Watersprings Part 9

"Come," said Howard, "that's going too far--we can't afford to quarrel.

I don't mind your saying what you think; but if you have the right to take your own line, you must allow the same right to others."

"That depends!" said Jack, and was silent for a moment. Then he turned to Howard and said, "Yes, you are quite right! I am sorry I said all that. You have done no end for me, and I am an ungrateful little beast.

It is rather fine of you not to remind me of all the trouble you have taken; there isn't anyone who would have done so much; and you have really laid yourself out to do what I liked here. I am sorry, I am truly sorry. I suppose I felt myself rather c.o.c.k of the walk here, and am vexed that you have got the whole thing into your hands!"

"All right," said Howard, "I entirely understand; and look here, I am glad you said what you did. You are not wholly wrong. I have interfered perhaps more than I ought; but you must believe me when I say this--that it isn't with a managing motive. I like people to like me; I don't want to direct them; only one can overdo trying to make people like one, and I feel I have overdone it. I ought to have gone to work in a different way."

"Well, I have put my foot in it again," said Jack; "it's awful to think that I have been lecturing one of the Dons about his duty. I shall be trying to brighten up their lives next. The mischief is that I don't think I do want people to like me. I am not affectionate. I only want things to go smoothly."

They drew near to the Manor, and Jack said, "I promised Cousin Anne I would go in to tea. She has designs on me, that woman! She doesn't approve of me; she says the sharpest things in her quiet way; one hardly knows she has done it, and then when one thinks of it afterwards, one finds she has drawn blood. I am cross, I think! There seems to be rather a set at me just now; she makes me feel as if I were in bed, being nursed and slapped."

"Well," said Howard, "I shall leave you to her mercies. I shall go on to the Vicarage, and say good-bye. I shan't see them again this time.

You don't mind, I hope? I will try not to use my influence."

"You can't help it!" said Jack with a grimace. "No, do go. You will touch them up a bit. I am not appreciated there just now."

Howard walked on up to the Vicarage. He was rather disturbed by Jack's remarks; it put him, he thought, in an odious light. Was he really so priggish and Jesuitical? That was the one danger of the life of the Don which he hoped he had successfully avoided. He was all for liberty, he imagined. Was he really, after all, a mild schemer with an ethical outlook? Was he bent on managing and uplifting people? The idea sickened him, and he felt humiliated.

When he arrived at the Vicarage, he found the Vicar out. Maud was alone. This was, he confessed to himself with a strange delight, exactly what he most desired. He would not be paternal or formative. He would just make friends with his pretty cousin as he might with a sensible undergraduate. With this stern resolve he entered the room.

Maud got up hastily from her chair--she was writing in a little note-book on her knee. "I thought I would just come in and say good-bye," he said. "I have to go back to Cambridge earlier than I thought, and I hoped I might just catch you and your father."

"He will be so sorry," said Maud; "he does enjoy meeting you. He says it gives him so much to think about."

"Oh, well," said Howard, "I hope to be here again next vacation--in June, that is. I have got to learn my duties here as soon as I can. I see you are hard at work. Is that the book? How do you get on? You have promised to send it me, you know, as soon as you have enough in hand."

"Yes," said Maud, "I will send it you. It has done me good already, doing this. It is very good of you to have suggested it--and I like to think it may be of some use."

"I have been with Jack all the afternoon," said Howard, "and I am afraid he is rather vexed with me. I can't have that. He drew a rather unpleasant picture of me; he seemed to think I have taken this place rather in hand from the Don's point of view. He thinks I should die if I were unable to improve the occasion."

Maud looked up at him with a troubled and rather indignant air. "Jack is perfectly horrid just now," she said; "I can't think what has come over him; and considering that you have been coaching him every day, and getting him shooting and fishing, it seems to me quite detestable!

I oughtn't to say that; but you mustn't be angry with him, Mr. Kennedy.

I think he is feeling very independent just now, and he said to me that it made him feel that he was back at school to have to go up with his books to the Manor every morning. But he is all right really. I am sure he is grateful; it would be too shameful if he were not. Please don't be vexed with him."

Howard laughed. "Oh, I am not vexed! Indeed, I am rather glad he spoke out--at my age one doesn't often get the chance of being sincerely scolded by a perfectly frank young man. One does get donnish and superior, no doubt, and it is useful to find it out, though it isn't pleasant at the time. We have made it up, and he was quite repentant; I think it is altogether natural. It often happens with young men to get irritated with one, no doubt, but as a rule they don't speak out; and this time he has got me between the joints of my armour."

"Oh, dear me!" said Maud, "I think the world is rather a difficult place! It seems ridiculous for me to say that in a place like this, when I think what might be happening if I were poor and had to earn my living. It is silly to mind things so; but Jack accuses me of the same sort of thing. He says that women can't let people alone; he says that women don't really want to DO anything, but only to SEEM to have their way."

"Well, then, it appears we are both in the same box," said Howard, "and we must console each other and grieve over being so much misunderstood."

He felt that he had spoken rather cynically, and that he had somehow hurt and checked the girl. He did not like the thought; but he felt that he had spoken sensibly in not allowing the situation to become sentimental. There was a little silence; and then Maud said, rather timidly: "Do you like going back?"

"No," said Howard, "I don't. I have become curiously interested in this place, and I am lazy. Just now the life of the Don seems to me rather intolerable. I don't want to teach Greek prose, I don't want to go to meetings; I don't want to gossip about appointments, and little intrigues, and bonfires, and College rows. I want to live here, and walk on the Downs and write my book. I don't want to be stuffy, as Jack said. But it will be all right, when I have taken the plunge; and after I have been back a week, this will all fade into a sort of impossibly pleasant dream."

He was again conscious that he had somehow hurt the girl. She looked at him with a troubled face, and then said, "Yes, that is the advantage which men have. I sometimes wonder if it would not be better for me to have some work away from here. But there is nothing I could do; and I can't leave papa."

"Oh, it will all come right!" said Howard feebly; "there are fifty things that might happen. And now I must be off! Mind, you must let me have the book some time; that will serve to remind me of Windlow in the intervals of Greek prose."

He got up and shook hands. He felt he was behaving stupidly and unkindly. He had meant to tell Maud how much he liked the feeling of having made friends, and to have talked to her frankly and simply about everything. He had an intense desire to say that and more; to make her understand that she was and would be in his thoughts; to ascertain how she felt towards him; to a.s.sure himself of their friendship. But he would be wise and prudent; he would not be sentimental or priggish or Jesuitical. He would just leave the impression that he was mildly interested in Windlow, but that his heart was in his work. He felt sustained by his delicate consideration, and by his judicious chilliness. And so he turned and left her, though an unreasonable impulse seized him to take the child in his arms, and tell her how sweet and delicious she was. She had held the little book in her hand as they sate, as if she had hoped he would ask to look at it; and as he closed the door, he saw her put it down on the table with a half-sigh.

XIII

GIVING AWAY

He was to go off the next day; that night he had his last talk to his aunt. She said that she would say good-bye to him then, and that she hoped he would be back in June. She did not seem quite as serene as usual, but she spoke very affectionately and gently of the delight his visit had been. Then she said, "But I somehow feel--I can't give my reasons--as if we had got into a mess here. You are rather a disturbing clement, dear Howard! I may speak plainly to you now, mayn't I? I think you have more effect on people than you know. You have upset us! I am not criticising you, because you have exceeded all my hopes. But you are too diffident, and you don't realise your power of sympathy. You are very observant, very quick to catch the drift of people's moods, and you are not at all formidable. You are so much interested in people that you lead them to reveal themselves and to betray themselves; and they don't find quite what they expect. You are afraid, I think, of caring for people; you want to be in close relation with everyone, and yet to preserve your own tranquillity. You are afraid of emotion; but one can't care for people like that! It doesn't cost you enough! You are like a rich man who can afford to pay for things, and I think you rather pauperise people. Here you have been for three weeks; and n.o.body here will be able to forget you; and yet I think you may forget us. One can't care without suffering, and I think that you don't suffer. It is all a pleasure and delight to you. You win hearts, and don't give your own. Don't think I am ungrateful. You have made a great difference already to my life; but you have made me suffer too. I know that like Telemachus in Tennyson's poem you will be 'decent not to fail in offices of tenderness'--I know I can depend on you to do everything that is kind and considerate and just. You won't disappoint me. You will do out of a natural kindliness and courtesy what many people can only do by loving. You don't claim things, you don't lay hands on things; and it looks so like unselfishness that it seems detestable of me to say anything. But you will have to give yourself away, and I don't think you have ever done that. I can say all this, my dear, because I love you, as a mother might; you are my son indeed; but there is something in you that will have to be broken; we have all of us to be broken. It isn't that you have anything to repent of. You would take endless trouble to help anyone who wanted help, you would be endlessly patient and tender and strong; but you do not really know what love means, because it does not hurt or wound you. You are like Achilles, was it not, who had been dipped in the river of death, and you are invulnerable. You won't, I know, resent my saying this? I know you won't--and the fact that you will not makes it harder for me to say it--but I almost wish it WOULD wound you, instead of making you think how you can amend it. You can't amend it, but G.o.d and love can; only you must dare to let yourself go. You must not be wise and forbearing.

There, dear, I won't say more!"

Howard took her hand and kissed it. "Thank you," he said, "thank you a hundred times for speaking so. It is perfectly true, every word of it.

It is curious that to-day I have seen myself three times mirrored in other minds. I don't like what I see--I am not complacent--I am not flattered. But I don't know what to do! I feel like a patient with a hopeless disease, who has been listening to a perfectly kind and wise physician. But what can I do? It is just the vital impulse which is lacking. I will be frank too; it is quite true that I live in the surface of things. I am so much interested in books, ideas, thoughts, I am fascinated by the study of human temperament; people delight me, excite me, amuse me; but nothing ever comes inside. I don't excuse myself, but I say: 'It is He that hath made us and not we ourselves.' I am just so, as you have described, and I feel what a hollow-hearted sort of person I am. Yet I go on amusing myself with friendships and interests. I have never suffered, and I have never loved. Well, I would like to change all that, but can I?"

"Ah, dear Howard," said his aunt, "that is the everlasting question. It is like you to take this all so sweetly and to speak so openly. But further than this no one can help you. You are like the young man whom Jesus loved who had great possessions. You do not know how much! I will not tell you to follow Him; and your possessions are not those which can be given away. But you must follow love. I had a hope, I have a hope--oh, it is more than that, because we all find our way sooner or later--and now that you know the truth, as I see you know it, the light will not be long in coming. G.o.d bless you, dearest child; there is pain ahead of you; but I don't fear that--pain is not the worst thing or the last thing!"

XIV

BACK TO CAMBRIDGE

"I HAD a hope . . . I have a hope," these words of his aunt's echoed often through Howard's brain, in the wakeful night which followed.

Nothing was plain to himself except the fact that things were tangled; the anxious exaltation which came to him from his talk with his aunt cleared off like the dying away of the flush of some beaded liquor. "I must see into this--I must understand what is happening--I must disentangle it," he said again and again to himself. He was painfully conscious, as he thought and thought, of his own deep lack both of moral courage and affection. He liked nothing that was not easy--easy triumph, easy relations. Somehow the threads of life had knotted themselves up; he had slipped so lightly into his place here, he had taken up responsibilities as he might have taken up a flower; he had meant to be what he called frank and affectionate all round, and now he felt that he was going to disappoint everyone. Not till the daylight began to outline the curtain-rifts did he fall asleep; and he woke with that excited fatigue which comes of sleeplessness.

He came down, he breakfasted alone in the early morning freshness. The house was all illumined by the sun, but it spread its beauties in vain before him. The trap came to the door, and when he came out he found to his surprise that Jack was standing on the steps talking to the coachman. "I thought I would like to come to the station with you,"

said Jack. Howard was pleased at this. They got in together, and one by one the scenes so strangely familiar fled past them. Howard looked long at the Vicarage as he pa.s.sed, wondering whether Maud was perhaps looking out. That had been a clumsy, stupid business--his talk with her! Presently Jack said, "Look here, I am going to say again that I was perfectly hateful yesterday. I don't know what came over me--I was thinking aloud."

"Oh, it doesn't matter a bit!" said Howard; "it was my fault really. I have mismanaged things, I think; and it is good for me to find that out."

"No, but you haven't," said Jack. "I see it all now. You came down here, and you made friends with everyone. That was all right; the fact simply is that I have been jealous and mean. I expected to have you all to myself--to run you, in fact; and I was vexed at finding you take an interest in all the others. There, it's better out. I am entirely in the wrong. You have been awfully good all round, and we shall be precious dull now that you are going. The truth is that we have been squabbling over you."

"Well, Jack," said Howard, smiling, "it's very good of you to say this.

I can't quite accept it, but I am very grateful. There WAS some truth in what you said--but it wasn't quite the whole truth; and anyhow you and I won't squabble--I shouldn't like that!"

Jack nodded and smiled, and they went on to talk of other things; but Howard was pleased to see that the boy hung about him, determined to make up for his temper, looked after his luggage, saw him into the train, and waved him a very ingenuous farewell, with a pretence of tears.

The journey pa.s.sed in a listless dream for Howard, but everything faded before the thought of Maud. What could he do to make up for his brutality? He could not see his way clear. He had a sense that it was unfair to claim her affection, to sentimentalise; and he thought that he had been doubly wrong--wrong in engaging her interest so quickly, wrong in playing on her unhappiness just for his own enjoyment, and doubly wrong in trying to disengage their relation so roughly. It was a mean business; and yet though he did not want to hold her, he could not bear to let her go.

As he came near Cambridge and in sight of the familiar landscape, the wide fields, the low lines of far-off wolds, he was surprised to find that instead of being depressed, a sense of comfort stole over him, and a feeling of repose. He had crammed too many impressions and emotions into his visit; and now he was going back to well-known and peaceful activities. The sight of his rooms pleased him, and the foregathering with the three or four of his colleagues was a great relief. Mr.

Redmayne was incisive and dogmatic, but evidently pleased to see him back. He had not been away, and professed that holidays and change of scene were distracting and exhausting. "It takes me six weeks to recover from a holiday," he said. He had had an old friend to stay with him, a country parson, and he had apparently spent his time in elaborate manoeuvres to see as little of his guest as possible. "A worthy man, but tedious," he said, "wonderfully well preserved--in body, that is; his mind has entirely gone to pieces; he has got some dismal notions in his head about the condition of the agricultural poor; he thinks they want uplifting! Now I am all for the due subordination of cla.s.ses. The poor are there, if I may speak plainly, to breed--that is their first duty; and their only other duty that I can discover, is to provide for the needs of men of virtue and intelligence!"

Later on, Howard was left alone with him, and thought that it would please the old man to tell him of the change in his own position.

"I am delighted to hear it," said Mr. Redmayne: "a landed proprietor, that's a very comfortable thing! Now how will that affect your position here? Ah yes, I see--only the heir-apparent at present. Well, you will probably find that the estate has all been run on very sentimental lines by your worthy aunt. You take my advice, and put it all on a business-like footing. Let it be clear from the first that you won't stand any nonsense. Ideas!" said Mr. Redmayne in high disdain, "that's the curse of the country. Ideas everywhere, about the empire, about civic rights and duties, about religion, about art"--he made a long face as though he had swallowed medicine. "Let us all keep our distance and do our work. Let us have no nonsense about the brotherhood of man.

I hope with all my heart, Howard, that you won't permit anything of that kind. I don't feel as sure of you as I should like; but this will be a very good thing for you, if it shows you that all this stuff will not do in practice. I'm an honest Whig. Let everyone have a vote, and let them give their votes for the right people, and then we shall get on very well."