct to seek the essence of things.
Mark himself, without and within, was all that she would have a man be—she, who seemed fated to attract only the ‘poor things’ of earth. Since Ailsa’s death and his return from Europe, she had worshipped him, with the still intensity of her northern nature. So felicitous had been their relation, and she so young, so happy in a home atmosphere the very antithesis of her own, that no afterthought had troubled her unclouded content.
For this reason, she had been able to accept, loyally, uncritically, his sudden and bewildering infatuation for a girl obviously unworthy of him; an infatuation that could survive even his knowledge of the motive which had prompted Bel to such unsparing use of her power. Entirely one with him in spirit, she could not choose but will what he willed: and conviction that Bel honestly loved him had mitigated the pain of her own hidden disappointment in him.
But now even that faint consolation was gone: and here, where associations were more intimate than at Inveraig, the shock to her belief in him seemed infinitely harder to bear. Here the question forced itself upon her—how could he, being what he was?
And his fresh appeal on behalf of Bel had badly shaken her innate capacity for acceptance.
Because of that appeal—which would also be made to the others—this girl, who had so cruelly tormented him for her own ends, must not be allowed to suffer a twinge of the discomfort she so richly deserved. For the first time, Sheila was goaded almost to the point of rebellion. For the first time her will was at odds with his: and it hurt more than she chose to admit. From a child she had invented her own private code of courage that never allowed her to say ‘I can’t bear it.’ And she would not say it now.
She would do what he asked, under protest, because he asked it. Her attitude, she was convinced, would matter nothing to Bel, who obviously looked down on her, from the attitude of her twenty-nine years, with a mild good-humoured contempt. But it would matter greatly to Mark;—and that sufficed.
She rose at last and wandered round the beloved room. Before the Viking she stood a long while, trying to draw the valiant soul of him into her own soul: then she went reluctantly out.
As she closed the door behind her, Mark opened his own and smilingly confronted her. ‘Hullo! Is that the way you dress for dinner?’
She coloured a little under his gaze.
‘I couldn’t resist going in—just to greet them all.’
‘Well—you might have let me come too! Are they such very special friends?’
‘A part of me—almost,’ she said very low. ‘I’ve known most of them—haven’t I?—ever since they were born.’
Then she went quickly down the passage; and for several seconds Mark stood looking after her. The sudden softening of his whole face, could she have seen it, would have been balm to her heart.