Chapter II: Part I: Dulce Domum (2)

Hal was without question the most masculine element at the Laburnums--excepting a back-view of William, broad and stolid, bending over a pit that he was digging at the far end of the garden, where the shrubbery degenerated into a mere tangle of shrubs. This pit was one of seven, and when asked what they represented, William said, “Earthworks”; and, if further pressed as to why he dug them--“Because I want to,” after a moment’s quiet and conscientious reflection.

Neither Mr. Maxwell nor Stanley Watson, however, was as casually masculine as Hal, because they were more preoccupied with manliness. And Bunny-- “Oh, Bunny’s like a girl,” said Nina, “he shows off!” Bunny was sensitive, too, in addition to all his other palpable faults.

[V]

THE inferior son of the Maxwells was wretchedly throwing a ball against the side of the house, on the same morning that Hal went on Aunt Lavvy’s errand, and the Watson babies drove Miss Roberts and her pupils into the drawing-room. He was remembering with apprehension a large and cleverly comical caricature which he had executed in brushwork on the inside of the lid of his late form-master’s desk, representing that gentleman himself saying waggishly: “Believe me, my boy, this is going to hurt you much more than it hurts me!”--a perversion of the popular sentiment which he had picked up from one of Saki’s books, and which he used “at least three hundred and sixty-four times a year more than it was funny!” as Bunny savagely put it. But Bunny’s report had revealed, when his father opened it, that his late form-master was not going to be late at all--in fact, that Bunny had not got his remove; which was quite bad enough in itself without the additional trouble of the caricature which would be discovered in Bunny’s presence on the first day of the coming term.

And then there was the matter of the unpaid tuck-shop bill, which the proprietor had threatened to send in to Mr. Maxwell unless settled by the end of the holidays.

Bunny for the moment did not feel at all handsome and dare-devil, which was how he best liked to see himself--not discouraged by the fact that the best sort of boy does not possess the faculty for seeing himself in any guise. One of Hal’s favourite stories against his younger brother related how Bunny, hopping pyjamaed round their bedroom one evening, paused in his carol of sheer _joie de vivre_ to say with simple sincerity: “Aren’t I lucky? I’m good-looking, brilliant, athletic--I can draw and swim and jump better than any other chap; I’m popular and brave----”

For weeks, the entrance of Bunny was the signal for a concerted roar of “Aren’t I lucky?” from his brothers and sisters; till superseded by the joke of Ursula and her coals.

Anyway, Hal was a good chap, and did not pass on the tale at Winborough. Hal _was_ a good chap ... would it be any consolation to pour out all the mess to him? Not that he could help, but Bunny was one of those who find relief in merely unburdening themselves. Only, although Hal listened with his rough fair eyebrows drawn critically together over his beaky nose, and then summed up and gave shrewd advice, semi-humorous but never didactic, Bunny, being sensitive, could not help feeling that Hal’s natural reticence was silently longing for equal reticence in Bunny; and that he was always apprehensive of an unburdening that would go beyond decency....

Perhaps Aunt Lavvy, of more porous material, might be a better selection for his present confidences. Yes, a fellow might go to Aunt Lavvy tonight after tea, when her room was genial with soft lamplight from behind the delicate pinky silk shade, and seductive with favouritism.... “I believe she likes me best of all, right enough!”

Grace would say that of course Aunt Lavvy loved them all alike. Grace was a fathead ... she talked of loving people alike as though it were a merit.

And Nina would say----,

“Oh, _sisters_!” Bunny, wet through with the drizzling rain, and thoroughly exasperated with things in general, tried to hurl his ball neatly into the open aperture of Nina’s window. It entered the room, certainly, but through the lower pane, not over it. “Damnation!” Bunny ran quickly into the house to recover his property. Once in the girls’ room, as it was still called, though Gracie had departed, he regretted that he had not brought up a fat toad he had noticed hopping in the mush of wet leaves outside, and promptly made an extra journey downstairs to fetch it. The room annoyed him with its spruce impersonal air, Nina’s cups and hockey-group photographs ranged all along the mantelpiece, as though she were a boy--as though she were Hal.

“I do hope no rotten man will ever make old Nina still more pleased with herself by getting struck on her!”--with an apprehension of the awful calamity this would be.

Bunny was quite busy and happy settling the toad in a temporary paradise of Nina’s wash-basin full to the brim with water, lifted unsteadily and set upon the carpet ... a surrounding tent of sheets pulled from Nina’s bed and draped over chairs and a tripod of golf-clubs.

Gradually, from a mischievous schoolboy, he was metamorphosed into a child again, by the unfailing fun of building up things with any odd material at hand into an erection for which they were not intended ... a child absorbed and solemn, breathing rather hard, dark rings of hair fallen over his forehead ... a crooning commentary on his own action forming at last into a little song. “That’s right, tie them together.... Hi, young Toad, you stop where you are ... this is _home_ in the basin. I’ll get you some mud presently ... here’s the other sheet ... peg it down--shall I leave an archway? ... he’ll get out, though--books so that they don’t blow up from the floor ... that’s splendid.... The Toaderies.... Paint the sheets blue so that he thinks it’s the sky above him ... ink would do ... night sky.... Bother! it’s slipped again.... Where did I put that string? ... a cave of broken flowerpots....”

“_Bunny!_”

He came up with a drowned expression--the miscellaneous heap built up on the carpet of Nina’s room slipped away from the illusion of under-the-sea grottos of which he had been inspired architect, and was merely silliness--he waited for Nina to say so, knowing there was no escape.... Why had he lugged in that old toad? It was not even as though Nina were afraid of them; then, there would have been some sense in it. If Nina had been a proper girl----

Sullenly, Bunny rose to his feet: “All right, I’ll clear it all up,” he said, hoping she would think he had used her possessions in wanton and destructive mischief, and not as it had really been, because for the past seven years he had been groping for his bricks....

“Is this your brother? I seem to remember him much bigger and fairer,” said the lady with whom Nina had just been spending the week-end, and who had accompanied her home. Mrs. Tom Fraser had been pretty once, but her tendency to fat had concentrated in the neighbourhood of her chins, so that her round little features looked as though they had been pushed upwards into a space much too small for them.

“You’re thinking of Hal,” said Nina, in a tone to correspond. “I’m sorry about this mess, Lill; come down into the drawing-room and see Aunt Lavvy--and I’ll speak to you later, young man!” Nina was very brightly flushed with the effort to keep her temper, and not betray the presence of the toad to Mrs. Fraser, who was short-sighted. She had quite a fondness for toads herself, but Lill would certainly have screamed.

Down in the drawing-room, she was soothed to find Aunt Lavvy and Hal, tempered by the less satisfactory presence of Miss Roberts and Ursula doing mathematics, and Lottie still practising with the metronome.

“Miss Roberts, do you think we might be very kind to Lottie, and give her ten minutes holiday?” asked Aunt Lavvy pleasantly, as soon as she grasped the identity of Mrs. Fraser.

“Mother,” Nina mentally worked out the usual table of contrasts, “would have apologized twenty times for the drawing-room being used as a schoolroom just today; and then she’d have explained all about Minnie not clearing the breakfast-table, and Gracie’s babies in the schoolroom, but Stanley hoped soon to find the house he wanted--and if she had known Lill was coming, etc.--all without stopping Lottie.”

That nicely-behaved child, in the meantime, had drawn a chair for Mrs. Fraser close up to Aunt Lavvy’s, and had brought her a footstool and a cushion, with the solicitude for old age which she bestowed upon every one over thirty. Then she trotted out of the room, realizing that one less of a crowd was desirable when visitors were present. If it had been afternoon, she would have left a message in the kitchen that there was one extra for tea. As it was, her period of urgent usefulness at an end, she drifted into Nina’s room to see if The Cup needed polishing; and was there ardently welcomed by Bunny, toiling to drag the sheets back to their former neatness over the bed.

“Here--catch hold!”

“Oh, Bunny, are you in a scrape _again_?”

Bunny laughed, and shook back his hair. “Oh, one more or less----” he boasted. “The sooner I come to a bad end, as old Nina puts it, the better! Then you’ll all stop waiting about for it! Think of me, Lottie, in convict’s garb, coming wearily home after twenty years’ hard, and leaning over the churchyard wall and counting your graves, and wishing I’d been a better brother and a better son----” Bunny acted the part with gusto, and collapsed into silent sobs with his arms on the bed-rail.

“You wouldn’t be wearing convict’s garb after they’d let you out,” Lottie, unimpressed by the pantomime, corrected him. “And there’s no reason why we should all be in our churchyard graves in twenty years. Unless, of course, there’s been an epidemic,” she added, after a moment’s careful thought.

Bunny started at her, and said from the fulness of his heart: “What a beastly little whelp you are!”

“Oh, Bunny, when I’m helping you!”

And he wondered, as so many of his sex have wondered before him, why just _his_ sisters should be devoid of beauty, charm, intelligence, humour and all generosity of spirit.

Down in the sitting-room, the telephone-bell rang, interrupting a pleasant conversation in which Nina, Hal and Mrs. Fraser described the latest tango fox-trot step to Aunt Lavvy.

“Hello--hello--yes?--Oh certainly. Wait a minute.” Nina laid down the receiver--“It’s for you, Aunt Lavvy.”

Hal and Mrs. Fraser, both keen dancers, lowered their voices and went on talking about the Revolving Bellows step. Mrs. Maxwell, who from upstairs had heard the telephone and thought it must be for her--most people who are at all psychic seem to catch this urgent personal note in the bell--rushed into the room, but was checked to find Aunt Lavvy at the receiver, and a visitor present: Mrs. Fraser, whom she hardly knew, but who was always so kind to Nina. She began to tell her so, with effusion, but was hushed by Nina, because Aunt Lavvy had looked round from the ’phone with a little appealing smile which meant, “Please, I can’t hear a word.”

“Yes?--Yes, it is. Platt’s Bank--this morning, yes.--Indeed, I remember, I received them not half an hour ago.--Oh, I am sorry; how very annoying for you, but--of course I will look, just one minute.” Aunt Lavvy turned round again to the room at large: “Nina darling, will you bring me my little bag. There it is, lying on the chair. The clerk at Platt’s has just found out he has given somebody an extra pound note by mistake this morning, and it may quite well be----” she drew out a little packet and counted “One, two, three, four, five--no, there are only five; I’ll just turn the bag out, in case--reticule is the word to use at my age, isn’t it, Mrs. Fraser? A dear old-fashioned word.... Only five treasury-notes, and the half-crown and sixpence I had before--thank you, Nina. Hello----”

Mrs. Maxwell had an irritating habit, when any member of the household was talking on the phone, of offering suggestions and making amendments to their remarks, during the pauses while the person at the other end was speaking. She did so now:

“Tell him the numbers, Lavvy--that may help him--it always helps ’em to know the numbers. And say they’re clean ones. That makes a difference, because the clean ones don’t stick so, greasy things some of them are, disgraceful, I always say----”

“_Mother!_” Ursula now, answering the appeal in Nina’s eyes. Nina did not want to be heard by Lill Fraser rebuking her mother twice running; but it was so awfully ill-bred, the oblivious way she ran on and on.

“Hello. No. I am so sorry for your trouble, but there has been no mistake. I counted them, only five--and my cheque was for five pounds.... Yes, Mr. Hal Maxwell brought them. I had asked him to cash the cheque for me.... Yes, he’s here.... With pleasure--it is just possible----”

“Turn your pockets out, Hal,” laughed Nina. “You’re under a cloud.”

But Aunt Lavvy’s serene face was slightly disturbed as once again she turned round.

“Hal dear, would you mind making quite sure that you have not a hole in your pocket, or a Bradbury sticking between the coat and the lining ... something like that. The young man is so persistent. It is foolish of me, but any trouble with the bank always makes me uneasy, especially when we know Mr. Fennimore so well.”

“This wasn’t old Fennimore himself though--it was the man he always sends over for this branch.” Hal was rummaging energetically in his pockets. “Hullo, here’s--no, it’s only an old letter.” One that Dorothy had written him. He was slightly flushed as he crumpled it back into his pocket. “Sorry, Aunt Lavvy, no luck.”

“I’m afraid we can’t help you to put your mistake right. Neither I nor Mr. Hal Maxwell have got the extra pound note,” said Aunt Lavvy into the mouthpiece. She emphasized her words with rather more bell-like precision than usual, and replaced the receiver with a sharp little click. Mrs. Maxwell let slip the bonds from her checked rush of indignation.

“Really, Lavvy, I don’t wonder you’re annoyed. It’s as though they suspected you, ringing up like that. Really, I wonder you were so polite, considering it was their own carelessness. And when we’ve invited Mr. Fennimore to supper tomorrow--I’m sorry I told Tom sherry as well as port. Well, it’s very unpleasant. Let’s talk about something else. How do you like your new house, Mrs. Fraser?” The conversation, thus manipulated, creaked protestingly at the lack of skill. “So jolly sporting of you to put up with Nina.”

“If only Mother wouldn’t use slang,” groaned Nina to herself; and Aunt Lavvy, more discriminating, thought: “If only poor Florrie didn’t try to please Nina by using slang.”

“It’s not a house, you know, Mrs. Maxwell. Nor even a flat, exactly. They call it a studio flat. And we found we actually have a wee musicians’ gallery on the premises--or rather a gallery without the musicians. Isn’t it quaint?”

“It would be much quainter if you found you had the musicians on the premises without the gallery,” said Ursula, bending over her sums, at the table; she had no right at all to be aware of the social entertainment part of the room; still less to enter into it. It sounded quite gracefully witty in her mind before she actually said it, but directly it was out, she knew it was a failure. It fell into the web of conversation, parting it, instead of drawing it together by tiny silken stitches.... Ursula sat with her head bent and eyelids lowered, while the hot scarlet shame dragged up over her neck. She was conscious of Nina’s astonished disapproval, of Mrs. Fraser’s perfunctory little laugh, of Gums preparing a tactless reproof. But most of all, she was conscious of having been merely clumsy where she had hoped to be effective.

“Can’t Ursula do her lessons--her studies--in the dining-room yet, Miss Roberts? They must have cleared away by now. Why, it’s nearly lunch-time.”

Whereupon Mrs. Fraser naturally said she must go home. And Mrs. Maxwell naturally tried to amend her blunder by inviting her to lunch. And Nina was apprehensive as to the quality of the lunch--quantity there always was. And Aunt Lavvy, usually to be relied upon for those deft silken stitches that were Ursula’s envy, was still not quite serenely herself--it was so disconcerting to be associated, even by a few courteous questions, with financial losses and banks and defaulting clerks.

Finally, Hal saw Mrs. Fraser into her car; and then, instead of returning into the house, disappeared into the shrubbery.

[VI]

HE sat uncomfortably on a damp, tree-stump and stared at William’s earthworks. Was it possible that he had kept back a one-pound treasury bank note? Kept back--taken--stolen.... Rats! Of course he hadn’t stolen it. Tramps stole, and burglars, and--sometimes--servants. Bank-clerks, too, occasionally. “But--but not _us_.”

If he hadn’t--taken--it, though ... and here it was, folded in his coat’s inner pocket--why not have produced it when Aunt Lavvy had turned round from the telephone, and said: “Hal----”? Why not have said: “Here you are, Aunt Lavvy. The chap made a mistake, and handed me out six of ’em.”

It was incredible that he should have lied then. That was the real lapse. He could remember the mood in which he had--the horror deepened ... the mood in which he had stolen the note, although it had receded to unfamiliarity.

Hal was magnificently independent of weather, and the colour of the sky and the haze of sunshine over bright September boughs, and such-like absurdities from which frailer natures weave their moods. So that he could, simply from his own fitness of body, feel with a sudden thrill of well-being that the world was an altogether costly place, as he strode along the prim tree-planted roads of Buckler’s Cross on that drizzling morning of dead summer. He had often enjoyed life before, but now, for the first time, he found conscious pleasure in hauling his blessings into parade....

Maisie--he had paused a moment at her gate, and watched her in the front garden, snipping the faded dahlias from their stems--a click of the scissors, and the big clumsy bloom toppled heavily sideways. The rain filmed her long ragged black hair, and glittered in tiny points as she bent and rose again. What a small head she had. If someone were to snick it off, how lightly it would fall among the roots of the Michaelmas daisies. Her old jersey was the same bluish tint as her eyes----

He did not stop to hail her cheerily, but walked quickly on. And he thought of her quite separately from Dorothy--which was a distinct advance.

Footer next term. And the following October, Oxford. Oh--_costly_! Maisie--in a punt ... having tea in his rooms ... old Nina would fix it. He’d begin to collect stuff for his rooms at Christmas.

Perhaps the pond would freeze this Christmas. If so--skating! Maisie, in a little fur cap.... He was rather a nut on the ice. A frosty Christmas would be no end of a rag.

And, beyond all these superficial reasons for elation, in defiance of the ugly road and the moist trickle down his neck, Hal, rather amused at himself for the imagery, wished he could pick up a small sharp knife and cut cleanly out from the shining curve of his future, the one black speck that spoiled it. That beastly business of his subscription to the Memorial to the Winborough Boys fallen in the Great War!

It would crop up quite early in the term, he knew. And his father had promised him an extra five bob for it. Five bob! _Well_ ... but he was Head of the School. And, in a matter like this, to be mean! If it were anything less solemn and patriotic and all that. He had known, personally, Roger Groves, and Latimer Major, and Brown, and Corbett--all among the Fallen. His would be the first name on the list. He ought to set an example of two quid, at least. The Guv’nor didn’t see it. He disapproved on principle of memorials when they took the shape of gym-halls and playgrounds and free libraries ... said that the Fallen would prefer the funds to be spent on providing employment for their discharged comrades. Hal allowed some sense in this, but he doubted if old Latimer were of the kind to worry much either way, wherever he was. But he would have understood, fast enough, that Hal, the first of Winborough’s athletic divinities, setting down his subscription prominently at the top of the list, could not put forth his Guv’nor’s principles as an excuse for shabbiness.

Five shillings. Add fifteen from his own pocket-money--and more than this would absolutely cripple him for the term--and still he was a pound short of what he wanted to give. Hal went into the Bank with Aunt Lavvy’s cheque.

Banks are impersonal things; the money that pours out from them is unlimited. It does not belong to the clerk, nor even to the branch manager. So that, when he came out, and discovered, carelessly counting the notes before thrusting them into his pocket, that he had one pound more in hand then he had to pass over to Aunt Lavvy, he could not, in his swift exultation, visualize any destination for the note except the Memorial.

His imagination, already more exuberantly goat-footed than normal, that morning, had had no time to subside, before this overwhelmingly magical response came to his wish that the blemish might be neatly removed from the radiance of all his tomorrows. His flood of relieved gratitude was as simple as that of some boy of ancient Greece who recognizes, by a gift dropped to his feet from Olympus, that he is indeed beloved of the gods.

Could God really work miracles in this altogether decent fashion, prompt, without excess, and without fuss? Hal didn’t call it God--he felt, dimly, that this would be “swank.” But acknowledging that “luck” had with intention singled him out, he called it luck with a shy reverence that confessed a salute to the Deity behind it.

The lapse had occurred then. An uncanny moral lapse--but not a guilty one. The guilt was later, when, his spirit snubbed by the fact that the pound had not materialized out of nowhere to make him happy, he had not once rapped out: “Here you are, Aunt Lavvy, the chap made a mistake, and handed me out six of ’em....”

But he had funked it, seeing then that he might have to explain his luck-loves-me mood in front of Nina and Mrs. Fraser and his mother and Ursula and Miss Roberts---- Anyhow, what were they all doing crowded up in the drawing-room?

“But when did you notice it, Hal?”

“Why didn’t you take it back at once?”

He could have pretended only to discover it in his pocket then ... it had got loose from the little bundle--“Good Lord, yes, here it is!”

But that would have been a lie, too, and secret acknowledgment that he had no claim on the note from the beginning. Before he could decide what to do, he had said: “Sorry, Aunt Lavvy----” But now he repudiated the absurd childish mood which had led to his acceptance of bounty from nowhere. For a few moments, he had been more than self-conscious schoolboy; for a few moments, he had held happiness like a flask of wine, shot gold with slanting sunbeams, high above his head. For a few moments he had held it there, shouting....

These emotional chaps--all over the place--came to grief sometime.... “I warn you, Bunny. Besides, it isn’t done.”

There was a stagnant smell round the “earthworks”--rotting leaves, and moisture, and a flat grey sky....

He was, without excuse, without fine shades of “but” and “because,” a thief and a liar--and deadly miserably ashamed of himself.

Hal dragged himself to his feet, and wondered drearily to whom his first abasement and confession should be. If it were Winborough, of course he would go straight to the Head. School was so--uncomplicated, compared with home.

Nina was his natural confidante, as far as he had ever needed one, which was only a very little way. But Nina--thought such a lot of him. You need not necessarily choose your highest pedestal to fall from. Bunny? Before he could decide, Bunny came sauntering dejectedly down to the earthworks.

“Hello!”

“Hello!”

“Just finished doing old Nina’s bed. She’s frightfully fed-up with me,” Bunny explained inconsequently. “It wasn’t the frog she minded, it was that Fraser person.” Then, with a sudden wrench: “I’m in a deuce of a mess!”

And Hal found himself listening, with his habitual air of half-humorous authority, to Bunny boasting of his caricature and tuck-shop scrapes. Bunny always laughed and boasted when he was a little bit afraid. His eyes pleaded absolution from his senior’s jawing.

“You’ll just have to be a martyr to art and stand the racket from old Bateman. I can’t help you there. But how much d’you owe at Swayne’s? fifteen bob? Right, I’ll drop him a line presently, and say I’ll pay it on the first day of the term for certain. It needn’t get round to the Guv’nor--he’s sick with you as it is for not getting a move.” Fifteen shillings he could spare Bunny from his next term’s pocket-money, and the pound would have to go back to the Bank from whence it came. And the mean five shillings left from the two pounds of that morning’s glorious reckoning, would head the subscription list for the Memorial. He would bend his head to the discipline when it came. But meanwhile, Hal’s tormented self-respect had craved just once more to be the one to help.

“Can you really manage it, old thing?” Bunny dug one heel into the ground, the off-hand gratitude in his voice an imperfect crust to conceal the burning lava of worship within. Hal did not pour out the tale of his crime to his young brother--he could not contemplate reversing their present satisfactory attitude of give-and-take. Besides, Bunny’s almost certainly flippant treatment of the whole matter, sunnily hailing Hal on level ground, would jar badly. With a curt nod, Hal dismissed him, unburdened now, whooping the whole way up the garden.

Not Nina, and not Bunny, then. And Grace was too inconveniently one with Stanley to be considered. Ursula he still lumped together in his mind with Miss Roberts and Lottie as “schoolroom gang.” The Guv’nor would be so--so fatherish, when told: “That any son of mine----” was inevitable. And Mother----

The shock broke over him again. That he was a thief. And that they would all have to know it, all. So what was the sense of rejecting first one and then the other, as a first hearer? He might as well go straight to William! Unless Aunt Lavvy----

If Aunt Lavvy were privately confided in, her instinct would undoubtedly be to shield Hal. He could not help knowing that he was a favourite with her; that, almost as though she were a young girl again, she loved his bigness, his slow chaff of her pretty rosy little weaknesses, his arm round her shoulders. Given the missing treasury note, she could quite easily arrange the matter with the Bank so that no other member of the family need hear anything about--an hour’s theft.

“After all, I found it in my bag with the other notes--two of them had stuck together. Indeed, I do hope you will forgive me for not having looked more carefully when you telephoned....” She might explain it thus. Anyhow, Aunt Lavvy, bless her, could be trusted to manipulate the affair with her most neat-witted diplomacy. Only--would he, by this, be shirking punishment?

But though he was dazed and shocked at his own matter-of-course acceptance of the note, he still did not own to guilt at that point.... It was something that happened to him, not something that he had done. He had not yet begun to figure the special terror that this involved. But, if not guilty, need he seek punishment?

And for the silence which was deliberate and cowardly in the drawing-room just now? “Won’t it do,” Hal wondered, for the first time in his existence of straightforward rights and wrongs, trying to hold the scales on his own responsibility, doing question and answer both, worrying over cause and effect, balancing and fine adjustment, “Won’t it do if I only leave myself that five bob to plank down first on the subscription list?”

By promising Bunny that fifteen shillings, he had doled himself out quite a fair prospect of suffering. Five shillings from the magnificent Head of the School, and next on the list, thirty shillings, say, from that dud Parkinson. The ignominy would have to be endured with shut teeth. “Won’t that be enough?” Hal pleaded with himself, as he thought, enthroned as judge.... Never again, with Whoever--Whatever--had tripped him up with vision and swift miracle, that morning; had cheated him for ever of self-confidence, and given him bewilderment in its stead.... Ought a fellow’s punishment--beastly word--be finely tempered to what he had not felt wrong when he did it? or ought it to be for how wrong it looked after it was done?

Hal, in his first conflict with ethics, was about as happy as a bear in boxing-gloves, putting together the minute works of a watch. His only mitigation was that he did not recognize “the whole foul mess” as ethics, or he would have regarded his entanglement with any process so priggish, as his final humiliation.

“I’ve had enough of this----” and with a sigh of relief at a vigorous decision, he strode determinedly in search of Aunt Lavvy.

But the luncheon-gong was being sounded as he came up the few perforated iron steps that led back from the garden into the drawing-room. And Hal had to submit to another hour with a one-pound treasury note that did not belong to him hidden in his pocket, accumulating reproach with every wasted moment. By now he was violently anxious to deliver it up to Aunt Lavvy, albeit not quite sure what, even then, and after a full confession, might yet remain behind with him.

Directly after lunch, he followed her to her room:

“May I come in, Aunt Lavvy?”

“Of course, my dear boy.” She sank into one of her round chintz armchairs with their dumpy old-rose and silver-grey cushions, and smiled up at Hal, standing with his hands in his pockets--no, with one hand in one pocket--in front of the empty fireplace.

“Not too loud, if this is to be secrets,” she whispered, with a nod at the door leading to Ursula’s room, “well, and so vacation is nearly over. Don’t correct me, Hal. I’m practising for next year when you’re at the ’Varsity. It would be too, too terrible if I spoke of ‘holidays’ then, wouldn’t it?” Then, as his silence became formidable--“Is it really something serious, Hal dear? I ought to have seen you were not in the mood for nonsense. Tell me.”

He brought out a crumpled oblong of thin paper, blurred with a dull brown and green design.

“Here you are,” he said gruffly.

But the situation was fifty times stiffer than he had imagined it. He wished that Aunt Lavvy would hurry up and begin to fold it into pliable shape.

“Where did you find it?” she asked, startled.

“I didn’t find it. I had it.”

Bunny, practised in confession, would have added appeal, whether of eyes or tongue. But Hal was waiting for Aunt Lavvy’s help before he could add anything to the bald statement, though she would understand, even back to the irrelevance of Maisie and the Michaelmas daisies ... perhaps she would of her own accord propose to “put things right” with the Bank. He had come to her eager for this gift of “put-things-right,” and venerating her for possessing it.... His throat was gritty, and his knees felt weak.

“Well!” exclaimed Aunt Lavvy at last in an indignant whisper. And again, after several seconds had loudly ticked away--“_Well_”....

Hal turned his back and rushed out of the room.

What had happened to the world of usual things that, on the same morning as he had betrayed his own code, Aunt Lavvy had failed him?

He stumbled into the den which he shared with Bunny, and where William slept. Bunny was there, sprawling across William’s bed, reading “Penrod.”

“Thought you’d gone out. I say, what about a spin to Badgery Wood this afternoon?” He looked up for an answer, and saw Hal’s face. “I say ... what--what is it?”

Half an hour ago, Hal had been nervous that Bunny, hearing the tale, would be exasperatingly flippant about it. But now, after that terrifying glimpse of Aunt Lavvy metamorphosed by anger, he rather wanted to hear his brother’s light-hearted: “What’s the odds?”

When he had finished, Bunny sat staring at the floor, his face getting redder and redder.

“Well?” impatiently. And, echoing Aunt Lavvy: “Well?” Hal rapped out again.

Bunny was crying.

And then Hal gave in to the fact that one swerve from the usual had carried him into a wholly unfamiliar world of behaviour, and that he could not find any way back again from strangeness.

“When you’ve quite done,” he growled; adding, “You’d have been surprised if I’d burst out blubbing when you let on to me about your precious scrapes, out in the garden just now.”

“This isn’t a scrape,” gulped out Bunny.

Hal stopped being a mere schoolboy.

“You mean ... it’s worse? It’s the sort of thing one gets put in gaol for?”

Bunny nodded, and dabbed his eyes, too shocked and miserable even to care that he had been seen crying.

Hal sat down on the edge of the bed, hands interlocked across his knees, his broad shoulders bent forward.

“That’s just it”--after a long pause. “It puts the wind up me a bit to realize that if I could freeze on to that quid--I could do almost anything. I could do anything,” he repeated, cutting out the “almost.” “And the fact that I wasn’t really that sort of chap--that of course I was always frightfully down on lying and cheating and--and thieving--the sort of things a decent fellow doesn’t do--it wouldn’t stop me. Like it hasn’t stopped me this time. It’s awful not to be certain that one has any sort of a self that one can rely on.”

“Murder?” whispered Bunny, his imagination, always on a loose rein, beginning now to gallop. “Could it just as easily have been murder, you mean? And is that how criminals do it--in the same way as you....”

“I suppose so.”

“Then--nobody’s safe--not even ordinary people?” They both felt horror very close to them ... stirring their hair with its breath.

“And--feeling so oddly bucked just before----”

“They might have meant that. Like premonition upside down.” Bunny had a swift glimpse into the neat ironies in life’s working-out. But when Hal gruffly bade him explain himself, he pretended, out of an odd deference to his senior’s less flexible speech and fancy, that he could not. This was not the time to swank any superiority over Hal. You only did that in the days when he was indubitably the Magnificent, and in self-defence you paraded any small advantages that were yours. The significance of any need for chivalry smote Bunny with a fresh pang ... he fought back a great lump which swelled up in his throat. “Need any one know?”

“The money’s got to go back somehow, hasn’t it?”

“Aunt Lavvy----”

“I’ve just come from Aunt Lavvy.”

“Oh--good!” Bunny sighed, faintly relieved.

“No.” Hal contradicted him with a touch of grimness. “Not a bit of good. She’s as hard as nails.”

“_Aunt Lavvy?_”

And Hal suddenly made a brilliant, if embittering, discovery: “Scratch an Aunt Lavvy,” he flung into the face of Bunny’s incredulity, “and you find a paying guest underneath.”

[VII]

GRACE WATSON knocked at the door of the attic Miss Roberts shared with Lottie:

“Am I disturbing you? I looked into the nursery on my way up, and saw Lottie there with my babies, so I thought you might be alone.”

The governess beamed a welcome with her teeth, and hustled Grace out of two consecutive chairs into a third which was dubitably more comfortable.

“And I thought it would be a great help to talk over this terrible affair quietly with some one sensible,” continued Grace, who believed too firmly in the wonders achieved by quiet “talking-over.”

“Oh dear!” Miss Roberts began, tentatively, to be shocked and grieved.

And then, in sedate sentences, for even in the midst of spiritual turmoil Grace’s language never became correspondingly wild and tattered, she told the story she had just heard from her mother.

“Mother’s in the drawing-room crying, and wondering how she can bear to break it to Father this evening. He’s been so proud of Hal, you know--his eldest son.”

“He may be shielding somebody,” exclaimed Miss Roberts, brightly. “Bunny, for instance!” She had a thrilling mental picture of Hal, a head taller than Bunny, with one arm flung round his young brother’s shrinking--and unmistakably guilty--shoulders, while in those fearless steady tones of one whose own conscience knew no burdens, he confessed to a crime which was not his. Such luscious fancies sprang too easily into Miss Roberts’ mind, showing that a corner of it was in an unaired condition, for all its surface chattiness. But she was only paid thirty pounds a year, and for Lottie’s sake she slept with the attic window open all the year round, and went for a brisk walk every day in all weathers. The Maxwells, for their thirty pounds a year, could hardly expect further hygienic sacrifice from her. Then, leaving the Bunny idea in a state of incompletion: “Surely dear Miss Lavinia will settle the whole affair happily for you? That is to say, as far as it can ever be happy, knowing that Hal----” She shook her head mournfully; but the mournfulness was not very deeply rooted. Truth to tell, Miss Roberts drew more pleasure from the present excitement of the idol overthrown, than she had ever drawn from the negative rejoicing in Hal’s unquestioned integrity.

“I don’t know,” Grace replied slowly. “I haven’t seen Aunt Lavvy, but Mother says--Mother was overwrought, I suppose. She imagines that Aunt Lavvy has suddenly turned into a sort of fiend who will talk of nothing but her own good name with the Bank, which must be restored at all costs. But naturally Aunt Lavvy was a little bit annoyed, and said one or two things she didn’t mean. Mother ought to have made allowances. That’s what I’m so afraid of, Miss Roberts: that everybody in this house will be so stupefied that Hal of all boys could have committed a common theft----” Miss Roberts made shocked noises. “You can’t talk things over with any good results unless you call them by their proper names,” said Grace, firmly settling the neat little bow at her throat.

“How clear-headed you are!” admiringly, from Miss Roberts.

“Oh, I’m not. At least, if I am, it’s only what I’ve picked up from Stanley. And that reminds me, Mother actually doesn’t want me to tell Stanley when he comes home: ‘Oh do for heaven’s sake keep it in the family!’ she cried. I was rather hurt, as this is the first time that she’s mentioned Stanley as though he weren’t quite one of the family.” She paused a moment, and then clinched her argument: “Because, after all, he lives in the house.”

Miss Roberts tried to convey by her expression that she entirely agreed with Grace, but that at the same time she did not consider the fact that she herself lived in the house lifted her to an equal level of privilege and family-membership as Mr. Stanley Watson.

“It would be a terrible thing for Hal if it got known as far as Winborough or the ’Varsity, that he had taken money that didn’t belong to him. It might ruin his career. But if we all keep our heads, and don’t get hysterical--I met Bunny racing down the stairs just now with his eyes as red as fire, so I suppose he knows.”

“I confess I am surprised that Bunny should have taken it that way. He is a dear boy, but not very serious, as a rule.”

“Hal was his idol.” Grace spoke gently. “Schoolboys don’t say much about their feelings, you know, but I suspect this has gone rather deep with Bunny.”

“How you see everybody’s point of view,” murmured Miss Roberts, dripping appreciation.

“Stanley always says the one thing he can’t bear is intolerance. He can lead one right through history from the early pre-Egyptian period, and show step by step how bigotry alone has dragged great men and great nations to their ruin.”

“How interesting to hear him!” cried Miss Roberts, who, lest she be misunderstood, was not in the least a humbug nor a sycophant, but merely suffered from a nature devoid of the critical faculty.

Grace got up to go. “I think you had better tell Lottie, Miss Roberts, and Ursula, too. They are bound to notice something wrong, and Ursula, especially, has a habit lately of bursting out with such odd things.”

“She’s at the awkward age, of course”; but Miss Roberts had been having trouble with Ursula for the past year or two, and did not display quite as much gums and enthusiasm as she usually did in defence of her pupils.

“Miss Roberts, aren’t we going for a walk this afternoon?” Lottie trotted in, with the moral shine about her of having that morning helped Bunny remake Nina’s bed, and that afternoon kept Honor Rose amused for three-quarters of an hour while Nurse dressed.

“Yes, dear, now. And tell Ursula I wish her to come too. I’ve something to tell you both.”

“Something nice?”

“I’m afraid not--but,” brightly, “things can’t always be nice, can they?”

Grace, with a low: “Thank you so much. You’ve been such a help,” left the room.

The tidings of “something wrong” were beginning to creep about the house, to make themselves felt uneasily ... but Nina was still in ignorance, for the straightforward reason that Hal himself and every one else dreaded too much the ordeal of breaking it to her. In the end it was William who voluntarily undertook the task.

“I’ve just been with Lottie,” he informed Nina, in the passage outside the door of her room. “And she’s just been with Miss Roberts.”

“Get on with it,” laughed Nina, knowing that no dynamo on earth would urge William beyond his own stolid conception of speed.

“Grace told Miss Roberts, and Mother told Grace. Aunt Lavvy told Mother.”

“Well, what?” Nina was careless of the abyss on whose brink she stood.

“That Hal stole the pound belonging to the Bank.”

“You’d better be careful what you’re saying, young man.” Nina laughed scornfully. “_Hal_, indeed!”

William looked at her with round eyes that held something of pity. “You’d rather it was Bunny. But it wasn’t. It was Hal. I’m sorry he did it, but I’d rather for once it was him.” He paused. Then, with a disgusting lapse from chivalry: “You never thought much of Bunny next to Hal, did you?”

Nina stood for a moment rigid, as though the whole of her life were in suspension. Then, angrily brushing William aside, she marched straight into the boys’ den. To Hal’s moody vision, she seemed strangely out of proportion in her big hard-ringing incredulity. He clenched his hands, dreading the next few minutes; wishing that a powerful wave could lift him bodily and set him down again on the leeward side of them.

“William has the cheek to say----”

“Yes. It’s true.”

“You _didn’t_?”

He was silent.

“Hal, not ... you?”

“Why shouldn’t it be me?”

“Stealing?” Her mouth was drawn in pain as though she were sucking at some bitter fruit.

He nodded. No hope of explaining with any success to Nina, as to Bunny, the slippery differences which separated his act from stealing. He had only just learnt himself that such differences existed; and Nina certainly would not and could not admit them, except as an attempt at cowardly shirking of consequences.

He had hardly glanced at consequences, yet.

“I wish I was dead,” Nina broke out suddenly.

“Don’t be a damned idiot.”

“It’s as ghastly for me as for you. Can’t you see that? I’ve always backed you up.”

No, there were no surprises in conduct from Nina, as there had been from himself, from Aunt Lavvy and from Bunny. Every one of the raging contemptuous accusations which stammering she hurled at him, had already sounded across his mind during the past hour. Nina, like all those cool clear people who hold that it is bad form to show or even to feel emotion, was betrayed by a genuine blow into melodrama.

“I’ve always backed you up. If you had got into any _decent_ scrape.... But--Good Lord!--the commonest board-school cad would have more sense of honour.... Men sometimes steal when they’re hungry--starving--but you---- What do you suppose they’ll say at Winborough? A girl from our school was expelled once for pinching half-a-crown that didn’t belong to her--serve her right--but she was a snivelling little rat, and her people were no class. I suppose you’d cheat at games now. Oh, I--I don’t want ever to see anybody again ... they’ll be laughing at me even if they don’t say it straight out. I’ve swanked about you, and you’ve let me down.”

It was all in that last phrase.

“I never asked you to swank about me,” said Hal slowly. He was standing with his back to her, looking out of the window, and bidding good-bye to a Nina deferential in spirit, though offering, for appearance’s sake, a casual surface to his lordly good humour. A Nina persistently engaged in his service, preoccupied with his interests, obstinately compelling family and outsiders to acknowledge his supremacy. Hal sighed, relinquishing his glorious past.

“I wish to God you’d shut up and go away.”

With her hand on the door, Nina turned: “How was it found out?”

“Found out?” Hal was glad of a cue to be angry in his turn. “What the devil do you mean--found out? I told Aunt Lavvy directly----”

“Directly she asked you? It was at the ’phone, and you lied about it. I was there and heard you. You pretended to look in your pockets.”

Hal shrugged his shoulders. “All the same I told Aunt Lavvy myself. Directly after lunch.” But “directly I came to my senses ...” was what he had been going to say before.

“I suppose she’ll try and shield you. I wouldn’t in her place.”

“You would. But she won’t. She’s livid.”

“_Aunt Lavvy!_” A short scornful laugh from Nina. Aunt Lavvy, with all her gentle wisdom, her sweet eyes, her pretty dainty habits, her silvery sense of humour, her tolerance, her tact, and the secret niche of favouritism which Hal and Nina jointly occupied in her heart--_livid_ indeed!

She would be deeply sorry, yes! Nothing more damaging than that.

“Better go and find out for yourself.”

“I will, then.”

But Aunt Lavvy was down in the drawing-room, having tea.

Tea, as the first public re-union since lunch, was also the tangible betrayal of moral disorganization at the Laburnums. Aunt Lavvy, Miss Roberts, Ursula and Lottie were present. Mrs. Maxwell and Grace had been invited to tea with Mrs. Fennimore, the banker’s wife; and, after a hurried talk-over with Miss Roberts, Grace had decided it the wiser policy and the truest service to her country--i. e., the family--to go as though nothing had happened, and make excuses for Mrs. Maxwell, whose blotched and tear-swollen condition still kept her to her room. “You see, Miss Roberts, nobody outside the house _knows_ anything yet, and we mustn’t let them begin to suspect....”

Hal, aware that by some pressure of invisible law he would have to appear at dinner, renounced his tea, and, like his mother, shut himself up in his room. He shut himself up there too long, so that the prospect of ever leaving it and facing publicity swelled to abnormal difficulty.

Bunny forlornly marched away for a solitary walk; and William, with the precaution of a large bun annexed from the tea-table, had followed him. He did not catch up with Bunny, but was satisfied to march unobserved about a hundred yards behind him. He saw him fling himself face downwards in a field; sat down and waited ... and finally arrived home about eight minutes in Bunny’s rear.

Nina, bursting open the door in her search for Aunt Lavvy, had thrown a look of disgust at the “schoolroom mess” present, and rushed out again.

Lottie asked if she might carry up a cup of tea and some cake to poor Hal. Aunt Lavvy’s face became smooth and uninterested. But Miss Roberts, to Ursula’s horror, gave assent: “Do, dear, that will be very nice of you.”

“You’re not to, Lottie,” Ursula cried passionately.

“Really, Ursula----”

“She’s only curious. Let her take Mother a cup if she wants a canteen job.”

Aunt Lavvy said, with the faint lisp in her voice a little more assertive than usual: “Do you know, Lottie darling, I’d have given you the job of bringing my tea upstairs if I’d only had a little sitting-room of my own. Food in one’s bedroom is not very tempting, is it? But just today----”

She sighed. Then smiled bravely, with the corners of her mouth--not with all of it--when Miss Roberts sympathetically asked whether she had a headache, and replied: “No, I mustn’t indulge myself by pretending I have. The headache pose is fatally tempting to old ladies. You’ll know one day, Miss Roberts.”

“That was meant for Mother,” reflected Ursula; “and sending Miss Roberts down for stronger tea--she’s never done it before--was to impress Gums and the servants that she has a right to it because she pays.” Ursula was making the same discovery as erstwhile Hal had made. “‘Just today’ was a stinger for Hal. And ‘the little sitting-room of her own’ she aimed at----”

Ursula, subconsciously, winced with fear.

“Are you going to split on Hal to the Bank?” she asked, wondering what made her voice sound so noisy.

Again that curious glassy obstinacy passed over Aunt Lavvy’s usually mobile prettiness. She replied nothing, but with careful selection she put aside the slices of the Swiss Roll and cut herself a piece from the uncut portion.

“Ursula, really, this is going too far. This is disloyal. When your Aunt Lavvy is doing her best to behave as though nothing had happened----”

“Why should she? Something _has_ happened. But it’ll be like that all the time, I know. Mother will come down to dinner trying to look as though she hadn’t cried, and we’ll all look as though of course she hadn’t. And Father will simply shut up and not play. He’s never supposed to join in when the rest of us pretend. And Grace will talk tactfully to Stanley about the babies, and how town is looking, and her tea-party, and the leaves falling. And Gums will ‘draw out’ Lottie, and we’ll all of us not stare at Hal, and feel beastlier than we’ve ever felt before, and goodness knows what Nina and Bunny will do, because I haven’t seen them since it happened. But it might be a bit better--not much, but a bit--if we could all be as glum as we liked.”

“Would you have said that during the war, Ursula? Why, I think it was splendid how every one hid their own feelings and were cheerful.” Miss Roberts, having been officially given charge of the situation by Grace--who had not got it to give--and asked to take care of it until a quarter to six, was feeling the hours unwontedly taut and thrilling.

“This isn’t the war. It’s _us_.”

[VIII]

MR. MAXWELL and Stanley returned together from the golf-house about six o’clock, and were at once anxiously taken possession of by their wives. Presently, Hal received the summons he expected to the study.

It was not to be the old thunderous “You young rascal” business, such as Bunny always encountered, but a Serious Talk; the kind that began: “Don’t be afraid of me, my boy....”

Hal _was_ afraid. A wrathful parent was a thing that might happen to any fellow. There was, however, a strange solemnity, proving his crime in an unspeakable category, about a father who suddenly treated him as an equal. “I want your confidence, my boy. After all, I’m your father. What was your motive?”