The Whirligig of Time Part 8

"Then when I get tired of that I may go to school--if I feel like it.

Aunt Miriam says she knows of one that would just do. Not Eton or Rugby, or anything like that; a school for younger boys. This one is in a beautiful big house, Aunt Miriam says, with lots of grounds and things about. Park, you know, like Windsor. And deer in it. And the house was built in the reign of Charles the First."

"Bet you don't even know when that was. What's the use in having that kind of place for a school, anyway?"

"St. Barnabas," replied Harry with hauteur, "was built in the reign of Queen Victoria."

"Queen nothing! Gosh, if you talk rot like this now, what'll you be when you've been over there a while?"

"Then I may go to Eton, or one of those places, later." This was merely to bring a rise; Harry had no idea of completing his education anywhere but at St. Barnabas'.

"Yes, a fine time you'd have there! A fine time you'd have with those kids. Lords, Dukes, and things. Gosh, wouldn't you be sick of them, and oh, but they'd be sick of you!"

"Oh, I don't know," said Harry; "good fellows, lords. Some of them, that is. I might be made one myself, in time, who knows?"

"Yes, you might, mightn't you?" James was laughing now. "Nothing more likely, I should think. Lord Harry, Earl Harry!"

Harry replied in kind, and hostilities ensued.

This was all more or less as it should be, and the mutual att.i.tude was maintained up to the actual moment of sailing--after it, indeed, for when Harry last saw his brother he was standing on the very end of the dock and shouting "Give my love to the earls!" and similar pleasantries to the small head that protruded itself out of the great black moving wall above him; above him now, and now not so much above, but some distance off, and presently not a great black wall at all, but the side of a perfectly articulate ship, way out in the river.

Uncle James and his wife, also their eldest child, Ruth, a girl of nine or thereabouts, all came down to the dock with James to see the travelers off, and as they arrived hours and hours, as Miriam put it, before there was any question of sailing, there was a good deal of standing about in saloons and on decks and talking about nothing in particular, pending the moment when gongs would be rung and people begin to talk jocularly about getting left and having to climb down with the pilot. They all went down to see the staterooms, which adjoined each other and were p.r.o.nounced satisfactory. Aunt Cecilia said she was glad Harry could have his window open at night without a draught blowing on him, and Aunt Miriam remarked that it was nice to have the ship all to one's self, practically, which was so different from Coming Over, and Uncle James added that when he crossed on the _Persia_ in '69 as a mere kid, there were only fifteen people in the first cabin and none of them ever appeared in the dining room after the first day except himself and the captain. After this, conversation rather lagged and there was a general adjournment to the deck. A few pa.s.sengers, accompanied by their stay-at-home friends and relations, wandered about the halls and stairways, saying that autumn voyages were not always so bad and that you never could tell about the ocean, at any season; which amounted to admitting that they probably would be seasick, though they hoped not.

Our friends, the Wimbournes, had little to say on even this all-absorbing topic, for Harry, who had crossed once before, had proved himself a qualmless sailor, and Aunt Miriam had crossed so often that she had got all over that sort of thing, years ago.

Uncle James was presently despatched to see what mischief those boys were getting that child into, and the two ladies wandered into the main lounge and sat down.

"Anything more different than the appearance of a steamship saloon while the ship is in dock from what it looks like when she is careering round at sea can hardly be imagined," murmured Lady Fletcher, pleasantly, with no intention of being comprehended or replied to. Mrs. James' polite and conscientious rejoinder of "What was that, Miriam?"--she had not, of course, been listening--piqued the other lady ever so slightly. It was not real annoyance, merely the rather tired feeling that comes over one when a companion sounds a note out of one's own mood.

"Oh, nothing; merely what a difference it makes, being out on the open sea."

"Yes, doesn't it?... Harry will--"

"Harry will what?"

"Nothing." Mrs. James blushed a little. She was going to say, "Harry will have to be looked out for, or he will go climbing over places where he shouldn't and fall overboard," or something to that effect, but she decided not to, fearing that her sister-in-law would think her fussy.

Lady Fletcher accepted the omission, and went on to talk of the next thing that came into her mind, which was Business. There were some Lackawanna shares, it appeared, part of Harry's property, the dividends on which James was going to pay regularly to the London banker for defraying Harry's expenses, and James might have forgotten to do something, or else not to do something, in connection with these. Lady Fletcher wandered on to American railroad stock, making several remarks which, in the absence of brothers, with their satirical smiles, remained unchallenged. Poor Aunt Cecilia, who could neither keep on nor off her sister-in-law's line of thought, unluckily broke in on the Union Pacific with the malapropos remark:

"Miriam, Harry has got to be made to wear woolen stockings in the winter, no matter what he says ..."

Lady Fletcher was amused. "I declare, Cecilia," she said, "you think I am no more capable of taking care of that boy than of ruling a state!"

But Mrs. James did not smile in reply; the remark came too near to describing her actual state of mind.

"Well, Miriam, with four children of one's own, one may be expected to learn a thing or two; it isn't all as easy as it seems. Beside, I am fond of the boy; I suppose I may be excused for that ..."

"I can certainly excuse it; I am fond of him myself." Lady Fletcher was trying to conceal her irritation. Perhaps the suavity of her tone was a little overdone; at any rate, it only served to make Mrs. James' face a little rosier and her voice a little harder as she replied:

"I suppose you think, Miriam, that because I have four children of my own to fuss over, I might be expected to let the others alone, and I daresay you're right; but all that I know is, my heart isn't made that way. I have noticed you during these last weeks, and I am sure that you have felt as I say. But if you think that because I have four of my own to love, and therefore have less to give to those two motherless boys, you are mistaken. The more you have to love, the more you love each one of them, separately--not the less, as you might know if you had children of your own ..."

She stopped, unable to say any more. Her words were much more cruel than she intended them to be; that is, they fell much more cruelly than she meant them to on Lady Fletcher's ears. She had no idea, of course, of the deep though vain yearning for offspring of her own that filled her sister-in-law's bosom; Miriam could not possibly have expressed this, the deepest and most tragic thing in her life, to Cecilia. She was made that way. The more poignantly she felt what she had missed, the more determinedly she concealed every trace of her feeling from the outside world.

So it was now. Every ounce of feeling in her flared for a moment into hate; the hate of the childless woman for the mother. The flame fell after a second or two, of course, and she was able to reply, unsmilingly and coldly:

"I think that Harry will be as well treated by me as you could wish, Cecilia."

Mother love, nothing else, was responsible for all the hardness and bitterness in her tone. But Mrs. James knew nothing of this; she only felt the hardness and bitterness and judged the speaker accordingly.

That was all. The quarrel, if such it could be called, died down as quickly as it had flared up, for it was impossible for these two well-bred ladies to fall out and fight like fishwives. Lady Fletcher's last remark made further discussion of the subject, or any other subject, for the time being, impossible, and after a minute the two rose by tacit consent and went out to find the others.

By the time they found them they were both as calm and self-possessed as usual. When, after a little more standing around, the gongs were rung and the time for farewell actually arrived, Lady Fletcher kissed her nephew and niece with neither more nor less than her usual cordiality, and Mrs. James was exactly as affectionate in her farewells to Harry as might have been expected. The two ladies also embraced each other with no sign of ill-feeling. Lady Fletcher's good-humor was unabated in quant.i.ty, if just a little strained in quality.

"Now comes the most amusing part of sailing," she said, "which is, watching other people cry. Don't tell me people don't love to cry better than anything else in the world; if not, why do they come down here? You might think that every one of them was being torn away from his home and country for life!"

"The time when I always want to cry most," contributed Uncle James, "is on landing. Everything is so disagreeable then, after the ease and comfort of the voyage."

That was the general tone of the parting. Even Aunt Cecilia smiled appreciatively and gave no sign of underlying emotion. But as she watched the great steamer glide slowly out of her slip her thoughts ran in such channels as these:

"Miriam is a brilliant woman; she has made a great lady of herself, and is going to be a still greater one. She has money, position, wit, beauty and youth. The greatest people come gladly to her house; small people scheme and plot to get invitations there. Yet what is it all worth, when the greatest blessing of all, the blessing of children, is denied her?

And the terrible part of it is, she is so utterly unconscious of what she has missed; her whole heart is eaten up with those worldly and unsatisfactory things. Poor Miriam, I pity her as it is, but how I could pity her if it were all a little different!"

And the thoughts of Lady Fletcher, as she stood on the deck and watched the sh.o.r.es slip away from her, were somewhat as follows:

"I always thought Cecilia was one of the best of women, until this hour.

I don't mind her being a great heiress, I don't mind her never being able to forget that she was a Van Lorn, I don't mind her subconscious att.i.tude of having married beneath her when she married James--whose ancestors were governing colonies when hers were keeping a grocery store on lower Manhattan Island--! But when it comes to her boasting about having children, and flaunting them in my face because I haven't got any, I think I am about justified in saying that she shows a mean and ign.o.ble nature. I have seen all I want to of Cecilia, for some time to come!"

CHAPTER VI

ARCADIA AND YANKEEDOM

We have given a more or less detailed account of the misunderstanding just described because of the fact that the mental relation it inaugurated was responsible, more than any one other thing, for the separation of Harry and James Wimbourne for a period of nearly seven years.

No one, not even Lady Fletcher herself, had any idea that this would come to pa.s.s at the time Harry left the country. One thing led on to another; Harry was put in a preparatory school for two or three terms soon after his arrival in England; he was so happy there and the climate and the school life agreed with him so well that it seemed the most natural thing, a year or so later, to send him up to Harrow with some of his youthful contemporaries, with whom he had formed some close friendships. This was done, be it understood, in accordance with Harry's own wish. There was an atmosphere, a quality, a historical feeling about the English schools that after a short time exerted a strong influence on Harry's adolescent imagination, and made St. Barnabas seem flat and unprofitable in comparison. It would not have been so with many boys, but it was with Harry.

Of course James was a strong magnet in the other direction, but not quite strong enough to pull him against all the forces contending on the English side. There was a distinct heart-interest there; within a year after Harry's arrival in the country, the majority of his friends were English boys. How many vice-Jameses were needed to offset the pull of one James we don't know, but we do know that there were enough. James at first objected strenuously to the change in plans, but Harry countered the objection with the proposal that James should leave St. Barnabas and go up to Harrow with his brother. This was considered on the American side as such an inexplicable att.i.tude that further argument was abandoned and the matter of Harry's schooling given up as a bad job.

The one valid objection to Harrow was that if Harry was to become an American citizen, the place to educate him was in America. Sir Giles saw this, and gave the objection its full value.

"If I were to consult my own inclination alone," he said to Harry when they were talking the matter over, "I should undoubtedly want to make an Englishman out of you. I think you would make a pretty good Englishman, Harry. You could go to Oxford, and then make your career here.

Parliament, you know, or the diplomatic. But there seems to be some feeling against such a course. They want you to be an American. They seem to think that your having been born and bred an American makes some difference. Fancy!"

"Fancy!" echoed Harry, as capable as any one of falling in with the spirit of what Lady Fletcher called Sir Giles'

"arising-out-of-that-reply" manner.

"And I won't say they are wholly wrong. The question is, can we make a good American of you over here in England? By the time you have gone through Harrow, won't you be an Englishman of the most confirmed type?

Won't you disappoint everybody and slip from there into Oxford, as it were, automatically?"