The Second Fiddle Part 6

Burton looked at him curiously; he rested his hand for a moment on his friend's shoulder.

"That's a jolly good phrase, Julian," he said quietly, "and I think it's true; but it's not necessarily a personal prize. You pay the piper, and he plays the tune; but you mightn't be there to listen to the tune."

"Don't be a croaking, weather-beaten, moth-eaten old Scotch raven!"

laughed Julian. "Take my word for it; you get what you want out of life if you put all you've got into it. That's just at this moment what I propose to put."

"And that," said Burton, without returning his smile, "is what we propose to take, Julian."

CHAPTER VIII

Amberley hung upon a cliff of land above the water meadows. Rising high behind it, fold on fold, were the Suss.e.x Downs, without lines, without rigidity, as soft as drifting snow.

The village had been the seat of a tremendous castle,--little of these famous ruins were left,--but the old, yellow stone walls still girdled Amberley in the shape of a broken crown.

There was only one street, a sleepy, winding, white down road, which ran between mossy barns and deep-thatched cottages under the Amberley Wall.

The castle was older than Amberley House, yet Amberley House was a respectable three hundred years, and had been all that time the home of countless Vernys. It had not retreated into relentless privacy, as most old English homes have done; it stood, with its wide porch, stoutly upon the moss-grown cobbles.

But it was better than its promises. If it had no park, there lay behind its frontage not a park, but a garden--a garden that fitted in with nature, only to excel it.

Lady Verny loved two things, her garden and her son; but she had been able to do most with her garden. There were terraces that swung from point to point above the long, blue valley; there was a lawn hemmed in by black yew hedges, over which the downs piled themselves, bare and high, with only the clouds beyond them. There was a sunken rose-garden, with rough-tiled pathways leading to a lake with swans. Three hundred years had helped Lady Verny with the lawn, but the herbaceous borders had been her own affair. Julian, crossing the lawn toward her, was the same strange mixture of her hand and time; and she had always known that when she had done all she could for Julian and the garden, she would have to give both up. With all their difficulties, their beauties, and their sullen patches, they would pa.s.s into the hands of some young and untried person unchosen by herself.

The person had been chosen now. Marian was already at Amberley for a week-end, and knowing that Julian was expected, she had left Lady Verny sitting by the tea-table under the yew hedge and gone up toward the downs.

Julian would like this; he would not wish his bride to meet him half-way. He would delight in Marian's aloofness; her deliberate and delicate coldness would seem to him like the bloom upon a grape. But the coldness of a future daughter-in-law is not the quality which most endears her to a mother.

"Julian," Lady Verny said to herself as he approached her, "will make a very trying lover. If he is absorbed in Marian, he will interfere with her; and if he is absorbed in anything else, he will ignore her. He needs a great deal of judicious teasing. Marian takes herself too seriously to see the fun of Julian; she only sees the fun of s.e.x. She was quite right to go up to the downs. It'll amuse him to pursue her now, but it'll bore him later; and in the end he'll find out that she doesn't keep him off because she's got so much to give, but because she's so afraid of giving anything."

"Where's Marian?" asked Julian before he kissed her.

"She went up toward the downs," said Lady Verny. "She left no directions behind her. She's a will-o'-the-wisp, my dear."

Julian laughed.

"She knew I'd follow her," he said; "but I'll have my tea first, please."

"She has always been followed, I imagine," said Lady Verny, giving him his tea, "and she has always known it."

Julian looked pleased; this was the kind of wife he wanted, a woman used to admiration, and who never made the fatal mistake of seeking it. He had not much knowledge of women, but he had very strong opinions about them, unshaken by any personal reckoning. One opinion was that nothing too much can be done for a good woman. She must be protected, cared for, and served under every ordeal in life. She must be like a precious jewel; bars, safes, banks, must be constructed to insure her inaccessibility from all the dangers of the open world.

She must be seen--the East receded from him at this point--and admired; but she must be immaculate. That is to say, she must at no time in her career personally handle an experience. She must be a wife and mother (unmarried women, though often presumably virtuous, were only the shabby bankrupts of their s.e.x), but, once married and a mother, she must be kept as far as possible from all the implications of these tremendous facts.

Bad women were uns.e.xed. That is to say, no law applied to them; they were as outcast as a man who cheats at cards. The simile was not exact, as the women were occasionally themselves the cheated; but it was near enough for Julian. There were of course considerably more female outcasts than card-sharpers; but this was fortunate, for inadvertently they protected good women, in a manner in which card-sharpers have not been known to protect good men. But Julian thought men needed no protection, only women who were safe, needed it.

Julian was kinder to women than his opinions promised, because, being strong, he was on the whole gentle toward those who were weak; but his kindness was a personal idiosyncrasy, not a principle.

Lady Verny looked at him a little helplessly. There was something she wanted very much to say to him, but she suffered from the disability of being his mother. There is an unwritten law that mothers should not touch upon vital matters with their sons. Lady Verny believed that Julian was a victim of pa.s.sion. She did not think he had understood Marian's nature, and she knew that when pa.s.sion burns itself out, one of two things is left, comradeship or resentment. She had lived with resentment for twenty years, and she knew that it was not an easy thing to live with, and that it would have been worth while had she known more about it earlier, to have found out if there was comradeship under the pa.s.sion before the flames of it had burned her boats.

"I wonder," she said consideringly, gazing into the bottom of her tea-cup, "if your lovely Marian has a sense of humor?"

"Humor?" said Julian, taking two savory sandwiches and wrapping them in bread and b.u.t.ter. "What does she want with humor at her age? It's one of the things people fall back on when they've come croppers. Besides, I don't believe in comradeship between the s.e.xes. Infernally dull policy; sort of thing that appeals to a bookworm. What I like is a little friendly sc.r.a.pping. Honor's easy! I never have cared much for brains in a woman."

He smiled at the woman he knew best in the world, who had brains, and had given him the fruit of them all her life, with kindly tolerance.

Probably she was jealous; but she wouldn't be tiresome if she was, and he would make things as easy for her as possible.

Lady Verny saw that Julian thought that she was jealous. She looked away from him to the terrace where he had fallen as a baby and struck his head against the stone cornice of the sun-dial.

She could never look at the sun-dial without seeing the whole scene happen again--and the dreadful pause that followed it when the small, limp figure lay without moving. Julian was the only child she had ever had. She shivered in the hot summer air and gave up the subject of human love. There is generally too much to be said about it to make it a good subject of conversation except for lovers, who only want each other.

She pointed to the newspaper that lay between them; that also was serious.

"My dear," she said quietly, "this appears to be a very bad business?"

"Yes," Julian acknowledged. "This time there'll be no ducking; there's nothing to duck under."

"And I dare say," said his mother, without moving the strong, quiet hands that lay on her lap, "you have been thinking what you are going to do in it?"

"Oh, yes, I've decided," said Julian. "I shall be off in ten days.

You'll guess where, but no one else must know."

"It was a big risk before, Julian," she said tentatively.

"This time it'll be a bigger one," he answered, meeting her eyes with a flash of his pleased blue ones. "That's all. It'll need a jolly lot of thinking out."

"And you've--and Marian has agreed to it?" Lady Verny asked anxiously.

"I haven't told her yet," said Julian, easily. "It didn't occur to me to mention it to her first any more than to you. I knew you'd both understand. Obviously it was the one thing I could do. She'll see that, of course."

"I'm different," said Lady Verny, with a twist of her ironic mouth. "I'm your mother. A mother takes what is given; a wife expects all there is to give."

Julian looked a little uncomfortable. Burton, who was a man, and might therefore be a.s.sumed to know better than a woman what a woman felt, had come to the same conclusion.

Julian was prepared to give everything he had to Marian--Amberley and all his money and himself. There was something in the marriage service that put it very well, but didn't, as far as he remembered, say anything to include plans.

"I hope she likes Amberley?" he ventured.

Lady Verny filled his cup a second time, and answered tranquilly:

"Marian thinks it a charming little place to run down to for week-ends."

Then she added very gently: "This is going to be very hard for Marian, Julian. You'll remember that, won't you, when you tell her?"

"d.a.m.nably hard," said Julian under his breath. "Of course I'll remember.

I wish to Heaven she'd marry me first. By Jove, I'll _make_ her!"