The Duchess of Wrexe Part 89

"It's about Francis--" She gave him the name with a little hesitation and with an air of restraint as though about the very whisper penalties could linger.

"You're the best friend that he's got--the best friend any man could have--and I want you to care for him, to look after him, to watch over him. I know," she went on hurriedly, "that you always have done that, but I want you to feel now that you're doing it a little for my sake as well as your own. I want you to be the one link that I've still got with him."

"But Roddy asked him----" began Christopher.

"Oh yes! I know--Roddy was splendid. But of course that can't be. We can't meet, at any rate for years. Besides, that time is so utterly done with. There's only Roddy now for me in all the world. But I know, better, I expect, than you think, how weak Francis is, how much he depends upon what the people whom he cares for say to him--and so I want you----"

"But of course," Christopher said. "He knows that he can count on me whatever happens--he's always known that."

He stopped and waited for her to continue; he saw that she had more to say.

"It's so strange," she said, staring, her eyes deep and black seeing into sacred places that were known only to her, "how grandmother's death has cleared, amazingly, the air. The motive for almost everything has gone. I didn't see--I hadn't the least idea--how all my thoughts and actions and wishes and impulses came from my sense of opposition to her.

Francis saw that--knowing that we both hated her--and that was why I was so difficult with Roddy, because I thought that grandmother had arranged the marriage and had him under her thumb--I had no idea of the kind of person Roddy was."

"Nor had I--nor had anyone," said Christopher.

"That whole affair with Francis was in idea--always--more than in fact.

I knew, and I believe that he knew, that it was simply a piece of wild rebellion on my part; and on his--well, he's like that, romantic, rebellious, responding in a minute to everything, but wanting, really, all the time to be safe and proper. That day we met in his rooms, we both knew, at heart, that something was missing--something one had to have if one was going to break away altogether. He was always a rebel by force of circ.u.mstances, never by real inclination."

She put her hand on Christopher's knee and drew very close to him.

"Chris dear, I'm terrified now when I think of how near I was to absolute, complete disaster. If it hadn't been for Roddy's accident and for Lizzie ... Lizzie's been to all of us everything in the world.

"Do you remember once telling me about Mr. Brun's Tiger? I've often thought of it since and it seems to me now that to all of us--for Roddy and Francis and Lizzie and me--the moment of our consciousness came.

Ever since that day when they carried Roddy back to Seddon each one of us has had to wait, just holding ourselves in.... But, you know, Dr.

Chris, that's the secret of the whole matter. It wasn't I, or Breton, or even Lizzie or Roddy that defeated grandmother--it was simply Real Life.

First the War, then Roddy's accident--Roddy's accident most of all. We had, all five of us, been leading sham lives, then suddenly G.o.d, Fate, Providence, what you will, steps in, jerks us all back, takes away from all of us what we thought we wanted most, puts us in line with the real thing--our Tiger, if you like. Grandmother simply couldn't stand it.

Lizzie and Roddy are real--half of Breton and me, and most of grandmother unreal--Well, Lizzie and Roddy have just put things straight quietly.... Grandmother's generation saw things 'through a gla.s.s darkly'--They're gone. It's all going to be 'face to face' now."

Christopher looked at her, smiling. She was so young, so adorably young with her seriousness.

She broke in--"What rot I'm talking! It only comes to this, that I wish now, like anything, that I'd been nicer to grandmamma. One sees things always too late.... I'd like to have another try, to begin with grandmamma again, to be more tolerant, to hate her less. But I expect in the end it would be the same. She'd have had me tied up, without a will of my own, without a word to say!... that was her idea of controlling us all. It's over, it's done with--no one, I expect, will have her kind of power again.... But she was fine! I only see now how fine she was!

"No one, I expect, will have her kind of power again...."

Now she stood away from Christopher, looking at him and also beyond him, as though she were finally, once and for all, surveying, cataloguing that same power--

"She wasn't terrible, she wasn't fine, she wasn't really anything except a kind of peg for all sorts of traditions to hang on to. In herself she was just a plucky, theatrical, obstinate old woman. It was simply the idea of her that frightened us all. I remember the first time that I saw Yale Ross's picture of her--He'd caught all the ceremony and the terror.

It was then that I had the first faint suspicion that she didn't, in herself, live up to the picture in the least.

"I suppose," she went on, coming up closer to him, "that that's why no one will ever be like her again--because no one will ever be taken in so completely by shams again, never by the empty sh.e.l.l of anything. But that's just how she influenced us--all of us. Myself, you, Lizzie, Roddy, Francis ... we were all mixed up in it--

"And then the first moment that we really came into contact with her she wasn't anything--wasn't simply there. Do you know, Dr. Chris, seeing her now, just an old sick woman, conscious that everyone was escaping her, I almost love her!... I do indeed!"

She sprang up and stood before him and laughed, crying--

"I'm grown up, Dr. Chris, I'm grown up! It's taken a time, but it's happened at last! Meanwhile I shall be the most perfect wife, the most perfect mother, and when the Tiger is restive there'll be the youngest Seddon to put it all into. Oh! What a child that child will be! Roddy and his impatience, me and my tempers----"

She laughed and for an instant her old fierce defiance was there then, as though some spirit had flashed, before his eyes, through the window into s.p.a.ce and freedom it was gone. She herself proclaimed its dismissal.

"It's gone--it's all gone--Dr. Chris. I'm the happiest woman in England!"

But even as she spoke her eyes were wistful; half-seen, half-recalled, eloquent with a colour, a flame that was too fierce for her present world, hung before her the memory of a moment when, in a darkened room, she had caught a letter to her lips, had sunk upon her knees before a pa.s.sion whose face she had scarcely seen but whose voice she had heard and still now, in her new life, remembered. She had had her moment ... the last strains of its dying music were still in her ears.

She caught her breath, then, turning, dismissed it; and, standing back from Christopher, gave him her last word--

"But look after Francis. Be with him as much as you can.... He needs all that you can spare--He's got to be--he's simply _got_ to be--the success of the family!"

CHAPTER XIII

EPILOGUE--PROLOGUE

"Third Apparition--A Child Crowned ..."

_Macbeth_.

I

Late on the evening of May 17th Christopher heard of the relief of Mafeking. It was too advanced an hour, he understood, for the town to display its triumph that evening. Let Christopher wait.

The following night Brun, whom he had not seen for many months, appeared. The clocks had struck nine and Christopher was finis.h.i.+ng his dinner, when the little man, s.h.i.+ning and dapper, pleased and impersonal, was shown in.

"Hullo!" cried Christopher; "thought you were abroad somewhere."

"I saw you at the d.u.c.h.ess's funeral. Of course I was there. What do you suppose? Meanwhile come out now and see your fine people make manifestations."

"Is there a noise?"

"A noise! _Mon Dieu!_ But come and look!"

They went out together. Harley Street was silent and deserted and above it a night sky, scattered with stars, was serenely still. But, beyond the further roofs and chimneys, golden light hovered and a confused murmur, like the buzzing of bees, hummed upon s.p.a.ce.

Through Oxford Street a great crowd of people was pa.s.sing, but it was a crowd hurrying to find some other crowd. Oxford Street was plainly not the meeting-place. There was a good deal of shouting and singing; young men, five abreast, pa.s.sed, girls with "ticklers" and whistles screamed and laughed and sang; merry bells were ringing, lights flared in the windows and now and again a rocket with a whiz and a shriek flashed into the sky and broke with a little angry splutter into coloured stars.

They crossed into Bond Street, down which other people were hurrying; sometimes a roaring echo of a mult.i.tude of discordant voices would be carried to them and then would be hidden again as though some huge door in front of them were swinging to and fro.

At the end of Bond Street, suddenly, as they might turn the corner of some sea road and, instantly, be confronted with the crash of a plunging surf, they met the crowd.

"Look out!" cried Brun, clutching hold of Christopher's arm. "We don't want to get drawn into this!"

Although they had apparently been walking quietly down Bond Street with no crowd about them, they now were pursued, upon all sides, by people.

They raised themselves on to a doorstep, hanging there, bending their feet forward, and feeling that if the crowd in front of them were for a moment to give way down they would go!

Meanwhile, along Piccadilly, towards the clubs and Hyde Park Corner, a thick ma.s.s of human beings was pressing. This gathering seemed, of itself, to lack all human quality.

A face, a voice, a hand, a cry----these things might now and again, as fish flash in a stream, detach themselves; sometimes a light from a flaring window or an illumination would fling into pale, unreal relief a bundle of faces that represented, at that instant, a piece of human history, but sank instantly back again into chaos.