Chapter II

1

Aunt Moira was the only relation Ivor had, that he was aware of; and towards the end of the year after he left school she sickened of a cancer and was tortured to death. But before she died she told her nephew an ancient tale.

Ivor had originally been told that his father had died of a sudden illness, a few weeks before his birth. His natural curiosity on the subject had elicited the more particular information that his father had died of a sudden inflammation of the lungs--which Ivor somehow never realised meant pneumonia until he himself had it--in the thirty-ninth year of his age, in Italy. Thirty-nine had seemed to young Ivor a reasonable age at which to die, but he had been curious about Italy, for Italy had seemed a curious place for his father to have died in. But nothing on earth could move Aunt Moira to speak of what she did not wish to speak, and Ivor had to wait until a certain gray October afternoon of his nineteenth year, when he was much more curious about himself than about the ghosts that had given him birth, to hear the ancient tale that Aunt Moira must tell from her bed.

But she, who was commonly so impatient of fantasy, as of all excretions of inactive minds, must needs begin her tale with the casual statement that Ivor had never had a father at all! Whereupon Ivor looked very serious, and said nothing. “Technically speaking, of course,” snapped Aunt Moira, as though he had made a fool of himself. His real father, he who had loved and had been loved by his mother, and who had died in Italy, had been, implied Aunt Moira--_implied_ Aunt Moira!--a vastly different person from any Mr. Marlay who could possibly have occurred in any strictly legal relation to his mother. “That,” said Lady Moira, “accounts to your nose and your Christian names.” For, of course, like other rebels, Aunt Moira could be a frightful snob when she chose.

But Aunt Moira’s tale came slowly, for that long-hidden cancer was at last and openly having its way with her, so certain the disease was that no surgeon’s knife could now avail the proud, tired body but in the one way itself made inevitable, from day to day of pain. But though, for press of suffering, her tongue must needs be still every now and then, her eyes were unmastered, keen and suspicious--for she would have no nonsense about her tale being misunderstood by this young man who sat rather too quietly by her bed, looking darker and sulkier than ever in the dim light of the heavily-curtained bedroom; and, in just such a silence, her eyes could dare the young man to feel the least atom of anger against the dead parents who had left him in what she didn’t hesitate to describe as “this mess.” Though, as she rather cynically said later, it was a much less careless mess than commonly happens:

“For you will be very well off, Ivor. There was nothing careless, nothing shoddy, even about your father’s lawlessness; as I hope there never will be about yours--but remember always that all lawlessness, like all cruelty, is fundamentally vulgar.” And Aunt Moira, having successfully contradicted herself, was again subdued by a stress of pain, and lay a while so still and silent that she might have seemed a carved figure but for those ever-open indomitable eyes that brooded suspiciously upon him.

And Ivor stirred restlessly, suddenly uncomfortable in the hard little chair which Aunt Moira had commanded him to pull up to the bed; Ivor stirred uneasily and wanted to stretch his legs and do something sensible with his hands, such as digging them into his pockets, but it was quite impossible to do any of those natural things, for one somehow didn’t lounge before Aunt Moira. But soon the discomfort of his body waned to nothing before the discomfort of his mind, for as she spoke or was silent he somehow began to feel that he was treating Aunt Moira unfairly, he felt a little mean for not thinking about it all as Aunt Moira seemed to expect him to think about it all--dear Aunt Moira, who was so seriously intent on explaining to him his illegitimacy! And so, of course, he ought to be serious too; and he had an uncomfortable feeling that there must be something _beastly_ in him for not taking his illegitimacy so seriously as it was expected of him, and he wondered if it was all part of that same beastliness in him that had made him feel “bored” at school instead of going through with it in the ordinary way. And suddenly he thought of Transome, just a flash of a grinning thought behind his serious attention to Aunt Moira--how amazingly affected Transome would be if it was suddenly sprung on him by an Aunt Moira that the late Colonel Transome had never had any existence, technically speaking, and that therefore, he, Transome, was as illegitimate as any one could be! And the thought of Transome, faced with this news, persisted, how he would think it was the most important thing that had ever happened to any one outside of a book, and how he would be bursting with the tragic news until he simply had to confide in some one, saying: “I say, old boy, I’ve gone and turned out to be a bastard. Now what could be fairer than that?” And then Ivor pulled himself together sharply, feeling frightfully mean and uncomfortable--but the idea still persisted in him that his illegitimacy wasn’t at all important to him, not at all disturbing: interesting, of course, but not really important or disturbing. But, faced by Aunt Moira’s stern eyes--and hurt eyes they were too, just now and then, as though a sudden memory had hurt them--he tried his best to think as he was expected to think, just like the bustling people in Fielding’s _Tom Jones_....

But suddenly he realised that Aunt Moira was speaking of his mother, and that awoke him vividly, for he remembered his mother dimly, and he remembered to have loved her, even as he loved the idea of her now, she was so gentle and serious a ghost. He wanted Aunt Moira to describe her minutely, her person and character and loveliness, and he wanted to hear about how she had loved his father. But Aunt Moira could never be minute, could not even describe in the ordinary way; but, when moved, would make some gesture of speech, as though to unfold a tapestry that she had long kept hidden, and then she would hold a torch to that tapestry, a flaming torch that cast a great light here and a deep shadow there, and left the listener gaping at so wanton a vagueness cloaked by so grand a manner.

Aunt Moira did not speak of his mother as his mother, at least she didn’t seem to, but as something much finer and grander and more intangible. She created for Ivor not the sad and quiet mother of his faint memory, but a figure of story; and she seemed, as it were defiantly, to speak of Ann Marlay as a woman of women, as of a tradition that is as ancient as song. In fact Aunt Moira, in that large and reckless way you couldn’t help loving in her, filled in a portrait of a lady as Gainsborough might have painted it, in the grand and fearless manner--anyway, his mother seemed very grand and fearless by the time Aunt Moira had done with her torchlight description; but Ivor could not, try as he would, see this fine and exquisite lady as his mother. He could not reconcile this tragic and remote figure of romance with a dimly acute memory: a memory of an emotion that had quite filled a very little boy’s heart and eyes with a tremendous thrill, when there had bent over him a lovely white face and calm, gentle eyes; and these eyes were so wide and deep and dark with a shining darkness that the little boy had just let them cover him with a faëry silence. It had been a marvellous plaything between them, that faëry silence; until, one day, it had taken bodily shape as death, and then down had swooped Aunt Moira....

2

But Ann Marlay’s womanhood, in the historic sense, was only the preface to Lady Moira’s tale--as such, indeed, has been the preface to many a tale, that womanhood so exquisitely contrived to serve love and to destroy ambition. The stuff of the tale, the very heart of all the alarums of the romance, lay--as Aunt Moira saw it, not unnaturally--with that fine gentleman, her younger brother and his father: through whom, of course, for all her gallant talk of his mother, her interest and affection for himself had descended, as she didn’t now trouble to conceal. And Ivor was made to see, vividly, how Aunt Moira must have treasured, inexorably and immensely, that other young man, his father--and how his father, head of his house at a rebellious age, must have evaded and combated and rebelled, very mightily and stormily of course, but always and only to succumb. The sterling intimacy of Aunt Moira’s life, this between herself and her younger brother had been--and how likely a one to bring one of them to trouble, as was well proved!

He was tall, of course, this father of his, and with hair as fair and thick as his own was dark and thick: and, Aunt Moira rather cruelly said, a rather obvious kind of face--though by “obvious” Ivor later found she meant the kind of face that leads crusades or smashes things; and, of course, with that nose piratical and predatory, that mountainous and ancient nose, brother to her own and father to Ivor’s. Aunt Moira, with a toss at her idol, suggested that that other young man might have been all the better for brown eyes instead of blue, for she had very unconventional views about eyes, saying: “There is something musty and _expected_ about blue eyes in that kind of face,” and that Ivor’s looks lost nothing for his mother having given him her dark eyes. “But it is of no importance,” said Aunt Moira.

Ivor had happened, it appeared, in the tenth year of his parent’s mating--“a word,” said Aunt Moira, “to be used very rarely”--and so the months of storm-tossed wonderings that had preceded that love’s consummation showed Ivor his father as a young man of about eight or nine-and-twenty, unhappily married five years before. And Ivor particularly liked to imagine his father during those first months of strivings this way and that way: this way, a barren and comfortless marriage--“a girl like a stone,” said Aunt Moira, “but not one of those stones that seagulls worship”--and that way the dim figure of lovely Ann Marlay, distracting him to leave quarrying stone and live, just live and love. And as Ivor thought of those preliminary months of strivings, this way honour and that way life, he couldn’t help feeling that, from a certain point of view, a great deal of fuss had been made of an issue, how confused soever. They seemed to have made tragedies for themselves where we would make a trunkcall; they seemed, his aunt and his father, to have debated the thing largely and at large--only in the end to do what it was quite inevitable that they must do, to yield to the most secret and compelling of the laws of life, which is the law of lawlessness. And as Ivor thought of the “girl like a stone,” he saw, dimly and painfully, what Aunt Moira with her sweeping distaste for sub-human people could not see, how even a figure of stone can be absent-mindedly crucified by full-blooded people.

It had been, of course, natural enough for that tempestuous young man to have at once hurried off his elder sister and dearest friend to see and love the girl Ann Marlay: to that house on Putney Hill where she lived with her father, a drowsy old gentleman who collected stamps and books, but little knowledge of men and none of daughters.

“Miracles cannot be explained,” Aunt Moira said to Ivor, in explaining this particular one. “For indeed it was a miracle that happened to your father--to meet, by chance and on the open road, the one woman in the world who could touch him so that nothing else could ever touch him!”

“They met like birds,” said Aunt Moira, and was silent a while. And in her eyes was that expression, profound and absorbed, of one who is going to die.

The actual ingredients of the miracle had been, it seemed, an accident to his carriage, a maimed dog, and a trembling girl on the curb, silently rebuking him for his negligence; and then Ivor’s father, least casual of men and as hurt as the dog, protesting his way with it in his arms into her father’s house near by, to placate her and comfort the dog--and to change the whole manner and colour of his life.

And into Aunt Moira’s manner, into the shadows of her fading voice, as she spoke of those two dear wraiths, there seemed suddenly to have come the explanation of Ivor’s perplexity at all that debate with which his father had challenged his house, and, through it, his world: an air, as absurd and sublime as of a mystic conviction, as of that regicide of long ago, who, in his defence, is said to have deigned only thus far: “This thing was not done in a corner.”

But of course it was done in a corner, inevitably, for in this life there is no sort of adultery that is not done in a corner, not even that of milk and water.... In this case in a corner of Italy, for ten amazing years! For there couldn’t then, Aunt Moira sharply pointed out, be any question of divorce: an Earl then was an Earl, whereas now he might be a Brazilian and no one know the difference.

It was one of those loves, then, whose purity and greatness appals an epithet: one of those loves that have something cosmic in their union, one to the other, down the long toll of centuries; a love immense enough to have demanded from Ivor’s father a clear alternative, his whole life or his absolute restraint--and in so completely surrendering, with his life, his honour, his ambitions and his place in England, he had done, Aunt Moira magnificently dared to say, very well with his bargain. And in that lay the great similarity between Ivor’s aunt and Ivor’s father, this sister and brother, that nothing they did could ever be not worth while to them to have done. They were so terribly genuine and weathered, like two trees on a harassed moor, very sombre in sadness, very mighty in joy. They were a dangerous couple, for some part of the truth was in them.

3

That night Ivor went for a long walk about London, and thought and wondered about what Aunt Moira had told him, about those lovely dead parents of his. And it was as he strode down the hill of Church Street, to Kensington, a tall, thin, boyish figure, completely and carelessly inelegant, that he whispered to himself: “My God, what a marvellous fluke it must be for two people to understand each other, utterly!...”

Ivor Marlay was already growing up. He was already emerging from that painful consciousness of himself which is the burden of our boyhood, into a dim, muddled consciousness of other people, other things, the world. His thoughts were confusing him mightily. He was becoming aware--as dully yet definitely, say, as he might become aware of an approaching headache--of the mad mystery of other people. The years of his boyhood had passed in a world where everything happened by rote, where everything happened inevitably. But from now onwards anything might happen, but anything--to him! The world had gifts to give--and he was alone, irresponsible, tremendously ready to receive. Love might happen, even love....

But of course love would happen.

And the first glimmer of an ideal came to him: the first glimmer of the ideal that comes to all men. But in nearly all men this glimmer dies, and of it nothing is left. That is called life. And in a few men this glimmer waxes into a great light, and then it fades, and then it dies. That, too, is called life.

Ivor Pelham Marlay, in those ensuing days, found his growing awareness greatly helped by an acute consciousness of his father--with whom, he comically thought, Aunt Moira had surprised him in a Jack-in-the-box kind of way. And he found his father marvellously adequate, as a father; he was glad of him, glad of his racking uncertainties, glad of his tearing folly; and altogether glad he was that his father had been a lover.

And thus it was that from the grim lips of Aunt Moira those dead parents passed wanly but finally into the history of their son’s life; a secret memory to last for ever--now strengthened and shepherded, as in their lives, by dear Aunt Moira herself, who died but a few days after telling Ivor of them. As she had lain for so many days, so she died, towards the evening of the seventeenth day of October, 1908, in unutterable fear of God.

_Miserere, Judex meus,_
_Mortis in discrimine_....

And so, because he had not gone up to Oxford, Aunt Moira’s death left Ivor Pelham Marlay, at the age of nineteen, intolerably alone.