Far to Seek Part 23

She drew his head to her and kissed him, then let her hands fall in her lap. "Wonderful Sonling! Indeed it _would_ ease me and please me--if coming from the true motive. Only remember, so long as you are thinking first of me, you can be sure That Other has not yet arrived."

"But I shall always think first of you," he declared, catching at her hands. "There's no one like you. There never will be."

"No--not like, but different--in clearness and nearness. Love is one big impulse, but many forms. Like white light made from many colours. No rival for me, That Other; but daughter-in-law--best gift a son can bring to his father's house. Just now there is room inside you only for one big thing--India."

"And you----"

"But I am India."

"Sublimated essence of it, according to Jeffers."

"Jeffers says many foolish things!" But she did not disguise her pleasure.

"I've noticed occasional flashes of wisdom!--But, I say, Motherling, what price tea?"

"Tea?" She feigned exaggerated surprise. "I thought you were much too far in the clouds!"

"On the contrary. I'm simply famished!"

And forthwith he fell upon a plate of sugar cakes; while she rang for the fresh teapot, so often in requisition for 'Mr Roy.'

CHAPTER VIII.

"Comfort, content, delight, the ages' slow-bought gain, They shrivelled in a night. Only ourselves remain To face the naked days in silent fort.i.tude.

Through perils and dismays renewed and re-renewed."

--KIPLING.

Nevil was up in town on business; not returning till next day. The papers were seething with rumours; but the majority of everyday people, immersed in their all-important affairs, continued cheerfully to hope against hope. Sir Nevil Sinclair was not of these; but he kept his worst qualms to himself. Neither his wife nor his son were keen newspaper readers; which, in his opinion, was just as well.

Certainly it did not occur to Lilamani that any trouble in Europe could invade the sanct.i.ties of her home, or affect the shining destiny of Roy.

That he was destined to shine, her mother's heart knew beyond all doubt.

And round that knowledge, like an aura, glimmered a dreamlike hope that perhaps his shining might some day, in some way, strengthen the bond between Nevil's people and her own. For the problem of India's changing relation to England lay intimately near her heart. Her poetic brain saw England always as "husband of India"; while misguided or malicious meddlers--who would "make the Mother a widow"--were fancifully incorporated in the person of Jane. And, in this matter of India, Roy had triumphed over Jane:--surely good omens, for bigger things:--for at heart she was still susceptible to omens; more so than she cared to admit. Crazy mother-arrogance, Nevil would say. But she seemed to feel the spirit of his grandfather at work in Roy; and well she knew that the old man's wisdom would guide and temper his young zeal. Beyond that, no human eyes could see; only the too-human heart of a mother could dream and hope....

Long ago her father had told her that nations had always been renewed by individuals; that India--aristocratic to the deeps of her Brahmin-ridden soul--would never acknowledge the crowd's unstable sway. For her it must always be the _man_--ruler, soldier, or saint.

Not that she had breathed a word of her 'arrogance' to Nevil, or even to Roy. Nor had she shown to either a certain letter from a distinguished Indian woman; pure Indian by birth; also by birth a Christian; her sympathy with East and West as evenly poised as Lilamani's own. The letter lived in a slim blue bag, lovingly embroidered. Lilamani--foolish and fanciful--wore it like a talisman, next her heart; and at night slipped it under her pillow with her gold watch and wisp of scented lawn.

To-night, being alone, and her mind very full of Roy, she drew it out and re-read it for the hundredth time; lingering, as always, on its arresting finale.

"I have seen much and grieved more over the problem of the Eurasian, as multiplied in our beloved country--the fruit, most often, of promiscuous unions between low-caste types on both sides, with sense of stigma added to drag them lower still. But where the crossing is of highest caste--as with you and your 'Nevil'--I can see no stigma; perhaps even spiritual gain to your children. For I love both countries with my whole heart.

And to my love G.o.d has given the vision that India may some day be saved by the son of just such a union as your own. He will have the strength of his handicap; the soul of the East; the forceful mind and character of the West. He will bring to the task of uniting them such twofold love and understanding that the world must needs take infection. What if the ultimate meaning of British occupation of India be just this--that the successor of Buddha should be a man born of high-caste, high-minded British and Indian parents; a fusion of the finest that East and West can give. That vision may inspire you in your first flush of happy motherhood. So I feel impelled to pa.s.s it on ..."

Such a vision--whether fantasy or prophecy--could not fail to stir Lilamani Sinclair's Eastern heart to its depths. But she shrank from sceptical comment; and sceptical Nevil would surely be. As for Roy, intuition warned her it was too heady an idea to implant in his ardent brain. So she treasured it secretly, and read it at intervals, and prayed that, some day, it might be fulfilled--if not through her, then through some other Lilamani, who should find courage to link her life with England. Above all, she prayed he who should achieve India's renewal might spring from Rajasthan....

In the midst of her thinking and praying, she fell sound asleep--to dream of Roy tossed out of reach on the waves of some large vague upheaval. The 'how' and 'why' of it all eluded her. Only the vivid impression remained....

And before the week was out, an upheaval, actual and terrible, burst upon a startled, unheeding world; a world lulled into a false sense of security; and too strenuously engaged in rushing headlong round a centrifugal point called 'progress,' to concern itself with a mythical peril across the North Sea.

But at the first clear note of danger, devotees of pleasure and progress and the franchise were transformed, as by magic, into a crowd of bewildered, curious and resentful human beings, who had suddenly lost their bearings; who s.n.a.t.c.hed at newspapers; confided in perfect strangers; protested that a European War was unspeakable, unthinkable, and all the while could speak and think of nothing else....

It was the nightmare terror of earthquake, when the solid ground underfoot turns traitor. And it shook even the stoutest nerves in the opening weeks of the Great War, destined to shatter their dear and familiar world for months, years, decades perhaps....

But underlying all the froth and fume of the earlier restlessness, of the later fear and futility, the strong, kindly, imperturbable heart of the land still beat, sanely--if inconspicuously--in the home life of her cottages and her great country houses. Twentieth-century England could not be called degenerate while she counted among her hidden treasures homes of such charm and culture and mutual confidence as those that produced the Grenfells, the Charltons, a Lord Elcho, an Edward Tennant and a Charles Sorley--to pick a few names at random from that galaxy of 'golden boys' who ungrudgingly gave their lives--for what?

The answer to that staggering question is not yet. But the splendour of their gift remains: a splendour no after-failure can tarnish or dim ...

To the inmates of Bramleigh Beeches--Nevil excepted--the crash came with startling abruptness; dwarfing all personal problems, heart-searchings and high decisions. Even Lady Roscoe forgot Family Herald heroics, and 'crossed the threshold' without comment from Nevil or herself. The weightiest matters became suddenly trivial beside the tremendous questions that hovered in every mind and on every tongue: 'Can We hold Them?' 'Can They invade Us?' 'Can it be true--this whispered horror, that rumoured disaster?' And the test question--most tremendous of all, for the mere unit--'Where do _I_ come in?'

Nevil came in automatically through years of casual connection with the Artists' Rifles. He was a Colonel by now; and would join up as a matter of course--to his wife's secret amazement and far from secret pride.

Without an ounce of the soldier in him, he acted on instinct like most Englishmen; not troubling to a.n.a.lyse motives; simply in the spirit of _n.o.blesse oblige_; or, in the more casual modern equivalent--'one just does.'

Roy--poet and dreamer--became electrically alive to his double heritage of the soldier spirit. From age to age the primeval link between poet and warrior is reaffirmed in time of war: and the Rajput in him recognised only one way of fighting worthy the name--the triune conjunction of man and horse and sword. Disillusion, strange and terrible, awaited him on that score: and as for India--what need of his young activities, when the whole Empire was being welded into one resistant ma.s.s by the triple hammer-strokes of a common danger, a common enemy, a common aim?

It was perhaps this sense of a clear call in an age of intellectual ferment, of s.e.x problems and political friction, that sent so many unlikely types of manhood straight as arrows to that universal target--the Front. The War offered a high and practical outlet for their dumb idealism; to their realism, it offered the 'terrific verities of fatigue, suffering, bodily danger--beloved life and staggering death.'

For Roy, Cavalry was a matter of course. In the saddle, even Jane could find no fault with him; little guessing that, in his genius for horsemanship, he was Rajput to the marrow. His compact, nervous make, strong thigh and light hand, marked him as the inevitable centaur; and he had already gained a measure of distinction in the cavalry arm of the Officers' Training Corps. But a great wish to keep in touch with his father led him to fall in with Sir Nevil's suggestion that he should start in the Artists' Rifles and apply for a transfer later on--when one could see more clearly how this terrific business was likely to develop.

George and Jerry--aged fifteen and sixteen and a half--raged at their own futile juvenility--which, in happier circ.u.mstances, nothing would have induced them to admit. Jerry--a gay and reckless being--had fell designs on the Flying Corps, the very first moment he could 'w.a.n.gle it.'

George--the truest Sinclair of them all--sagely voted for the Navy, because it took you young. But no one heeded them very much. They were all too absorbed in newspapers and their own immediate plans.

And Lilamani, also, found her niche, when the King's stirring proclamation announced the coming of Indian troops. There was to be a camp on the estate. Later on, there would be convalescents. Meantime, there was wholesale need of 'comforts' to occupy her and Helen and Christine.

Tara's soaring ambition would carry her farther afield. Her spirit of flame--that rose instinctively to tragic issues and heroic demands--could be at peace nowhere but in the splendid, terrible, unorganised thick of it all. Without making any ado, she proposed to get there in the shortest possible time; and, in the shortest possible time, by sheer concentration and hard work, she achieved her desire. Before Roy left England, before her best-loved brother--a man of brilliant promise--had finished learning to fly, she was driving her car in Belgium, besieged in Antwerp, doing and enduring terrible things ...

After Tara, Nevil--for the Artists' Rifles were early in the field.

After Nevil, Roy--his exchange effected--very slim and soldierly in cavalry uniform; his grey-blue eyes, with the lurking gleam in them, more than ever noticeable in his sunburnt face.

The last day, the last hour were at once sad and glad beyond belief; so that Lilamani's coward heart was thankful for urgent trifles that helped to divert attention from the waiting shadow. Even to-day, as always, dress and sari were instinctively chosen to express her mood:--the mother-of-pearl mood; iridescence of glad and sad: glad to give; yet aching to keep. Daughter of Rajputs though she was, she had her moment of very human shrinking when the sharp actuality of parting was upon them; when he held her so close and long that she felt as if the tightened cord round her heart must snap--and there an end....

But, by some miracle, some power not her own, courage held; though, when he released her, she was half blinded with tears.

Her last words--entirely like herself though they were--surprised him.

"Son of my heart--live for ever," she whispered, laying light hands on his breast. "And when you go into the battle, always keep strongly in your mind that They must _not_ win, because no sacred or beautiful thing would be left clean from their touch. And when you go into the battle always remember--Chitor."

"It is _you_ I shall always remember--looking like this," he answered under his breath. But he never forgot her injunctions; and through years of fighting, he obeyed them to the letter....

That was in April, after Neuve Chapelle, when even optimists admitted that the War might last a year.

At Christmas time he came home on short leave--a changed Roy; his skin browner; his sensitive lips more closely set under the shadow line of his moustache; the fibre of body and spirit hardened, without loss of fineness or flexibility. Livelier on the surface, he was graver, more reticent, underneath--even with her. By the look in his eyes she knew he had seen things that could never be put into words. Some of them she too had seen, through his mind; so close was the spiritual link between them. In that respect at least, he was beautifully, unaffectedly the same....