Mrs. Warren's Daughter Part 5

David's, and after all, if it hadn't 'a-been you, it 'd 'a-been young Evan. Why there's bin some girls in the village have had two and even three babies before they settled down and got married. Now we must dish up supper. I've given you lots and lots of pancakes and the cream and honey you wa.s.s always so fond of--you bad boy--" She ventured a kiss on the smooth cheek of her nursling and heavily descended the stairs.

David had a very bad night, because to please his old nurse he had eaten too many of her pancakes with cream and honey. In fact, he had at last to tip-toe down through a sleeping house cautiously to let himself out and relieve his feelings by pacing the verandah till the nausea pa.s.sed off. After that he lay long awake trying to size up the situation. He got his thoughts at last into some such shape as this:--

"It's clear I was a regular young rake before I was sent up to London to be Praddy's pupil. Apparently I seduced the housemaid or kitchenmaid--my father's establishment seems to consist of Nannie who is housekeeper and cook, and a maid who does housework and helps in the kitchen--and this unfortunate girl who fell a prey to my solicitations--or more likely misled me--afterwards gave birth to a child attributed either to my fatherhood or the gardener's. But the matter has been hushed up by a payment of twenty pounds and the girl is now married and respectable and ought to give no further trouble. I suppose that was a climax of naughtiness on my part and the main reason why I was sent away. The two people who matter most have received me without doubt or question, but the one to be wary about is the old nurse, whose very affection makes her inconveniently inquisitive. _Mem._ get up and lock my door, or else she may come in with hot water or something in the morning and take me by surprise.

"The original David is evidently dead and well out of the way. There can be no harm in my taking his place, at any rate for a few years: it may give the old man new life and genuine happiness, for I shall play my part as a good son, and certainly shall cost him nothing.

I'll begin by taking him to an oculist and finding out what is wrong with his eyes.... Probably only cataract. It may be possible to effect a cure and he can then finish his book on the history of Glamorganshire from earliest times. Must remember, by the bye, that the Welsh change most of the old _m's_ into _f's_ and that this country is called Forganwg, with the _w_ p.r.o.nounced like _oo_, and the _f_ like _v_. Must learn some Welsh. What a nuisance. But nothing is worth doing if it isn't done well. If I can keep this deception up this would be a jolly place to come to for occasional holidays, and I simply couldn't have a better reference to respectability, s.e.x and station with the benchers of Lincoln's Inn than 'my father,' the Revd. Howel Williams, Vicar of Pontystrad.

They'll probably want a second or a third reference. Can I rely on Praddy? Is it possible I might work up my acquaintance with that professor whom I met in the train? I'll see. Perhaps I could attend cla.s.ses of his if he lectures in London."

Then the plotting David fell asleep at last and woke to hear the loud tapping on his door at eight o'clock, of Bridget, rather surprised to find the door locked, but entering (when he had garbed himself in his Norfolk jacket and opened the door), with hot water for shaving and a cup of tea.

It was a hot July morning, and while he dressed, the southern breeze came in through the open window scented by the roses and the lemon verbena growing against the wall. His father was pacing up and down the hall and the verandah restlessly awaiting him, fearing lest the whole episode of the day before might not have been one of his waking dreams. His failing sight made reading almost a torture and writing more a matter of feeling than visual perception. Time therefore hung wearisomely on his hands; Bridget was not a good reader, besides being too busy a housekeeper to have time for it.

Had David really returned to him? Would he sometimes read aloud and sometimes write his letters, or even the finish of his History? Too good to be true!

But there was David coming down the stairs, greeting him with tender affection. "Read and write for you, father? Of course! But before I go back to London--and unfortunately I _must_ go back early in August--I'm going to take you to see an oculist--Bristol or Clifton perhaps--and get your sight restored."

After breakfast, however, the father decided he must take David round the village, to see and be seen. David was not very anxious to go, but as the Revd. Howel looked disappointed he gave in.

It had to be got over some time or other. So they first visited the church, a building in the form of a cross, with an imposing battlemented tower. Here David asked to inspect the registers and found therein (while the old gentleman silently prayed or sat in mute thankfulness in a sunny corner)--the record of his father's marriage to Mary Vavasour twenty-six years before (Mary was twenty-three and the Revd. Howel forty at the time) and of his own baptism two years afterwards.

Then issuing from the church, father and son walked through the village, the father pointing out the changes for better or worse that had taken place in four years, and not noticing the vagueness of his son's memories of either persons or features in the landscape. The village, like most Welsh villages, was of white-washed cottages, slate-roofed, but it was embowered with that luxuriance of foliage and flowers which makes Glamorganshire--out of sight of the coal-mining--seem an earthly paradise. Every now and then the Revd. Howel would nudge his son and say: "That man who spoke was old Goronwy, as big a scoundrel now as he was five years ago," or he would introduce David to a villager of whom he thought more favourably. If she were a young woman she generally smirked and looked sideways; if a man he grunted out a Welsh greeting or only gave a nod of surly recognition. Several professed fluent recognition but some said in Welsh "he wasn't a bit like the Mr.

David _they_ had known." Whereupon the Revd. Howel laughed and said: "Wait till you have been out to South Africa fighting for your king and country and see if _that_ doesn't change _you_!"

The visit to the Clifton oculist resulted in a great success. The oculist after two or three days' preparation in a nursing home performed the operation and advised David then to leave his father for a few days (promising if any unfavourable symptoms supervened he would telegraph) so that he might pa.s.s the time in sleep as much as possible, and with no mental stimulation. During this interval David transferred himself and his bicycle to Swansea, and thence visited the Gower caves where he ran up against Rossiter once more and spent delightful hours being inducted into palaeontology by Rossiter and his companions. Then back to--by contrast--boresome Clifton (except for its Zoological Gardens). After another week his father was well enough to be escorted home. In another fortnight he might be able to use his eyes, and soon after that would be able to read and write--in moderation.

But David could not wait to see his intervention crowned with complete success. He must keep faith with Honoria who would be wanting a long holiday in Switzerland; and their joint business must not suffer by his absence from London. There were, indeed, times when the peace and comfort and beauty of Pontystrad got hold of him and he asked himself: "Why not settle down here for the rest of his life, put aside other ambitions, attempt no more than this initial fraud, leave the hateful world wherein women had only three chances to men's seven." Then there would arise once more fierce ambition, the resolve to avenge Vivien Warren for her handicaps, the desire to keep tryst with Honoria and to enjoy more of Rossiter's society.

Besides, he ran a constant risk of discovery under the affectionate but puzzled inspection of the old nurse. In her mind, residence amongst the "Wild Boars," service in an army, travel and adventure generally during an absence of five years, as well as emergence from adolescence into manhood, accounted for much change in physical appearance, but not sufficiently for the extraordinary change in _morale_: the contrast between the vicious, untidy, selfish, insolent boy that had gone off to London with ill-concealed glee in 1896 and this grave-mannered, polite, considerate, pleasant-voiced young man who had already managed to find good employment in London before he revealed himself anew to his delighted father.

These doubts David read in Nannie's mind. But he would not give them time and chance to become more precise and formulated.

Gradually she would become used to the seeming miracle. In the meantime he would return to London, and if his father's recovery was complete he would not revisit "home" till Christmas. As soon as he was able to write, his father would forward him the copy of his birth-certificate, and he would likewise answer in the sense agreed upon any letters of reference or enquiry: would state the apprenticeship to architecture with Praed A.R.A., and then the impulse to go out to South Africa, the slight wound--David insisted it was slight, a fuss about nothing, because he had enquired about necrosis of the jaw and realized that even if he had recovered it would have left indisputable marks on face and throat. In fact there were so many complications involved in an escape from the Boers, only to be justified under the code of honour prevailing in war time, that he would rather his father said little or nothing about South Africa but left him to explain all that. A point of view readily grasped by the Revd. Howel, who to get such a son back would even have not thought too badly of desertion--and the negative letters of the War Office said nothing of that.

So early in September, after the most varied, anxious, successful six weeks in his life--so far--David Vavasour Williams returned to Fig Tree Court, Inner Temple.

CHAPTER V

READING FOR THE BAR

It had been a hot, windless day in London, in early September.

Though summer was in full swing in the country without a hint of autumn, the foliage in the squares and gardens of the Inns of Court was already seared and a little shrivelled. The privet hedges were almost black green; and the mould in the dismal borders that they screened looked as though it had never known rain or hose water and as if it could no more grow bright-tinted flowers than the asbestos of a gas stove which it resembled in consistency and colour. It was now an evening, ending one of those days which are peculiarly disheartening to a Londoner returned from a long stay in the depths of the country--a country which has hills and streams, ferny hollows, groups of birches, knolls surmounted with pines, meadows of lush, emerald-green gra.s.s, full-foliaged elms, twisted oaks, orchards hung with reddening apples, red winding lanes between unchecked hedges, blue mountains in the far distance, and the glimpse of a river or of ponds large enough to be called a mere or even a lake. The exhausted London to which David Williams had returned a few days previously had lost a few thousands of its West-end and City population--just, in fact, most of its interesting if unlikable folk, its people who mattered, its insolent spoilt darlings whom you liked to recognize in the Carlton atrium, in Hyde Park, in a box at the theatre: yet the frowsy, worthy millions were there all the same. The air of its then smelly streets was used up and had the ammoniac strench of the stable. It was a weary London.

The London actors had not returned from Cornwall and Switzerland.

Provincial companies enjoyed--a little anxiously owing to uncertain receipts at the box office--a brief license on the boards of famous play-houses. The newspapers had exhausted the stunt of the silly season and were at their flattest and most yawn-provoking. The South African War had reached its dreariest stage....

Bertie Adams on this close September evening had out-stayed the other employes of _Fraser and Warren_ in their fifth floor office at No. 88-90 Chancery Lane. He had remained after office hours to do a little work, a little "self-improvement"; and he was just about to close the outer office and leave the key with the housekeeper, when the lift came surging up and out of it stepped a young man in a summer suit and a bowler hat who, to Bertie's astonishment, not only dashed straight at the door of the partners' room, but opened its Yale lock with a latch-key as though long accustomed to do so. "But, sir!..." exclaimed the junior clerk (his promotion to that rank had tacitly dated from Vivie Warren's departure). "It's all right," said the stranger. "I'm Mr. David Williams and I've come to draw up some notes for Mrs. Claridge. I dare say Miss Fraser has told you I should work in the office every now and then whilst my cousin--Miss Warren, you know--is away. You needn't wait, though you can close the outer office before you go; and, by the bye, you might fetch me _Who's Who_ for the present year." All this was said a little breathlessly.

Bertie brought the volume, then only half the size of its present bulk, because it lacked our new n.o.bility and gave no heed to your favourite recreation. D.V. Williams stood in the yellow light of the west window, reading a letter... "Cousin? No! Twin brother, perhaps; but had she one?..." mused Bertie... and then, that never-to-be-forgotten voice ... "Here's 'Oo's Oo--er--Hoo's Hoo, I mean.... Miss..." He only added the last word as by some sub-conscious instinct.

"_Mister_ Williams," said Vivien-David-Warren Williams, facing him with resolute eyes. "Be quite clear about that, Adams; _David Vavasour Williams_, Miss Warren's cousin."

"Indeed I will be, Miss ... Mister ... er ... Sir..." said the transfigured Bertie (his brain voice saying over and over again in ecstasy ... "_I_ tumble to it! _I_ tumble to it!"). And then again "_Indeed_ I will, Mr. Williams. I'm a bit stupidlike this evenin'

... readin' too much.... May I stay and help you, Sir? I'm pretty quick on the typewriter, Miss Warren may have told you ... Sir ...

and I ain't--I mean--_I am not_--half bad with me shorthand.... You know--I mean, _she_ would know I'd joined them evenin' cla.s.ses..."

"Thank you, Adams; but if you have joined the evening cla.s.ses you oughtn't to interrupt your attendance there. I can _quite_ manage here alone and you need not be afraid: I shall leave everything properly closed. You could give up the key of the outer office as you go out. You may often find me at work here after office hours, but that need not disturb you ... and I need hardly say, after all Miss Fraser and Miss Warren have told me about you, I rely on you to be at all times thoroughly discreet and not likely to discuss the work of this firm or my share in it with any one?"...

"Indeed you may ... Mr. Williams ... indeed you may.... Oh! I'm so happy.... Good-night ... Sir!"

And Adams's heart was too full for attendance at a lecture on Roman law. He went off instead to the play. He himself belonged now to the world of romance. He knew of things--and wild horses and red-hot tweezers should not tear the knowledge from him, or make him formulate his deductions--he knew of things as amazing, as prodigal of developments as anything in the problem play enacted beyond the pit and the stalls; he was the younger brother of Herbert Waring and the comrade of Jessie Joseph: at that moment deceiving the sleuth hounds of Stage law by parading in her fiance's evening dress and going to prison for his sake.

Beryl Claridge had taken up much of Vivie Warren's work on the 1st of August in that year, while Honoria Fraser was touring in Switzerland. Miss Mullet and Miss Steynes were replaced (Steynes staying on a little later to initiate the new-comers) by two young women so commonplace yet such efficient machines that their names are not worth hunting up or inventing. If I have to refer to them I will call them Miss A. and Miss B.

Beryl Claridge was closely scanned by Bertie Adams, and frequently compared in his mind with the absent and idealized Vivie. He decided that although she was shrewd and clever and very good-looking, he did not like her. She smoked too many cigarettes for 1901. She had her curly hair "bobbed" (though the term was not invented then). She put up her feet too high and too often; so much so that the scandalized Bertie saw she wore black knickerbockers and no petticoats under her smart "tailor-made." She snapped your head off, was short, sharp and insolent, joked too much with the spectacled women clerks (who became her willing slaves); then would ask Bertie about his best girl and tell him he'd got jolly good teeth, a good biceps and quite a nice beginning of a moustache.

But she was a worker: no doubt of that! Of course, in the dead season there were not many clients to shock or to win over by her nonchalant manners, only a few women who required advice as to houses, stocks, and shares, law, or private enquiries as to the good faith of husbands or fiances. Such as found their way up in the lift were a little disappointed at seeing Beryl in Vivie's chair or at not being received by their old friend Honoria Fraser. But Beryl was too good a business woman to put them off with any license of speech or manners. For the rest she spent August and early September in "mugging up" the firm's business. Although deep down in her curious little heart, under all her affectation of hardness and insolent disdain of public or family opinion she firmly loved her architect and the children she had borne him, she desired quite as pa.s.sionately to be self-supporting, to earn a sufficient income of her own, to be dependent on no one. She might have her pa.s.sing caprices and her loose and flippant mode of talking, but she wasn't going to be a failure, a cadger, a parasite, a "fallen" woman. She fully realized that in England no woman _has_ fallen who is self-supporting, whose income meets her expenses and who pays her way. Given those guarantees, all else that she does which is not actually criminal is eventually put down to mere eccentricity.

So Honoria's offer and Honoria's business provided her with a most welcome opening. She realized the opportunities that lay before this Woman's Office for General Inquiries, established in the closing years of the nineteenth century--this business that before Woman's enfranchis.e.m.e.nt nibbled discreetly at the careers and the openings for profit-making hitherto rigidly reserved for Man. She wasn't going to let Honoria down. Honoria, she realized, was in herself equivalent to many thousands of pounds in capital. Her reputation was flawless. She was known to and esteemed by a host of women of the upper middle cla.s.s. Her Cambridge reputation for learning, her eventual inheritance of eighty thousand pounds were unexpressed reasons for many a woman of good standing preferring to confide her affairs to the judgment of _Fraser and Warren_, in preference to dealing with male legal advisers, male land agents, men on the Stock Exchange, men in house property business.

So Beryl became in most respects a source of strength to Honoria Fraser, deprived for a time of the overt co-operation of her junior partner.

Beryl in the first few weeks of her stay evinced small interest in the departure of Vivien Warren and her reasons for going abroad. She had a scheme of her own in which her architect would take a prominent part, for providing women--auth.o.r.esses, actresses, or the wives of the newly enriched--with week-end cottages; the desire for which was born with the Twentieth century and fostered by the invention of motors and bicycles. Cases before the firm for opinions on intricate legal problems Beryl was advised to place before the consideration of one of Honoria's friends, a law student, Mr. D.V.

Williams, who would shortly be back from his holiday and who had agreed to look in at the office from time to time and go through such papers as were set aside for him to read. Beryl had remarked--without any intention behind it--on seeing some of his notes initialled V.W. that it was rum he should have the same initials as that Vivie girl whom she remembered at Newnham ... who was "so silent and standoffish and easily shocked." But she noticed later that when Mr. Williams got to work his initials were really three and not two--D.V.W. One thing with the other: her departure from the office at the regular closing hour--five--so that she might see her babies before they were put to bed; Williams's habit of coming to work after six; kept them from meeting till the October of 1901. When they did meet after Honoria's return from Switzerland, Beryl scanned the law student critically; decided he was rather nice-looking but very pre-occupied; perhaps engaged to some girl whose parents objected; rather mysterious, _quand meme_; she had heard some one say this Mr. David Williams was a cousin or something of Vivie Warren ... what if he were in love with Vivie and she had gone away because she had some fad or other about not wanting to marry? Well! All this could be looked into some other time, if it were worth bothering about at all. Or could Williams be spoony on Honoria? After her money? He was much younger--evidently--but young men adored ripe women, and young girls idolized elderly soldiers.

_C'etait a voir_ (Beryl ever since she had been to Paris on a stolen honeymoon with the architect liked saying things to herself in French).

Towards the end of October, David received at Fig Tree Court a letter from his father in Glamorganshire.

Pontystrad Vicarage, _October_ 20, 1901.

MY DEAR SON,--

The improvement in my sight continues. I can now read a little every day, by daylight, without pain or fatigue, and write letters. I feel I owe you a long one; but I shall write a portion each day and not try my eyes unduly.

I am glad to know you are now settled down in chambers at Fig Tree Court in the Temple and have begun your studies for the Bar. You could not have taken up a finer profession.

What seems to me so wonderful is that you should be able to earn your living at the same time and be no charge on me. I accept your a.s.surances that you need no support; but never forget, my dear Son, that if you _do_, I am ready and willing to help. You sowed your wild oats--perhaps we both exaggerated the sins of the wild years--at any rate you have made a n.o.ble reparation. What a splendid school the Colonies must be! What a difference between the David who left me five years ago for Mr. Praed's studio and the David who returned to me last summer! I can never be sufficiently thankful to Almighty G.o.d for the change He has wrought in you! No lip religion, but a change of heart. I presume you explained everything to the Colonial Office after you got back to London and that you are now free to take up a civil career? The people out there never sent me any further information; but the other day one of my letters to you (written after I had received the sad news) returned to me, with the information that the hospital you were in had been captured by the Boers and that you could not be traced. I enclose it. You can now finish up the story yourself and let the authorities know how you got away and returned home.

The other day that impudent baggage Jenny Gorlais came and asked to see me ... she said her husband was out of work and refused to give her enough money to provide for all her children, that he had advised her to apply to _you_ for the maintenance of _your_ son! Relying on what you had told me I sent for Bridget and we both told her we had made every enquiry and now refused absolutely to believe in her stories of five years ago--that we were sure you were _not_ the father of her eldest child. Bridget, for example, believed the postman was its father. Jenny burst into tears, and as she did not persist in her claim my heart was moved, and I gave her ten shillings, but told her _pretty plainly_ that if she ever made such a claim again I should go to the police. You should have heard Bridget defending you! _Such_ a champion. If you want a witness to character for your references you should call _her_! She is loud in your praise.

_October_ 22.

There is one thing I want to tell you; and it is easier to write it than say it. Your mother did not die when you were three years old--much worse: she left me--ran away with an engineer who was tracing out the branch railway. He seemed a nice young fellow and I had him often up at the Vicarage, and _that_ was the way he repaid my hospitality! He wrote to me a year afterwards asking me to divorce her. As though a Clergyman of the Church of England could do such a thing! I had offered to take her back--not then--it would have been a mockery--but by putting advertis.e.m.e.nts into the South Wales papers. But after her paramour's letter--which I did not answer--I never heard any more about her....

["d.a.m.n it all," said David to himself at this juncture of the letter--he was training himself to swear in a moderate, gentlemanly way--"d.a.m.n it all! Whatever I do, it seems I _cannot_ come from altogether respectable stock."...]

You grew up therefore without a mother's care, though good Bridget did her best. When you were a child I fear I rather neglected you. I was so disappointed and embittered that I sought consolation in the legends of our beloved country and in Scriptural exegesis. You were rather a naughty boy at Swansea Grammar School and somewhat of a scamp at Malvern College--Well! we won't go over all that again. I quite understand your reticence about the past. Once again I think the blame was mine as much as yours. I ought to have interested myself more in your pursuits and games ... what a pity, by the bye, that you seem to have lost your gift of drawing and painting! I do remember how at one time we were drawn together over the old Welsh legends and the very clever drawings you made of national heroes and heroines--they seemed to come on you as quite a surprise when I took them out of the old portfolio.

But about your mother--for it is necessary you should know all I can tell you in case you have to answer questions as to your parentage. Your mother's name was, as you know, Mary Vavasour. It is a common name in South Wales though it seems to be Norman French. She came to our Pontystrad school as a teacher in 1873. Her father was something to do with mining at Merthyr. I fell in love with her--she had a sweet face--and married her in 1874. You were born two years afterwards. Bridget had been my housekeeper before I was married and I asked her to stay on lest your mother should be inexperienced at first in the domestic arts. They never got on well together and when Mary had recovered from her confinement and seemed disposed to take up housekeeping I sent away poor Bridget reluctantly and only took her back after your mother's flight. Bridget was a second mother to you as you know, though I fear you never showed her much affection till these later days.