Chapter XI: Book IV: XXV (2)

None of the younger children could pronounce the name of the book, and they therefore preserved a respectful silence; but Terry interrupted with a laugh: “Oh, it’s the book that Scopy cures us all out of. It’s called the ‘Cyclopædia of Nursery Remedies’.”

The Princess received this with a dubious frown. “I don’t remember a book of that name being used in our courses at Lohengrin; is it a recent publication?”

Miss Scope sat rigid and majestic at the opposite table-end. Thus directly challenged, she replied reassuringly: “Dear me, no; it’s been thoroughly tested. My mother and all my aunts used it in their families. I believe even my grandmother—”

“Even your grandmother? But then the book must be completely obsolete—and probably very dangerous.”

Miss Scope smiled undauntedly. “Oh, I think not. My mother always found it most reliable. We were fourteen in the family, ten miles from the railway, in Lancashire, and she brought us through all our illnesses on it. In a family of that size one couldn’t always be sending for the doctor....”

This gave her interlocutor’s dismay a new turn. “Fourteen in your family? You don’t mean to say your mother had fourteen children?”

Miss Scope replied with undisguised pride that that was what she did mean; and the Princess laid down her fork with the air of one about to spring up and do battle against such deplorable abuses. “It’s incredible...” she began; then broke off to add in a lower tone: “But I suppose that at that time—” her glance at Miss Scope’s white head seemed to say that the whole business was an old unhappy far-off thing, and she resumed more hopefully: “In the United States such matters will soon be regulated by legislation....”

She met Miss Scope’s horrified stare, and glanced nervously about the table, as if realising that the subject, even at Lohengrin, might hardly be considered suitable for juvenile ears. To relieve her embarrassment she leaned across Bun and addressed herself once more to Zinnie.

“You must be Lady Wrench’s little girl, aren’t you, my dear? Only think, I saw your mother the other day in Venice,” she said, in an affable attempt to change the conversation.

Zinnie’s face sparkled with curiosity. “Oh, did you see her, truly? What did she have on, do you remember?”

“Have on—?” The Princess hesitated, with a puzzled look, and Judith intervened: “Zinnie has a passion for pretty clothes.”

“I think _yours_ are awfully pretty,” Zinnie insidiously put in, addressing the Princess; and added: “Are you sure my mother didn’t give you any presents to give us?”

“Zinnie!” came reprovingly from Miss Scope.

The Princess shook her head. “No; she didn’t give me any presents. Perhaps she thinks you ought to come and get them. But she gave me a message for you when she heard that I was coming here—she told me to tell you how dreadfully she wanted to see her little girl again.”

Zinnie grew scarlet with excitement and gratification; such notice lifted her at once above the other children. But an afterthought soon damped her pride. “If she really feels like that I’d of thought she’d of sent me a present,” she objected doubtfully.

“Presents aren’t everything. And it’s not very nice to associate the people you love with the thought of what they may be going to give you. Besides,” continued the Princess illogically, “if your mother is so generous, think how many presents you’d get if you were always with her.”

This seemed to plunge Zinnie into fresh perplexity. “Always with her? How could I be? She doesn’t want to ’dopt the lot of us, does she? ’Cos you see we’ve all sweared—”

“You mustn’t say swear,” said the Princess.

“Swore,” Zinnie corrected herself.

“I mean, not use such words,” the Princess explained.

“But we _did_,” said Zinnie, “on Scopy’s book; so she’d have to ’dopt us all, with Judy. Do you s’pose she would?”

“I don’t know about that; perhaps it might be difficult. But why shouldn’t she want to have her own little daughter with her?” The Princess again leaned over, and laid a persuasive hand on Zinnie’s. “Don’t you want me to take you back to Venice, to your own real mother, when I go to-morrow?”

There was a pause of suspense. Boyne signed to Judith to keep silent, and the children, taking the cue, remained with spoons above their pudding, and eyes agape, while this perfidious proposal was submitted. Zinnie, from crimson, had grown almost pale; the orange spirals of her bushy head seemed to droop with her drooping lips. Her head sank on her neck, and she twisted about in its crease of plumpness the necklace her mother had given her. “What kind of presents ’d you s’pose they’d be?” she questioned back with caution.

“Oh, I don’t know, dear. But you oughtn’t to think about that. You ought to think only of your mother, and her wanting so much to have you. You must give me an answer to take back to her. Shan’t I tell her you want to go to her, Zinnie?”

Zinnie hung her head still lower. If it had been possible for a Wheater child to be shy, she would have appeared so; but in reality she was only struggling with a problem beyond her powers. At last she raised her head, and looked firmly at the Princess. “I should like to consult my lawyer first,” she said.

Boyne burst out laughing, and the Princess nervously joined him, perhaps to cover the appearance of defeat.

Having so obviously failed to inspire the children with confidence, she once more addressed herself to Miss Scope. “I should be so much interested in talking over your educational system with you. I suppose you’ve entirely eliminated enforced obedience, as we have at Lohengrin?”

“Enforced—?” Miss Scope gave an incredulous gasp, and her charges, evidently struck by the question, again remained with suspended spoons, and eyes eagerly fixed on the Princess. Miss Scope gave a curt laugh. “I’ve never known children to obey unless they were forced to. If you know a way to make them, I shall be glad to learn it,” she said drily.

This seemed to cause the Princess more disappointment than surprise. “Ah, that’s just what we won’t do; _make them_. We leave them as free as air, and simply suggest to them to co-operate. At Lohengrin co-operation has superseded every other method. We teach even our little two-year-olds voluntary co-operation. We think the idea of obedience is debasing.” She turned with a smile to her step-son. “When Astorre and Beatrice come to live with me the first thing I shall do is to make them both co-operate.”

Bun received this unsmilingly, and Beechy burst into passionate weeping and flung her arms jealously about her brother. “No—no, you bad wicked woman, you mustn’t! You shan’t operate on Bun, only on me—if you _must_!” she added in a final wail, her desperate eyes entreating her step-mother.

“But, my dear, I don’t understand,” the Princess murmured; and Judith hurriedly explained that Blanca had been operated upon for appendicitis the previous year, and that the use of the word in connection with her illness had had an intimidating effect on the younger children, and especially on Beechy.

“But this is all wrong ... dreadfully wrong ...” the Princess said with a baffled sigh. No one found an answer, and supper being over, Judith proposed that they should return to the sitting-room. The children followed, marshalled by Miss Scope, and the Princess again tried to engage them in talk; but she could not break down the barrier of mistrust which had been set up. Finally she suggested that they should all play a game together—a quiet writing game she thought would be interesting. A table was cleared, and paper and pencils found with some difficulty, and distributed among the children, the youngest of whom were lifted up onto sofa-cushions to make their seats high enough for collaboration. The Princess explained that the game they were going to play was called “Ambition,” and that it had been introduced into the Vocational Department of Juvenile Psychology at Lohengrin in order to direct children’s minds as early as possible to the choice of a career. First of all, she continued, each was to write down what he or she would most like to be or to do; then they were to fold the papers, and Mr. Boyne was to shake them up in his hat, and read them out in turn, and as he read the children were to try to guess who had made each choice.

The game did not start with as much _élan_ as its organiser had perhaps hoped. The children were still oppressed by her presence, and all of them but Terry hated writing, and were unused to abstract speculations on the future; moreover, they probably felt that if they were to state with sincerity what they wanted to be their aspirations would be received with the friendly ridicule which grown ups manifest when children express their real views.

All this made for delay and hesitation, and it was only Terry’s persuasion, and the fear of disobeying the tall authoritative lady who had suddenly invaded their lives, which finally set their pencils going. Boyne received the papers, shook them up conscientiously, and began to read them out.

“Al If Boy—oh, a _lift-boy_; yes—.” Zinnie’s burning blush revealed her as the author of this ambition, and Boyne read on: “An Ambassadoress”—Blanca, of course; and the added vowel certainly gave the word a new stateliness. “A great Poet, or the best Writer of Detective Stories,” in Terry’s concise hand, showed him torn between a first plunge into Conan Doyle, and rapturous communion with “The Oxford Book of English Verse.”

Boyne read on: “Never brush meye tethe,” laboriously printed out by Beechy; “A Crow Bat”—an aspiration obviously to be ascribed to Bun: “A noble character” (bless Scopy! As if she wasn’t one already—); and lastly, in Judith’s rambling script: “An exploarer.” At the reading of that, something darted through Boyne like a whirr of wings.

The ambitions expressed did not long serve to disguise the choosers, and there was a prompt chorus of attributions as Boyne read out one slip after the other. The Princess had apparently hoped that something more striking would result. She said the game usually promoted discussion, and she hoped the next stage in it would lead to freer self-expression. The children, she explained, were now to say in turn why—that is, on what grounds—they wanted to be this or that. But an awestruck silence met her invitation to debate, and Beechy again began to show signs of emotion. The Princess seemed much distressed, but was assured by Miss Scope that this breach of manners was due only to over-excitement, and the strain of sitting up later than usual—she hoped the Princess would excuse her, but really the children had better go to bed. At this suggestion all the faces round the table lit up except Zinnie’s, which was clouded by a pout. She slipped down from her cushions with the others, but when her turn came to file by the Princess for goodnight, she held up the march-past to ask: “N’arn’t there going to be any prizes after that game?”

She was swept off in Miss Scope’s clutch, and the Princess, after a timid attempt at endearment, imperfectly responded to, when Bun and Beechy took leave, sat down for a talk with Boyne and Judith. Much as she had evidently seen to disapprove of in the bringing-up of the little Wheaters she was in a less aggressive mood than in the afternoon; something she had been unprepared for, and had only half understood, in the relation of the children to each other and to their elders, seemed imperceptibly to have shaken her convictions. Though she continued to repeat the same phrases, it was with less emphasis; and she listened more patiently to Boyne’s arguments, and to Judith’s entreaties.

Judith was presently called away to say goodnight to the children, and as soon as the Princess and Boyne were alone, the former began abruptly: “But you must listen to me, Mr. Boyne; you must understand me. It’s not only that I cannot conscientiously approve of the way in which Beatrice and Astorre are being brought up: it is that I need them myself—I need them for my husband.” She coloured at the avowal, and went on hastily: “If he is to begin a new life—and he _has_ begun it already—his first step ought to be to take back his children. You must see that.... You must see how I am situated....” Her voice broke, and Boyne suddenly felt the same pity for her as when she had shown her fear that he might be hinting a criticism of Prince Buondelmonte’s past.

“I’ll do what I can—only trust me,” he stammered.

Judith came back, and the Princess, still a little rigid from the effort at self-control, began at once to thank her for her kindness, and to say that she was afraid it was time to go. She would tell Prince Buondelmonte, she added, with an effort at cordiality, that the children seemed very well (_“physically_ well,” she explained), and she would give him the assurance—she hoped she might?—that some sort of understanding as to their future would soon be reached.

Victory or defeat? Judith and Boyne, sitting late, asked each other which it was, but found no answer.

XXVIII

All the next day the rain continued. It was one of those steady business-like rains which seem, in mountain places, not so much a caprice of the weather as the drop-curtain punctually let down by Nature between one season and the next. Behind its closely woven screen one had the sense of some tremendous annual scene-shifting, the upheaval and overturning of everything in sight, from the clouds bursting in snow on the cliff-tops to the mattresses and blankets being beaten and aired in the hotel windows.

These images were doubtless born of Boyne’s own mood. When he opened his shutters on the morning after the Princess Buondelmonte’s apparition it seemed to him as if she herself had hung that cold gray mist before the window. He was afraid of everything now—of what the post might bring, of what his own common-sense might dictate to him, above all, of seeing Judith again, and having his apprehensions doubled by hers.

The worst of it was that, even should all their tormentors agree to leave them in peace, they could not—more particularly on Terry’s account—delay on that height through the coming weeks of storm and rain. Moreover, all the hotels and _pensions_, which would reopen later for the season of winter sports, were preparing to close for their yearly cleaning and renovating. After the middle of October there would be no demand for accommodation till the arrival of the Christmas lugers and ski-ers. If it proved possible to keep the little Wheaters together any longer the best plan would probably be to transport them to Riva or Meran till winter and fine weather were established together in the mountains.

Boyne turned over these things with the nervous minuteness with which one makes plans for some one who is dying, and will never survive to see them carried out. It seemed to give him faith in the future, a sense of factitious security, as it sometimes does, beside a deathbed, to think: “To-morrow I’ll see what the doctor says about a warmer climate.”

Judith and Miss Scope shared his idea about Meran or Riva, and for some time had been talking vaguely of going down to look for rooms. But the ever-recurring difficulty of persuading a boarding-house keeper to lodge seven children made them decide that it would be best to try to hire an inexpensive villa. The episode of the gold-fish and the rabbit had not endeared them to their present landlady, and they felt the hopelessness of trying to ingratiate themselves with another, in a place where they were unknown, and where the autumn season would be at its height. It had therefore been decided that Judith, Miss Scope and Boyne should motor to Meran that very week to look over the ground. But on reflection Boyne hesitated to leave the children alone with their nurses, even for so short an absence. With Joyce in Paris, once more reorganising her life, and the Princess Buondelmonte returning to Rome unsatisfied, danger threatened on all sides. Any one of these cross-blasts might dash to earth the frail nest which had resisted the summer’s breezes; and Boyne, heavy-hearted, set out to call another council at the _Pension Rosenglüh_.

As he left the hotel a telegram was handed to him. He glanced first at the signature—Sarah Mervin—then read what went before. “I will gladly receive own dear grandchildren subject to parents’ final settlement of affairs fear cannot assume responsibility step-children letter follows”.... “A lawyer’s cable,” Boyne growled as he pocketed it. “That’s the reason it’s taken so long to compose.”

Fresh bitterness filled him as he saw one more prop withdrawn from under the crazy structure of his hopes. “These people,” he reflected, “all act on impulse where their own wants are concerned, and call in a lawyer when it’s a question of anybody else’s.” But in his heart he was not much surprised. Mrs. Mervin was no longer young, and it is natural for ageing people to shrink from responsibilities. Besides, she might well plead that it was no business of hers to take in children she had never seen, and whose parents were eager, and financially able, to care for them. On second thoughts, it really did not need Judith’s bald hint as to the allowance her grandmother received from Cliffe Wheater to account for the poor lady’s attitude. “I don’t see what else she could have done,” the impartial Boyne was obliged to admit in the course of his interminable argument with the other, the passionate and unreasonable one.

What a Utopia he and Judith had been dreaming! He wondered now how he could have lent himself to such pure folly.... Well, the dream was over, and his was the grim business of making her see it.... Heavily he went down the hill through the rain.

At the _pension_ Judith was watching for him from the window. She opened the door and led him into the sitting-room, where a sulky fire smouldered, puffing out acrid smoke. The landlady said it was always like that—the stove always smoked on the first day of the autumn rains, unless there was a little wind to make a draught. And there was not a breath today; the only way was to leave a window open, Judith explained as she turned to Boyne. Her face was colourless and anxious; he could see that she had been treading the wheel of the same problems as himself. The sight made him resolve to try and hide his own apprehensions a little longer.

“Well, old Judy—here we are, after all; and not a breach in the walls yet!”

“You mean she’s gone—the Princess?”

He nodded. “I saw her off to Rome an hour ago.”

Her eyes brightened, as they always did at his challenge; but it was only a passing animation. “And you haven’t had any telegram?” she questioned.

The question took him unprepared. “I—why, have you?”

“Yes. From mother. Here.” She produced the paper and thrust it feverishly into his hand. Boyne’s anger rose—evidently; he thought, old Mrs. Mervin had waited to communicate with her daughter before answering him. What cowardice, what treachery! He pictured all these grown up powers and principalities leagued together against the handful of babes he commanded, and the bitterness of surrender entered into him. It was not that any of these parents really wanted their children. If they had, the break up of Judith’s dream, though tragic, would have been too natural to struggle against. But it was simply that the poor little things had become a bone of contention, that the taking or keeping possession of them was a matter of pride or of expediency, like fighting for a goal in some exciting game, or clinging to all one’s points in an acrimoniously-disputed law-suit. Boyne unfolded Mrs. Wheater’s telegram, and read: “You must come to Paris immediately bringing Chip I must see you at once do not disobey me stop telegraph Hotel Nouveau Luxe Mother.”

The vague phrasing made it impossible to guess whether the message were the result of a cable from Mrs. Mervin, or simply embodied a new whim of Joyce’s. Boyne, on the whole, inclined to the latter view, and felt half ready to exonerate Mrs. Mervin. After all, perhaps she had kept faith with him, and her message was only the result of her own scruples.

He tossed the telegram onto the table with a shrug. “Is that all? You’ve heard nothing else?”

Yes; it appeared she had. Nanny, the day before, had received a letter from Mrs. Wheater’s maid Marguerite, an experienced person who wielded a facile but rambling pen. This letter Judith had coaxed from Nanny, unknown to Miss Scope; for Miss Scope, even in the extremest emergencies, would not admit the possibility of her charges using, as a means of information, what the Princess would have called “salaried assistants.”

Marguerite’s news, if vague, was ample. It appeared that Mrs. Wheater had met in Venice a gentleman a good deal older than herself, whose name the maid could not even approximately spell, but who was quite different from any of the other gentlemen in her mistress’s circle.

“Different—different how?”

“She says he’s made a different woman of mother,” Judith explained. “He’s made her chuck Gerald, to begin with.”

“But, for God’s sake, why? I thought she was chucking your father on account of Gerald.”

Judith went into this with the lucid impartiality she always applied to the analysis of her parents’ foibles. She reminded Boyne that Joyce never stuck long to one thing, and that she had decided to marry Gerald chiefly in order to annoy her husband, and to have an excuse for detaining the young tutor at the Lido when the children left. “He’s rather a Lido man, Gerald is,” Judith commented, “and it made all the other women so furious. That’s always rather fun, you know.”

But, after all, she pursued, her mother had much more sense than her poor father, who was always the prey of women like Zinnia Lacrosse or Sybil Lullmer. “She does pull herself together sometimes—especially since that awful time with Buondelmonte. And so, when she met this other gentleman, who is so much older, and very religious, and enormously rich, and who only wants to influence her for good, Marguerite says it made her feel how dreadfully she’d wasted her life, and what a different woman she might have been if she’d known him years before. You see, he doesn’t want to marry her, but only to be her friend and adviser. He thinks she’s been married often enough. And so, in order not to leave Gerald at a loose end, she’s kept him on as secretary till he can get another job, and she and Gerald and the other gentleman have gone to Paris together to see what had better be done. And the gentleman says she ought to have us all with her; and he feels awfully fond of us already, and knows mother will be ever so much happier if we’re with her....”

“Oh, my God—then it’s all up with us,” Boyne groaned.

Judith made no answer, and he went on: “It only remains now to hear from Lady Wrench and the Princess!”

“Or Grandma Mervin—there’s still grandma,” Judith rejoined, half hopefully.

Boyne hesitated a moment; then he said to himself that there was no use in any farther postponement. “No; I’ve heard from her,” he said.

Judith’s eyes were again illuminated. “You have? Oh, Martin! If she’d only take us all, perhaps it would satisfy mother and the new gentleman. Oh, Martin, she doesn’t say no?”

Silently—for no words came to him—he gave her the cable, and walked away to the window to be out of sight of her face. For a while he stood watching the gray curtain of failure that hung there between him and his golden weeks; then he pulled himself together and turned back.

“Judy—”

She handed him the cable.

“After all, you expected it, didn’t you?” he said.

She nodded. “It doesn’t make so much difference, anyhow,” he continued, in an unconvinced voice, “if Bun and Beechy have to go....”

She pondered on this for a few moments without answering. Then, with one of her sudden changes of tone: “Martin,” she broke out impetuously, “do you suppose she was right, after all—I mean the Princess—about our being so dreadfully behind the times? Do you suppose, if we did all the things she suggested: if we got new teachers and new books, and somebody for Bun’s gymnastics, it would make any difference—do you think it would?” Every line of her face, from lifted eyebrows to parted lips, was a passionate demand for his assent. “After all, you know—perhaps she was right about some things: that stupid old book of Scopy’s, for instance. Of course we all know poor darling Scopy’s a back number. And about Bun’s gymnastics too. Do you suppose if we took a villa at Meran we could afford to fit up a room like the one she described, and get an instructor—didn’t she call him an instructor? And then there’s fencing and riding—I dare say she was right about that too! But after all—” she paused, and her eyes looked as the rain did when the sun was trying to break through it. “After all, Martin,” she began again, “the main thing is that the children are so well, isn’t it? Look at our record—see what the summer has done! You wouldn’t know Terry, would you, if you were to see him now for the first time after meeting us on the boat at Algiers? And Chip—isn’t Chip a miracle? Every one stops Nanny in the street to admire him, and they always think he must be three years old. He was just beginning to walk alone when he came here—now he runs like a hare! Nanny gets worn out chasing him. And the tricks he’s learnt to do! He can imitate everybody; I believe he’s going to be a movie star. Have you seen him do the lion, with Bun as lion-tamer? Or the old man at the market, all doubled up with sciatica, who leans on a stick, and holds one hand behind his back? But it’s a wonder! Oh, Martin, wait, and I’ll fetch him down now to do the old man for you—shall I?”

Once again her grown up cares had vanished in the childish pride of recounting Chip’s achievements. Would it always be like this, Boyne wondered, or would life gradually close the gates of the fairyland which was still so close to her? He would have given most of his chances of happiness to help her keep open that communication with her childhood. And what if he were the one being who could do it? The question wound itself through his thoughts like a persuasive hand insinuating itself into his. This heart-break of separation that was upon her—what if he alone had the power to ease it? He stood looking down at her perplexedly.

“Judy—Chip’s a great man, and I’d love to see him do the old gentleman with the sciatica. But first....”

“Yes—first?” she palpitated. But under his gaze her radiance gradually faded, and her lips began to tremble a little. “Ah, then you don’t think ... there’s any hope for us?”

“I think you’ve got to go to Paris and see your mother.”

“And take Chip? I’ll never take Chip! I won’t!”

“But listen, dear—.” He sat down, and drew her to the sofa beside him, speaking as he might have to a child on a holiday who was fighting the summons back to school.

“Listen, Judy. We’ve done our best; we all have. But the children are not yours or mine. They belong to their parents, after all.” How dry and flat his phrases sounded, compared with the words he longed to say to her!

She drew back into the corner of the sofa. “That Buondelmonte woman’s got at you—she’s talked you over! I knew she would.” She was grown up again now, measuring him with angry suspicious eyes, and flinging out her accusations in her mother’s shrillest voice.

“Why, child, what nonsense! You said just now that perhaps the Princess was right....”

“I never did! I said, perhaps we ought to get a new Cyclopædia for Scopy, and have Bun taught scientific gymnastics; and now you say....”

“I say that fate’s too much for us. It didn’t need the Princess Buondelmonte to teach me that.”

She made no answer, and they sat in silence in their respective corners of the sofa, each gazing desperately into a future of which nothing could be divined except that it was the end of their hopes. Suddenly Judith flung herself face down against the knobby cushions and broke into weeping. Boyne, for a few minutes, remained numb and helpless; then he moved closer, and bending over drew her into his arms. She seemed hardly aware of his nearness; she simply went on crying, with hard uneven sobs, pressing her face against his shoulder as if it were the sofa-cushion. He held her in silence, not venturing to speak, or even to brush back her tumbled hair, while he pictured, with the acuity of his older and less articulate grief, what must be passing before her as the fibres of her heart were torn away. “It’s too cruel—it’s too beastly cruel,” he thought, wincing at the ugly details which must enter into her vision of the future, details he could only guess at, while she saw them with all the precision of experience. Yes, it was too cruel; but what could he or she do? He continued to hold her in silence, listening to the beat of the rain on the half-open window, and smelling the cold grave-yard smell of the autumn earth, while her sobs ran through him in shocks of anguish.

Gradually her weeping subsided, and Boyne took courage to lift his hand and pass it once or twice over her hair. She lay in his hold as quietly as a frightened bird, and presently he bent his head and whispered: “Judy—.” Why not? he thought; his heart was beating with reckless bounds. He was free, after all, if it came to that; free to chuck his life away on any madness; and madness this was, he knew. Well, he’d had enough of reason for the rest of his days; and a man is only as old as he feels.... He bent so close that his lips brushed her ear. “Judy, darling, listen.... Perhaps after all there’s a way—.”

In a flash she was out of his arms, and ecstatically facing him. “A way—a way of keeping us all together?” Ah, how hard her questions were to answer!

Boyne drew her down again beside him. Crying was a laborious and disfiguring business to her, and her face was so drawn and tear-stained that she looked almost old; but its misery was shot through with hope. If he could have kept her there, not speaking, only answering her with endearments, how easy, how exquisite it would have been! But her face was tense with expectation, and he had to find words, for he knew that his silence would have no meaning for her.

“Judith—” he began; but she interrupted: “Call me Judy, or I shall think it’s more bad news.” He made no answer, and she flung herself against him with a cry of alarm. “Martin! Martin! You’re not going to desert us too?”

He held her hands, but his own had begun to tremble. “Darling, I’ll never desert you; I’ll stay with you always if you’ll have me; if things go wrong I’ll always be there to look after you and defend you; no matter what happens, we’ll never be separated any more....” He broke off, his voice failing before the sudden sunrise in her eyes.

“Oh, Martin—” She lifted his hands one by one to her wet cheeks, and held them there in silent bliss. “Then you don’t belong any longer to Mrs. Sellars?”

“I don’t belong to any one but you—for as long as ever you’ll have me....”

Her eyes still bathed him in their radiance. “My darling, my darling.” She leaned close as she said it, and he dared not move, in his new awe of her nearness—so subtly had she changed from the child of his familiar endearments to the woman he passionately longed for.... “Darling,” she said again; then, with a face in which the bridal light seemed already kindled, “Oh, Martin, do you really mean you’re going to adopt us all, and we’re all going to stay with you forever?”

XXIX

Boyne felt like a man who has blundered along in the dark to the edge of a precipice. He trembled inwardly with the effort of recovery, and the shock of finding himself flung back into his old world. Judith, in a rush of gratitude, had thrown her arms about him; and he shrank from her touch, from the warm smell of her hair, from everything about her which he had to think back into terms of childhood and comradeship, while every vein in his body still ached for her. There was nothing he would have dreaded as much as her detecting the least trace of what he was feeling. His first care must be to hide the break in their perfect communion—the fact that for a moment she had been for him the woman she would some day be for another man, in a future he could never share. He undid her hands and walked away to the window.

When he turned to her again he had struggled back to some sort of composure. “Judy, child, I wish you wouldn’t take such terrible life-leases on the future.” He tried to smile as he said it. “I’m always afraid it will bring us bad luck. We’d much better live from hand to mouth. I’m ready to promise all that a reasonable man can—that I’ll put up another big fight for you, and that I don’t despair of winning it. At any rate, I’ll be there; I’ll stand by you; I won’t desert you....” He broke off, reading in her unsatisfied eyes the hopelessness of piling up vague assurances....

“Yes,” she assented, in a voice grown as small and colourless as her face.

He stood before her miserably. “You do understand, dear, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure....” She hesitated. “A little while ago I thought I did.”

His nerves began to twitch again. Could he bear to go into the question with her once more—and what would be the use if he did? The immediate future must somehow or other be dealt with; but the last few minutes had deprived him of all will and energy. He had the desolate sense of her knowing that he had failed her, and yet not being able to guess why.

“Of course I’ll do what I can,” he repeated.

She remained silent, constrained by his constraint; and he saw the disappointment in her eyes.

“You don’t believe me?”

Still she looked at him perplexedly. “But you said.... I thought you said just now that you’d found a way of keeping us all together. No matter what happened; you had a plan, you said.”

His senseless irritation grew upon him. Could such total simplicity be unfeigned? Could she have such a power of awaking passion without any inkling of its meaning? He hated himself for doubting it. In time—a short time, perhaps—her rich nature would come to its ripeness; but as yet the only full-grown faculties in it were her love for her brothers and sisters, and her faith in the few people who had shown her kindness in a world unkindly.

“I’m sorry,” she continued, after pausing for an answer which did not come. “I must have misunderstood you, I suppose.”

Boyne gave a nervous laugh. “You did, most thoroughly.”

“And—you won’t tell me what you really meant?”

He stood motionless, his hands in his pockets, staring down at the knots in the wooden floor, as he had stared at them on the day when she had owned to having taken her father’s money—but in a mental perturbation how much deeper! A few minutes before, it had seemed like profanation to brush her with the thought of his love; now, faced by her despair, by her sense of being left alone to fight her battles, he asked himself whether it might not be fairer, even kinder, to speak. At the thought his heart again began to beat excitedly. Perhaps he had been too impetuous, too inarticulate. What if, after all, a word from him could wake the sleeping music?

The difficulty was to find a beginning. What would have been so simple if kisses could have told it, seemed tortuous or brutal when put in words. He shrank not so much from the possibility of hurting her as from the sudden fear of her hurting him beyond endurance.

“Judith,” he began, “how old are you?”

“I shall be sixteen in three months—no, in five months, really,” she said, with an obvious effort at truthfulness.

“As near as that! Well, sixteen is an age,” he laughed.

She continued to fix her bewildered eyes on him, as if seeking a clue. “But I look a lot older, don’t I?” she added hopefully.

“Older? There are times when you look so old that you frighten me.” He remembered then that she had spoken to him with perfect simplicity of Gerald Ormerod’s desire to marry her, as of the most natural thing in the world; and his own scruples began to seem absurd. “I’m always forgetting what a liberal education she’s had,” he thought with a touch of self-derision.

He cleared his throat, and continued: “So grown up that I suppose you’ll soon be thinking of getting married.”

The word was out now; it went sounding on and on inside of his head while he awaited her answer. When she spoke it was with an air of indifference and disappointment.

“What’s the use of saying that? How can I ever marry, with all the children to look after?” It was clear that she regarded the subject as irrelevant; her tone seemed to remind him that he and she had long since dealt with and disposed of it. “You might as well tell me that I ought to be educated,” she grumbled.

He pressed on: “But it might turn out ... you might find....” He had to pause to steady his voice. “If we can’t prevent the children being taken away from you, you’ll be awfully lonely....”

“Taken away from me?” At the word her listlessness vanished. “Do you suppose I’ll let them be taken like that? Without fighting to the very last minute? Let Syb Lullmer get hold of Chip—and Bun and Beechy go to that Buondelmonte man?”

“I know. It’s hateful. But supposing the very worst happens—oughtn’t you to face that now?” He cleared his throat again. “If things went wrong, and you were very lonely, and a fellow asked you to marry him—”

“Who asked me?”

He laughed again. “If I did.”

For a moment she looked at him perplexedly; then her eyes cleared, and for the first time she joined in his laugh. Hers seemed to bubble up, fresh and limpid, from the very depths of her little girlhood. “Well, that would be funny!” she said.

There was a bottomless silence.

“Yes—wouldn’t it?” Boyne grinned. He stared at her without speaking; then, like a blind man feeling his way, he picked up his hat and mackintosh, said: “Where’s my umbrella? Oh, outside—” and walked out stiffly into the passage. On the doorstep, still aware of her nearness, he added a little dizzily: “No, please—I want a long tramp alone first.... I’ll come in again this afternoon to settle what we’d better do about Paris....”

He felt her little disconsolate figure standing alone behind him in the rain, and hurried away as if to put himself out of its reach forever.

XXX

It was still raining when the Wheater colony left Cortina; it was raining when the train in which Boyne and Judith were travelling reached Paris. During the days intervening between the receipt of Mrs. Wheater’s telegram and the clattering halt of the express in the gare de Lyon, Boyne could not remember that the rain had ever stopped.

But he had not had time to do much remembering—not even of the havoc within himself. After the struggle necessary to convince Judith that she must go to Paris and take Chip with her—since disobedience to her mother’s summons might put them irretrievably in the wrong—he had first had to help her decide what should be done with the other children. Once brought round to his view, she had immediately risen to the emergency, as she always did when practical matters were at stake. She and Boyne were agreed that it would be imprudent to leave the children at Cortina, where the Princess, or even Lady Wrench, might take advantage of their absence to effect a raid on the _pension_. It took a three days’ hunt to find a villa in a remote suburb of Riva where they could be temporarily installed without much risk of being run down by an outraged parent. Boyne put the _Rosenglüh_ landlady off the scent by giving her the address of Mrs. Wheater’s Paris banker, and letting it be understood that Judith was off to Paris to prepare for the children’s arrival; and Blanca and Terry, still deep in Conan Doyle, gleefully contributed misleading details.

The excitement of departure, and the business of establishing the little Wheaters in their new quarters, left no time, between Boyne and Judith, for less pressing questions; and Boyne saw that, once their plan was settled, Judith was almost as much amused as the twins by its secret and adventurous side. “It will take a Dr. Watson to nose them out, won’t it?” she chuckled, as she and Boyne, with Chip and Susan, scrambled into the Paris express at Verona. It was not till they were in the train that Boyne saw the cloud of apprehension descend on her again. But then fatigue intervened, and she fell asleep against his shoulder as peacefully as Chip, who was curled up opposite with his head in Susan’s lap. As they sat there, Boyne remembered how, on the day of Mr. Dobree’s picnic, he had watched her sleeping by the waterfall, a red glow in her cheeks, velvet shadows under her lashes. Now her face was pinched and sallow, the lids were swollen with goodbye tears; she seemed farther from him than she had ever been, yet more in need of him; and at the thought something new and tranquillizing entered into him. He had caught a glimpse of a joy he would never reach, and he knew that his eyes would always dazzle with it; but the obligation of giving Judith the help she needed kept his pain in that deep part of the soul where the great renunciations lie.

In Paris he left his companions at the door of the _Nouveau Luxe_, where Mrs. Wheater was established, drove to his own modest hotel on the left bank, and turned in for a hard tussle of thinking. He could no longer put off dealing with his own case, for Mrs. Sellars was still in Paris. He had not meant to let her know of his arrival till the next day; he needed the interval to get the fatigue and confusion out of his brain. But meanwhile he must map out some kind of a working plan; must clear up his own mind, and consider how to make it clear to her. And after an unprofitable attempt at rest and sleep, and a weary tramp in the rain through the dusky glittering streets, he suddenly decided on immediate action, and turned into a telephone booth to call up Mrs. Sellars. She was at home and answered immediately. Aunt Julia was resting, she said; if he would come at once they could talk without fear of interruption.

He caught the tremor of joy in her voice when he spoke her name—but how like her, how perfect of her, to ask no questions, to waste no time in exclamations; just quietly and simply to say “Come”! The healing touch of her reasonableness again came to his rescue.

He would have liked to find her close at hand, on the very threshold of the telephone booth; at the rate at which his thoughts were spinning he knew he would have to go over the whole affair again in his transit to her hotel. But there was no remedy for that; he could only trust to her lucidity to help him out.

Aunt Julia’s apartment was in a hotel of the rue de Rivoli, with a row of windows overhanging the silvery reaches of the Tuileries gardens and the vista of domes and towers beyond. The room was large, airy, full of flowers. A fire burned on the hearth; Rose Sellars’s touch was everywhere. And a moment later she stood there before him, incredibly slim and young-looking in her dark dress and close little hat. Slightly paler, perhaps, and thinner—but as she moved forward with her easy step the impression vanished. He felt only her mastery of life and of herself, and thought how much less she needed him than did the dishevelled child he had just left. The thought widened the distance between them, and brought Judith abruptly closer.

“Well, here I am,” he said—“and I’ve failed!”

He had prepared a dozen opening phrases—but the sudden intrusion of Judith’s face dashed them all from his lips. He was returning to ask forgiveness of the woman to whom he still considered himself engaged, and his first word, after an absence prolonged and unaccountable, was to remind her of the cause of their breach. He saw the narrowing of her lips, and then her victorious smile.

“Dear! Tell me about it—I want to hear everything,” she said, holding out her hand.

But he was still struggling in the coil of his blunder. “Oh, never mind—all that’s really got nothing to do with it,” he stammered.

She freed her hand, and turned on the electric switch of the nearest lamp. As she bent to it he saw that the locks escaping on each temple were streaked with gray. The sight seemed to lengthen the days of their separation into months and years. He felt like a stranger coming back to her. “You’ve forgiven me?” he began.

She looked at him gravely. “What is it I have to forgive?”

“A lot—you must think,” he said confusedly.

She shook her head. “You’re free, you know. We’re just two old friends talking. Sit down over there—so.” She pointed to an armchair, sat down herself, and took off her hat. In the lamplight, under the graying temples, her face looked changed and aged, like her hair. But it was varnished over by her undaunted smile.

“Let us go back to where you began. I want to hear all about the children.” She leaned her head thoughtfully on her hand, in the attitude he had loved in the little sitting-room at Cortina.

“I feel like a ghost—” he said.

“No; for I should be a little afraid of you if you were a ghost; and now—”

“Well—now....” He looked about the pleasant firelit room, saw her work-basket in its usual place near the hearth, her books heaped up on a table, and a familiar litter of papers on a desk in the window. “A ghost,” he repeated.

She waited a moment, and then said: “I wish you’d tell me exactly what’s been happening.”

“Oh, everything’s collapsed. It was bound to. And now I—”

He got up, walked across the room, glanced half-curiously at the titles of some of the books, and came back and leaned against the mantelpiece. She sat looking up at him. “Yes?”

“No. I can’t.”

“You can’t—what?”

“Account for anything. Explain anything—” He dropped back into his chair and threw his head back, staring at the ceiling. “I’ve been a fool—and I’m tired; tired.”

“Then we’ll drop explanations. Tell me only what you want,” she said.

What he really wanted was not to tell her anything, but to get up again, and resume his inarticulate wanderings about the room. With an effort of the will he remained seated, and turned his eyes to hers. “You’ve been perfect—and I do want to tell you ... to make you understand....” But no; that sort of talk was useless. He had better try to do what she had asked him. “About the children—well, the break up was bound to come. You were right about it, of course. But I was so sorry for the poor little devils that I tried to blind myself....”

His tongue was loosened, and he found it easier to go on. After all, Mrs. Sellars was right; the story of the children must be disposed of first. After that he might see more clearly into his own case and hers. He went on with his halting narrative, and she listened in silence—that rare silence of hers which was all alertness and sympathy. She smiled a little over the Princess Buondelmonte’s invasion, and sighed and frowned when he mentioned that Lady Wrench was also impending. When he came to Mrs. Wheater’s summons, and his own insistence that Judith and Chip should immediately obey it, she lifted her eyes, and said approvingly: “But of course you were perfectly right.”

“Was I? I don’t know. When I left them just now at the door of that Moloch of a hotel—”

She gave a little smile of reassurance. “No; I don’t think you need fear even the _Nouveau Luxe_. I understand what you’re feeling; but I think I can give you some encouragement.”

“Encouragement—?”

“About the future, I mean. Perhaps Mrs. Wheater’s news about herself is not altogether misleading. At any rate, I know she’s taken the best legal advice; and I hear she may be able to keep all the children—her own, that is. For of course the poor little steps—”

Boyne listened with a sudden start of attention. He felt like some one shaken out of a lethargy. “You’ve seen her, then? I didn’t know you knew her.”

“No; I’ve not seen her, and I don’t know her. But a friend of mine does. The fact is, she ran across Mr. Dobree at the Lido after he left Cortina—”

“_Dobree?_” He stared, incredulous, as if he must have heard the wrong name.

“Yes; hasn’t she mentioned it to the children? Ah, no—I remember she never writes. Well, she had the good sense to ask him to take charge of things for her, and though he doesn’t often accept new cases nowadays he was so sorry for the children—and for her too, he says—that he agreed to look after her interests. And he tells me that if she follows his advice, and keeps out of new entanglements, he thinks she can divorce Mr. Wheater on her own terms, and in that case of course the courts will give her all the children. Isn’t that the very best news I could give you?”

He tried to answer, but again found himself benumbed. Her eyes continued to challenge him. “It’s more than you hoped?” she smiled.

“It’s not in the least what I expected.”

She waited for him to continue, but he was silent again, and she questioned suddenly: “What _did_ you expect?”

He looked at her with a confused stare, as if her face had become that of a stranger, as familiar faces do in a dream. “Dobree,” he said—“this Dobree....”

She kindled. “You’re very unfair to Mr. Dobree, Martin; you always have been. He’s not only a great lawyer, whose advice Mrs. Wheater is lucky to have, but a kind and wise friend ... and a good man,” she added.

“Yes,” he said, hardly hearing her. All the torture of his hour of madness about Mr. Dobree had returned to him. He would have liked to leap up on the instant, and go and find him, and fight it out with his fists....

“I can’t think,” she continued nervously, “what more you could have hoped....”

He made a weary gesture. “God knows! But what does it matter?”

“Matter? Doesn’t it matter to you that the children should be safe—be provided for? That in this new crash they should remain with their mother, and not be tossed about again from pillar to post? If you didn’t want that, what did you want?”

“I wanted—somehow—to get them all out of this hell.”

“I believe you exaggerate. It’s not going to be a hell if their mother keeps them, as Mr. Dobree thinks she’ll be able to. You say yourself that she’s fond of them.”

“Yes; intermittently.”

“And, after all, if the step-children are taken back by their own parents, that’s only natural. You say the new Princess Buondelmonte seems well-meaning, and kind in her way; and as for Zinnie—I suppose Zinnie is the one of the party the best able to take care of herself.”

“I suppose so,” he acceded.

“Well, then—.” She paused, and then repeated, with a sharper stress: “I don’t yet see what you want.”