Chapter IV

"A seed of fire is in the human soul
That tears can quench not...."
F. W. B.

Helen, herself, had seen at a glance that something was wrong: very wrong indeed. When the two were gone, she returned to Mark with a flutter of trepidation at her heart.

Sheila cared. By this time she was convinced of it. And Mark? Once already, in his blindness, he had flung aside this jewel of a girl. Did he mean to do it a second time open-eyed, because his body had suffered shipwreck in the service of his country? If he had got that resolve in his brain, she foreknew the futility of argument. Yet--given the chance and the facts--she was prepared to fight it out with him, for Sheila's sake no less than his own.

But it was for him to speak first; and she feared his silence.

During her absence he had wheeled himself along the terrace and back again to that fatal corner, where a ghostly Sheila still sat in the empty chair, her arms resting on the table, a light of unearthly beauty in her eyes. His face wore the hard closed-up look that his mother had not seen for weeks. Casual talk about Bramleigh Beeches was sheerly impossible.

"My darling, what _has_ gone wrong?" she made bold to ask.

He frowned and set his teeth. "Everything. Too perfect to last. I might have known it." He looked about him uneasily. "We can't talk out here. Let's get indoors."

They proceeded to get indoors accordingly; and there by the freshly crackling drawing-room fire it was possible to talk. Mark lit a cigarette to steady himself. Lady Forsyth sat in her favourite small chair, warming her hands, that always went cold under stress of emotion.

"Mark, did you speak to her?" she asked quietly.

"I came within an ace of it--God forgive me!"

Those three words confirmed her worst fears. But she could say nothing yet. Her heart was beating fast. It was a distressing symptom, greatly increased by months of anxiety and the ceaseless strain of the war.

So she remained silent, awaiting further revelations. And after a pause Mark went on:--"I deserve a thorough good kicking. Wish I'd a father to give it me. Perhaps Keith will. I'm not blaming you, Mums. This massage business has done me no end of good. But in every other respect it's been the very devil. As for _her_--she's the most perfect thing God ever made. And I'm afraid ... I'm horribly afraid ... she cares. The look in her eyes dumbfounded me. There was no choice between a clean cut ... and surrender...."

"And why _not_ surrender?" his mother ventured, fearful yet undaunted. "Honestly I believe--it would be better and happier for us all."

At that the stifled flame in him leaped out even as she had feared.

"Better for _me_ ... for you. That's the extent of your honest belief. Mums, you're not facing this business straight: though you think you are. You're just a dear devoted mother-woman. Whatever your son cries for, from a Noah's ark to a wife, you'll move heaven and earth to get it for him at any cost--to any one. And I love you for it. But you can't expect me, always, to see it the same way. I'm considering Sheila and no one but Sheila----"

"My dear boy, _I'm_ considering her too!" his mother cried out, unable to endure that last reproach. "I've been doing so a good deal longer than you have; and, believe it or not, my understanding of her goes deeper than yours. I'm a woman. She's a woman----"

"_There_ you are!" Mark fairly took the word out of her mouth. "It's because she's so divinely a woman that I refuse to let her in for ... a travesty of a marriage. A girl like that was created for better things than dancing attendance on a broken man. It would be a sin. You know that as well as I do."

She was silent a moment, recognising that he spoke the truth: one side of it. But even while she loved and honoured him for his refusal, conviction remained that Sheila, if she really cared, would recognise no obstacles.

"But, dear, after all, things aren't quite past mending," she urged in a quieter tone. "Surely Sheila has the right to know you love her, and to make her own choice."

Mark shook his head. "She wouldn't think things out. And she'd be too tender-hearted to refuse.--As for me, there probably will be improvement, of sorts. But, so far as I can see, the chances are I'll never be a whole man again: and I don't see myself marrying Sheila, on the off chance----"

"Oh--you're hopeless! And _she's_ helpless, poor darling! Why must we wretched women always be dumb on this matter that concerns us above everything else? She ought to be allowed to take the initiative in a case like this."

"Just as well for me that she isn't," Mark muttered grimly. But she detected in his voice the mere ghost of a vibration, and a wild hope leaped in her heart. Sheila might move him, or Keith----

At this point Mark leaned forward suddenly and flung away his cigarette.

"Don't let's talk of this again, Mums," he said, more gently than he had spoken yet. "It hurts us both too much. Also it's futile. Nothing on earth would induce me to offer Sheila--damaged goods: damaged in every sense. I'm the sinner first and last. When I ought to have been at her feet, I was wasting my substance on ... Miss Alison. Oh yes ... you knew ... you're welcome to your private triumph.'

"My son--it's no triumph," she broke out bitterly. "It's torment. I would sooner have been entirely wrong and that Bel should have turned out worthy of your chivalrous love----"

"Well, _I_ wouldn't," he contradicted her inevitably. "I wouldn't sooner anything that might have robbed me of discovering Sheila as I've been discovering her these few weeks; even though it's made things in general ten times harder to bear. She's a perpetual inspiration. A light of earth. If she were only that--! But she's more. And so ... she's not for me. Possibly I was mistaken this afternoon. It might have been ... just her heavenly sympathy. I hope to God it was! We'll run no more risks, anyway. If she gets this leave of hers, I'd better go off on some sort of tour with Keith:--doctor's orders! If he's too busy, the Sinclairs might put up with me for a bit, or Uncle John down at Weymouth. The farther the better. We must furbish up some sort of presentable excuse. It's pretty detestable, just when things in general seemed to be taking a real lift all round."

And his mother sat listening to it all, mute and miserable, envisaging the spring and summer--that had seemed to promise resurrection--darkened by this fresh tragedy. She knew, now, just how high hope had risen of late.

"And is this sort of thing ... to be permanent?" she asked, with a sigh of utter weariness.

He turned and regarded her reproachfully, the faintest flicker of humour in his grave eyes. "My dear Mums, I sometimes wonder if you really have walked this earth for fifty years! Is anything ever permanent--except change? I suppose ... we shall both shake down in time and accept the horrid fact. But at present, as things stand, the less she sees of me the better. She ought--to marry. And she probably will. Oh _God_!"

The last words were no more than a fierce whisper, and his hand closed sharply on the arm of his chair.

His mother neither moved nor spoke. She leaned forward over the fire, her face half turned away from him, thankful the lights were not switched on.

But although no sob escaped her, Mark knew very well that she was crying. In other circumstances he would have been on his knees beside her. As it was, he sat there dumb; chained to the accursed chair, raging at his helplessness; raging still more at his very belated readiness to fulfil her heart's desire.

Soon she rose hurriedly, murmured something about coming back soon, and left him....

They were alone that evening. Keith was dining at Wynchmere and speaking afterwards at the Working Man's Club on ambulance driving in France. They missed him badly, both of them. It is often the way with such quiet, unobtrusive natures. Keith and Sheila were alike in that respect: and all through dinner, both were vividly present to the minds of mother and son. But their talk in the main was of Bramleigh Beeches, Indian genius, and the poetry of Tagore.

After dinner Mark asked for _Sadhāna_ and music. He wanted to escape from talk that could not, just then, be anything but a mere makeshift between them: a state of things unnatural and intolerable to both. While his mother played Grieg and Beethoven, he opened his book haphazard at the poet's exquisite clear-eyed discourse on "Realisation in Love."

"Our individual soul," he read, "has been separated from the Supreme Soul not from alienation, but from fulness of love. It is for this reason that untruths, sufferings, and evil are not at a standstill: the human soul can defy them, can overcome them; nay, can altogether transform them into new power and beauty...."

Mark pondered that sentence a long while. It was like a light flashed upon the dark path before him; like the voice of God in his own soul, saying, "This do and thou shalt live." His faith in the Unseen was, like that of most Britons, an inarticulate and very hidden thing. But his brief, strenuous spell of service, followed by weeks of intimate, yet unspoken communion with the passionate soul of one small French nun, had intensified his inner vision and deepened the measure of faith that was in him. To-night he recognised and accepted the task assigned him; recognised also that, just in so far as he fulfilled it, he would be still able to serve his country and his own people, in defiance of his handicap. The struggle between spirit and matter, that had hitherto been the keynote of his art, must now become the keynote of his life.... "Unconquering, yet unconquered...." Stevenson knew.

Yet still his desolate, rebellious heart cried out that _with Sheila_ any achievement were possible: without her the future loomed dark and formless, a night devoid of stars....

Punctually at ten he asked to be taken up to bed. When he was gone, the house felt so silent and empty that Helen fled for refuge to her own room and her own fire. Anxious and disheartened by this fresh trouble, she clung to the thought of Keith as a shipwrecked man to a spar. Her own pleading was vitiated--no denying it--by the mere fact of her motherhood. Keith could speak more impartially, more frankly, as one man to another. She wanted to see him, and unburden her heart to him before she slept. But he expected to be late and had begged her not to sit up. Besides, he would be tired and it would not be fair on him. She must have patience till the morning. Her rebel spirit was being drilled into patience these days.

The door into Mark's room was shut. It most often had to be, now. But she heard no sound of footsteps. The men had evidently left him. Should she go in and say good night? Her heart yearned over him; and it was hateful to feel unsure of her welcome. Did he guess how acutely she missed his casual wanderings in and out; the arguments, the "ragging," and the dear delights of their ancient comradeship, that almost seemed to belong to another life?

Latterly, under Sheila's reviving influence, the old happy relation had been renewed with a difference. It was she who now went in to him for early tea, when he did not peremptorily order her back lest she catch cold; and the "hair-brush interview" often took place beside his bed. Being dependent on the men, he could not sit up till all hours. Now, to-day--just as hope was sending green shoots into the sunshine--she felt jerked back into the miseries and uncertainties of a winter that she would fain wipe clean out of her memory.

Finally, she decided to go in to him and chance the result.

The comfort of finding she was welcome would be worth the risk.

His room was in darkness: curtains drawn back, windows flung open, revealing a strip of starry sky and black pine branches blotting out a constellation or two. The light from her own room guided her to his bed.

He said not a word. But his arms came out to greet her; and he drew her down, clinging to her, as he had never done in the days before War had crippled his strong, shapely body and shaken his nerves.

"I thought--you had forgotten," he said at last.

"And _I_ thought perhaps--you would rather not."

He tightened his hold. "I forbid you to think that, ever. No matter what the devil inside me may say or do. A nice sort of curse I am to you, little Mums."

"You're the dearest blessing of my life," she answered, her cheek against his.

It was some time before he let her go: but neither of them spoke the word uppermost in their minds.

She left him at last, with his fervent "God bless you" in her ears and hope renewed in her heart. Sheila--if she loved him sufficiently--must win in the end.