The Debatable Land Part 11

"Tell your uncle you belong to me."

"No!"

"Helen, do as I say!"

"No!"

Thaddeus pointed at Morgan's arm.

"Will you kindly--thank you."

Helen fled, through hall and up the stairs, a shimmer of white skirts past the hall lamp; and in her room she leaned from the window and let the rain drive against her face. Mrs. Mavering's window threw a great bar into the night. Morgan's voice below seemed to fill the drawing-room, the hall, and came rolling up the stair after her, in muttering pursuit. She gave a half sob, listened a moment, and began to laugh.

"I'm glad Uncle Tad has that row."

"I remember," said Thaddeus, amiably, "I remember being--a--rejected once myself. It was unpleasant, very unpleasant."

"Do you think a thing of seven years is going to be thrown out like this? Do you think I'm a man to put up with this kind of business? Do you think I don't know Helen?"

"I think," said Thaddeus, "that you don't. My dear fellow, you have made a curious mistake, and yet--and yet quite logical. I am charmed to say, quite such as I should have predicted. You have treated a woman with a certain contempt. You couldn't help it. It expressed, if I may say so, the degree of your culture. Nevertheless, a mistake. Deference, deference--they like it. It belongs to them. It is--a--their acc.u.mulated inheritance. Seven years--at thirteen--but, my dear fellow, a child!

You announce your intention to a growing girl, by whose--a--admiring worship it is received with awe. You suppose she continues to worship you in the same primitive manner. You suppose your ownership and property established, that it merely remains to dictate and receive. How simple, how--pardon me--characteristic! By the way, your father. I recollect, had a singular opinion of you. I am candid, you see. It appears to be your faculty--remarkably so--to invite candor. If I recollect, he thought, supposing you were in some way blown up or ground up into small fragments--some accident, some catastrophe--and then fitted together carefully--supposing, if I understood him, this process repeated sufficiently--you might--but I doubt it--a--paternal weakness. But as to the situation at present, I cannot conceal my--a--satisfaction."

Morgan glowered under reddish-yellow brows, and Thaddeus talked on with persistent amiability. So grim and forcible looked Morgan, so likely to be summary or primitive inaction, that it seemed to argue for Thaddeus a fine trust in the strength of social restraint, his continuing that airy, provocative speech.

"A distinction arises--a child, a woman. It arose in Helen, no doubt, during her sickness. You observed the distinction, I presume, but only from its effect on you. But, really, you know, it must have affected her. I have, in my time, studied the s.e.x--a subject of delightful interest."

"I don't pretend to take interest in your delights." Morgan had grown cool.

"Quite so," murmured Thaddeus.

"Go ahead, and enjoy them. I suggest you don't interfere with me. I want Helen and will have her. There is a bond--"

"Allow me. Has been, perhaps, an understanding a.s.sumed."

"I'm not going to quibble with words."

"Exactly. Whatever there has been, or been a.s.sumed to be, quite clear, no longer is--is no longer a.s.sumed. I believe I speak with authority."

"I'm not going to quibble about your authority, either. You can flutter it as much as you please. I'll see Helen alone."

"Not to-night. A--a little flutter of authority. You leave next week? I shall not, perhaps, take the trouble to prevent your seeing Helen. I shall take the trouble to see that nothing comes of it. My dear boy, I'm extremely sorry. I don't like you. Your invitation to candor is irresistible."

Morgan laughed shortly, turned, and went into the hall. Thaddeus followed.

"Really, it's raining. Let me lend you--but a soldier, of course--what a blessing is youth! Exit!"--to the now closed outer door--"exit the primitive."

And so spring came to an end, with a warm rain murmuring on the roofs all night, soaking down the roots of the maples, driving part of the Third Regiment to sleep in the grand-stands. As in sleeping Hamilton no one knew another's dream, so almost as little by lamp-light or at dawn did any watcher truly imagine another's thought. Who shall escape the dungeon of himself? The policeman on the corner of Shannon Street and Philip's road, when Morgan rushed by him, sympathized with an apparent hurry to get out of the comfortless rain. Thaddeus, before his sea-coal fire, plotted such happy paths for Helen to walk in as an enlightened egoism showed would be best for Thaddeus. Helen let the rain drive in her face, and thought that, "if people never meet again, never will be a long, long time." Gard stood in the middle of his study, looked around him, whistled "The Campbells Are Coming," and called it clearing up.

Books, music, piano, chairs, and memories of meditations--he thought he did not care much what became of them. There was a new time coming, and time it came. "This is no world to play with mammets and to tilt with lips. We must have b.l.o.o.d.y noses and cracked crowns." "The Campbells are coming--trala! trala!" Mrs. Mavering drew the rope of her long black hair over her shoulder, smoothed it on her knee, and thought of the terms "commission" and "estates in happiness." The braid was thick and glossy. It seemed hard if her own play were quite ended and story told.

What, nothing more! Restlessness must come from overbrooding, or the new stir of the times. A woman's story ended too soon. What a melancholy noise the rain made!

Who shall escape the dungeon of himself, or look from its clouded windows through the clouded windows even of that one which lies nearest, where another prisoner strains to see?

Chapter XI

The Whirlpool.--Mr. Paulus's Reminiscences of Women.

The Third Regiment went its way. Visibly, it resembled swarms of bees when last seen clinging to the freight cars, or an excited picnic with ornamental bayonets, but to a larger contemplation rather a stream of sea-drift drawn into the suck and roar of a growing whirlpool. Men are noisy and cheerful, and seldom know their own pathos. But the streets of Hamilton seemed empty, though hardly fewer people went to and fro; in the faces of women here and there, there was a certain premonitory desolation.

Helen felt the emptiness to be extraordinary--unexpected; an emptiness between her and the sky; rooms mysteriously disfurnished; things that people said sounding hollow, as if the meaning of words had fallen away from beneath them; Saint Mary's at night became silent and dark, except for now and then a droning service without palaces or towers of sound.

"To what end," reflected Thaddeus, "am I a student of human nature in the subtle s.e.x? If she doesn't miss that antediluvian brute. I'm an addled egg."

"We're dreadfully dull, Lady Rachel, aren't we?" said Helen. "Let's be Knights Hospitallers."

"What do you mean?"

"All the rest do is to sc.r.a.pe lint and read newspapers and potter. Why couldn't we enlist and be nurses?"

"I dare say we could."

"With white caps and big cuffs? Could we?"

Mrs. Mavering wondered at Helen's influence over her. She had watched it grow, with a half-amused curiosity. She had thought to be the girl's guide and helper, and that this new interest would be her reward upon Thaddeus's theory of commissions. But she had seemed more and more to be following, not leading; as if, in the actual onward game of life, experience, instead of a lamp before, were a lamp behind, darkening the path with the shadow of ourselves. To remember only made one irresolute.

It was necessary to be young, or else to forget--at any rate, to be valiant. But had she not had enough of excitement, adventure, the ragged seams of things, variety and burlesque, and been soul-sick through it all, and fled at last from its noise and pa.s.sions? She shook her head, not so much at Helen as at the other side of her own inner argument.

"Collars and cuffs, Lady Rachel! But you'd look beautiful!"

"That isn't what people want in nurses."

"It isn't? But it is! Why, if I were a man, and had you around looking like a remorseful queen who had just hung up her robe and crown on the hat-rack, and was trying to be humble with collars and cuffs, and all that, I'd get well if I were shot criss-cross. I'd say, 'This world is too fine to leave.'"

"How should you know what you would do?"

"Oh!" She hesitated, and drooped a little. "I think it was Gard said that." Then, with returned animation: "He was so funny, Lady Rachel. I asked him if he didn't think you were all that, and he only said, 'This world is too fine to leave; I think I'll stay quite a while.'"

It did not all seem to Mrs. Mavering a direct argument to go hospitalling; only it seemed to fall in line with other questionings about the fallen curtain, and whether it might not again be raised. One might be content with a minor part.

They went up to Hagar at the end of June, and spent the blue-and-green summer together in the widow's house behind the militant church.

Thaddeus came every Sat.u.r.day, invented new paradoxes, to watch them fall helplessly on the widow's comprehension, and went down the hill after tea in the wide sunset--an immaculate gentleman, with eye-gla.s.s, cane, and smooth-shouldered coat--to talk with Mr. Paulus.

"Ain't goin' to get married again, are ye?"

"To whom, Peter? To whom?"