The Wooden Horse Part 19

"I beg your pardon." he stammered. "I didn't know----" He waited for a moment as though he were going to say something, or expected his father to speak. Then he turned and left the room.

"Let's have the candles," said Sir Jeremy, as though he had not noticed the interruption, and Harry lit them.

The old man sank off to sleep again, and Harry fell back into his own gloomy thoughts once more. They were always meeting like that, and on each occasion there was need for the same severe self-control. He had to remind himself continually of their treatment of him, of Robin's coldness and reserve. At times he cursed himself for a fool, and then again it seemed the only way out of the labyrinth.

His love for his son had changed its character. He had no longer that desire for equality of which he had made, at first, so much. No, the two generations could never see in line; he must not expect that. But he thought of Robin as a boy--as a boy who had made blunders and would make others again, and would at last turn to his father as the only person who could help him. He had fancied once or twice that he had already begun to turn.

Well, he would be there if Robin wanted him. He had decided to speak to Mary about it. Her clear common-sense point of view seemed to drive, like the sun, through the mists of his obscurity; she always saw straight through things--never round them--and her practical mind arrived at a quicker solution than was possible for his rather romantic, quixotic sentiment.

"You are too fond of discerning pleasant motives," she had once said to him. "I daresay they are all right, but it takes such a time to see them."

He had not seen her since the outbreak, and he was rather anxious as to her opinion; but the main thing was to be with her. Since last Sunday he had been, he confessed to himself, absurd. He had behaved more in the manner of a boy of nineteen than a middle-aged widower of forty-five. He had been suddenly afraid of the Bethels--going to tea had seemed such an obvious advance on his part that he had shrunk from it, and he had even avoided Bethel lest that gentleman should imagine that he was on the edge of a proposal for his daughter's hand. He thought that all the world must know of it, and he blushed like a girl at the thought of its being laid bare for Pendragon to laugh and gibe it. It was so precious, so wonderful, that he kept it, like a rich piece of jewellery, deep in a secret drawer, over which he watched delightedly, almost humorously, secure in the delicious knowledge that he alone had the key. He wandered out at night, like a foolish schoolboy, to watch the lamp in her room--that dull circle of golden light against the blind seemed to draw him with it into the intimacy and security of her room.

On one of his solitary afternoon walks he suddenly came upon her. He had gone, as he so often did, over the moor to the Four Stones; he chose that place partly because of the Stones themselves and partly because of the wonderful view. It seemed to him that the whole heart of Cornwall--its mystery, its eternal sameness, its rejection of everything that was modern and ephemeral, the pathos of old deserted altars and past G.o.ds searching for their old-time worshippers--was centred there.

The Stones themselves stood on the hill, against the sky, gaunt, grey, menacing, a landmark for all the country-side. The moor ran here into a valley between two lines of hill, a cup bounded on three sides by the hills and on the fourth by the sea. In the spring it flamed, a bowl of fire, with the gorse; now it stood grim and naked to all the winds, blue in the distant hills, a deep red to the right, where the plough had been, brown and grey on the moor itself running down to the sea.

It was full of deserted things, as is ever the way with the true Cornwall. On the hill were the Stones sharp against the sky-line; lower down, in a bend of the valley, stood the ruins of a mine, the shaft and chimney, desolately solitary, looking like the pillars of some ancient temple that had been fashioned by uncouth worshippers. In the valley itself stood the stones of what was once a chapel--built, perhaps, for the men of the desolate mine, inhabited now by rabbits and birds, its windows s.p.a.ces where the winds that swept the moor could play their eternal, restless games.

On a day of clouds there was no colour on the moor, but when the sun was out great bands of light swept its surface, playing on the Stones and changing them to marble, striking colour from the mine and filling the chapel with gold. But the sun did not reach that valley on many days when the rest of the world was alight--it was as if it respected the loneliness of its monuments and the pathos of them.

Harry sat on the side of the hill, below the Stones, and watched the sea. At times a mist came and hid it; on sunny days, when the sky was intensely blue, there hung a dazzling haze like a golden veil and he could only tell that the sea was there by the sudden gleam of tiny white horses, flashing for a moment on the mirror of blue and shining through the haze; sometimes a gull swerved through the air above his head as though a wave had lost its bounds and, for sheer joy of the beautiful day, had flung itself tossing and wheeling into the air.

But to-day was a day of wind and rapidly sailing clouds, and myriads of white horses curved and tossed and vanished over the shifting colours of the sea; there were wonderful shadows of dark blue and purple and green of such depth that they seemed unfathomable.

Suddenly he saw Mary coming towards him. A scarf--green like the green of the sea--was tied round her hat and under her chin and floated behind her. Her dress was blown against her body, and she walked as though she loved the battling with the wind. Her face was flushed with the struggle, and she had come up to him before she saw that he was there.

"Now, that's luck," she said, laughing, as she sat down beside him; "I've been wanting to see you ever since yesterday afternoon, but you seemed to have hidden yourself. It doesn't sound a very long time, does it? But I've something to tell you--rather important."

"What?" He looked at her and suddenly laughed. "What a splendid place for us to meet--its solitude is almost unreal."

"As to solitude," she said calmly, pointing down the valley. "There's Tracy Corridor; it will be all over the Club to-night--he's been watching us for some time"; a long thin youth, his head turned in their direction, had pa.s.sed down the footpath towards its ruined chapel, and was rapidly vanishing in the direction of Pendragon.

"Well--let them," said Harry, shrugging his shoulders. "You don't mind, do you?"

"Not a bit," she answered lightly. "They've discussed the Bethel family so frequently and with such vigour that a little more or less makes no difference whatsoever. Pendragon taboo! we won't dishonour the sea by such a discussion in its sacred presence."

"What do you want to tell me?" he asked, watching delightedly the colour of her face, the stray curls that the wind dragged from discipline and played games with, the curve of her wrist as her hand lay idly in her lap.

"Oh, it'll keep," she said quickly. "Never mind just yet. Tell me about yourself--what's happened?"

"How did you know that anything had?" he asked.

"Oh, one can tell," she answered. "Besides, I have felt sure that it would, things couldn't go on just as they were----" she paused a moment and then added seriously, "I hope you don't mind my asking? It seems a little impertinent--but that was part of the compact, wasn't it?"

"Why, of course," he said.

"Because, you know," she went on, "it's really rather absurd. I'm only twenty-six, and you're--oh! I don't know _how_ old!--anyhow an elderly widower with a grown-up son; but I'm every bit as old as you are, really. And I'm sure I shall give you lots of good advice, because you've no idea what a truly practical person I am. Only sometimes lately I've wondered whether you've been a little surprised at my--our flinging ourselves into your arms as we have done. It's like father--he always goes the whole way in the first minute; but it isn't, or at any rate it oughtn't to be, like me!"

"You are," he said quietly, "the best friend I have in the world. How much that means to me I will tell you one day."

"That's right," she said gaily, settling herself down with her hands folded behind her head. "Now for the situation. I'm all attention."

"Well," he answered, "the situation is simple enough--it's the next move that's puzzling me. There was, four days ago, an explosion--it was after breakfast--a family council--and I was in a minority of one.

I was accused of a good many things--going down to the Cove, paying no attention to the Miss Ponsonbys, and so on. They attacked me as I thought unfairly, and I lost control--on the whole, I am sure, wisely.

I wasn't very rude, but I said quite plainly that I should go my own way in the future and would be dictated to by no one. At any rate they understand that."

"And now?"

"Ah, now--well--it's as you would expect. We are quite polite but hostile. Robin and I don't speak. The new game--Father and Son; or how to cut your nearest relations with expedition and security." He laughed bitterly.

"Oh, I should like to shake him!" she cried, sitting up and flinging her arms wide, as though she were saluting the sea. "He doesn't know, he doesn't understand! Neither himself nor any one else. Oh, I will talk to him some day! But, do you know," she said, turning round to him, "it's been largely your fault from the beginning."

"Oh, I know," he answered. "If I had only seen then what I see now.

But how could I? How could I tell? But I always have been that kind of man, all my days--finding out things when it's too late and wanting to mend things that are hopelessly broken. And then I have always been impulsive and enthusiastic about people. When I meet them first, I mean, I like them and credit them with all the virtues, and then, of course, there is an awakening. Oh, you don't know," he said, with a little laugh, "how enthusiastic I was when I first came back."

"Yes, I do," she answered; "that was one of the reasons I took to you."

"But it isn't right," he said, shaking his head. "I've always been like that. It's been the same with my friendships. I've rated them too highly. I've expected everything and then cried like a child because I've been disappointed. I can see now not only the folly of it, but the weakness. It is, I suppose, a mistake, caring too much for other people, one loses one's self-respect."

"Yes," she said, staring out to sea, "it's quite true--one does. The world's too hard; it doesn't give one credit for fine feelings--it takes a short cut and thinks one a fool."

"But the worst of it is," he went on ruefully, "that I never feel any older. I have those enthusiasms and that romance in the same way now at forty-five--just as I did at nineteen. I never could bear quarrelling with anybody. I used to go and apologise even when it wasn't my fault--so that, you see, the present situation is difficult."

"Ah, but you must keep your end up," she broke in quickly. "It's the only way--don't give in. Robin is just like that. He is self-centred, all shams now, and when he sees that you are taken in by them, just as he is himself, he despises you. But when he sees you laugh at them or cut them down, then he respects you. I'm the only person, I think, that knows him really here. The others haven't grasped him at all."

"My father grows worse every day," Harry went on, as though pursuing his own train of thought. "He can't last much longer, and when he goes I shall miss him terribly. We have understood each other during this fortnight as we never did in all those early years. Sometimes I funk it utterly--following him with all of them against me."

"Why, no," she cried. "It's splendid. You are in power. They can do nothing, and Robin will come round when he sees how you face it out.

Why, I expect that he's coming already. I've faced things out here all these years, and you dare to say that you can't stand a few months of it."

"What have you faced?" he asked. "Tell me exactly. I want to know all about you; you've never told me very much, and it's only fair that I should know."

"Yes," she said gravely, "it is--well, you shall!--at least a part of it. A woman always keeps a little back," she said, looking at him with a smile. "As soon as she ceases to be a puzzle she ceases to interest."

She turned and watched the sea. Then, after a moment's pause, she said:

"What do you want to know? I can only give you bits of things--when, for instance, I ran away from my nurse, aged five, was picked up by an applewoman with a green umbrella who introduced me to three old ladies with black pipes and moustaches--I was found in a coal cellar. Then we lived in Bloomsbury--a little house looking out on to a little green park--all in miniature it seems on looking back. I don't think that I was a very good child, but they didn't look after me very much. Mother was always out, and father in business. Fancy," she said, laughing, "father in business! We were happy then, I think, all of us. Then came the terrible time when father ran away."

"Ah, yes," Harry said, "he told me."

"Poor mother! it was quite dreadful; I was only eight then, and I didn't understand. But she sat up all night waiting for him. She was persuaded that he was killed, and she was very ill. You see he had never left any word as to where he was. And then he suddenly turned up again, and ate an enormous breakfast, as though nothing had happened.

I don't think he realised a bit that she had worried.

"It was so like him, the naked selfishness of it and the utter unresponsibility, as of a child.

"Then I went to school--in Bloomsbury somewhere. It was a Miss Pinker, and she was interested in me. Poor thing, her school failed afterwards. I don't know quite why, but she never could manage, and I don't think parents ever paid her. I had great ideas of myself then; I thought that I would be great, an actress or a novelist, but I got rid of all that soon enough. I was happy; we had friends, and luxuries were rare enough to make them valuable. Then--we came down here--this sea, this town, this moor--Oh! how I hate them!"

Her hands were clenched and her face was white. "It isn't fair; they have taken everything from me--leisure, brain, friends. I have had to slave ever since I came here to make both ends meet. Ah! you never knew that, did you? But father has never done a stroke of work since he has been here, and mother has never been the same since that night when he ran away; so I've had it all--and it has been sc.r.a.pe, sc.r.a.pe, sc.r.a.pe all the time. You don't know the tyranny of b.u.t.ter and eggs and vegetables, the perpetual struggle to turn twice two into five, the unending worry about keeping up appearances--although, for us, it mattered precious little, people never came to see if appearances were kept.