This Freedom Part 41

She went over to him. "Dear, won't you like the nurseries to be in use again?"

He said slowly, "I will, very much, Rosalie. It's lonely, these empty rooms. I will very much--in some ways."

Rosalie knew what Harry meant. She touched his hand. "Dear, I think it can be made different."

Harry knew what Rosalie meant. He pressed the hand that touched his own. "That's all right, Rosalie. That's all right, dearest."

Rosalie was down early next morning. She desired an early breakfast and to go on to see Lucy before Field's. It might be necessary to stay the day with Lucy. There was also Huggo. What was Huggo doing?

Overnight Rosalie had seen Doda, come in late from an evening with a very intimate friend of hers always known, through some private joke of Doda's, as "the foreign friend." The foreign friend, not in the least foreign but English, was a young married woman living apart from her husband. Doda had brought her to the house once.

She was very pretty and a cheery soul. She would have been called fast when Rosalie was a girl. In 1921 she would almost, in the manner she presented to Rosalie, have been called slow. Doda and she were greatly attached.

Doda, overnight, going straight upstairs to bed, had said, "Have you seen Huggo to-day? He's in a sc.r.a.pe of some sort."

"Oh, Doda, what kind of a sc.r.a.pe?"

"He didn't tell me. I ran into him quite by chance coming away from a theatre with the foreign friend. We both thought he was rather badly rattled."

"Was he going on to Lucy? Did he know Lucy was very ill indeed?"

Doda said, "I don't know. He didn't tell me. Is she?" and indifferently pa.s.sed upstairs.

Rosalie at her early breakfast was thinking what news the day would give of Lucy and of Huggo. She was suddenly, by Huggo in person, brought intelligence of both. She heard the door bell ring and in a minute Huggo surprisingly broke into the room. He had kept his hat on. He looked white, drawn and very agitated. He shut the door behind him. "Lucy's dead."

Tears sprang into the eyes of Rosalie, "Oh, my poor Huggo!"

He made a gesture. "Oh, that's no good! Look here, mother, will you look after things over there for me? That's all I've come in to say. Will you see to everything and will you take the kid? I can't stop."

He made to go.

"Huggo, of course I will. But you'll be there? Are you going there now?"

"I'm not. I'm going away."

"Going away?"

His hand was on the door. "Yes, going away. Look here, there's another thing. If any one comes here for me will you say you haven't seen me? It's important. It's vital."

"Huggo, what is the matter?"

"You'll jolly soon know. You may as well know now. Then you'll realise. If you want to know--the police are after me."

He was gone.

CHAPTER V

In the Book of Job it all happened, to Job, in the apparent compa.s.s of one piece of time not broken by diurnal intervals, not mitigated by recuperative cessations between blow and blow. It seemed to Rosalie that it was like that it happened also to her. There seemed no interval. It seemed to her wrath on wrath, visitation upon visitation, judgment upon judgment.

It seemed to her that she was no sooner come down out of the Old Bailey--her hand touching at things for support, her vision vertiginous, causing the solid ground to be in motion, her ears resonant, crying through her brain the words she saw in Huggo's look as they removed him; it seemed to her she was no sooner out from there than she was at the telephone and summoned by the foreign friend and was there with Doda and was in process of "Oh, Doda!"--"Oh, mother!"; it seemed to her she was no sooner out from that than she was with that burly messenger, going with him, returning from him. There were days and nights walled up in weeks and months between these things, but that is how they seemed to Rosalie.

The syndicate was laid by the heels, one here, one there, Huggo in France, very shortly after the warning that had put Huggo in flight. The syndicate went through the police court where was unfolded a story sensational with surprising sums of money, captivating with ingenuity of fraud covered up by fraud to help new fraud again.

The syndicate stood in the dock at the Old Bailey. Those two of the syndicate described by the prosecution and by the judge as the princ.i.p.als were sentenced to three years' penal servitude. "You,"

said the judge, addressing with a new note in his voice the third prisoner, "You, Occleve, stand in a different--"

Rosalie began to pray.

Harry would not attend the trial. He had done all that could be done, and of his position there was very much that he was able to do, and had attended the police court during the initial proceedings.

He would not go to the Old Bailey. He would not go out. He would not read the papers. He used to sit about the house. "My son a felon.... My boy a felon. My son.... My eldest son...."

Rosalie was given a seat in the floor of the court on the first days of the hearing. On the day when the verdict was to be given and sentence pa.s.sed she could not bear that. An usher, much pitying, obtained her a place in the gallery. She looked down immediately upon her Huggo. Her hands, upon the ledge before her, were all the time clasped. Her eyes alternately were in her hands and on her Huggo. Her heart moved between her Huggo and her G.o.d.

"You, Occleve, stand in a different position... ."

She began to pray. All of her being, all of her soul, all of her life, with a spiritual and a physical intensity transcending all that her body and her mind had ever known, was in apotheosis of supplication. "O G.o.d the Father! O G.o.d the Father! O G.o.d the Father!"

Her Huggo! Those words that only in s.n.a.t.c.hes she heard were being addressed to her Huggo.

"... Your counsel has most eloquently pleaded for you.... You bear an honoured name.... You bear a name held in these precincts in honour, in esteem, in love, in admiration.... You have had a good home, a great and a n.o.ble father, a distinguished and devoted mother...."

That suppliant crouched lower in her supplication.

"... You have been the dupe, you have been the tool, you have been in large part, as your counsel has pleaded, and as I believe, the unsuspecting agent.... Nevertheless, the least sentence I can pa.s.s on you--"

"O G.o.d the Father, the Father!"

"... is six months' imprisonment."

That boy, whose head had been hung and eyes downcast, lifted his head and raised his eyes and gave one look into the eyes of that suppliant for him that sat above him. There was recalled by that suppliant a look that had pa.s.sed from the place of accusation to the place of a.s.sembly in the place called the Sanhedrin.

Her Huggo!

They took him away.

Doda didn't stop going out. She seemed to go out more. The pain within that house, brought there by Huggo, seemed to make that house more than before unbearable to Doda. She often spent the night, or the week end away, staying with the foreign friend, she generally said. She would have nothing whatever to do with the baby now installed in the house. She never would go near it. Once she pa.s.sed it in the hall in its perambulator. She stopped and stooped over the face of lovely innocence that lay there and gazed upon it with an extraordinary intensity. She drew back with a sharp catch at her breath and sharply stepped away and turned and ran very quickly upstairs. After that. when she chanced to pa.s.s the child, she turned aside and would not look upon the child. She began not to look well, Rosalie thought. There often was upon her lovely face a pinched and drawn expression, disfiguring it. On the rare occasions when she was in to dinner she sat strangely moody. There only was a moodiness about that table then; but the moodiness of Doda was noticeable to Rosalie. She ate hardly at all. She sometimes would get up suddenly before a meal was ended and go away, generally to her own room. Very many times Rosalie would seek anxiously to question her, but apart from the independence which commonly she maintained towards Rosalie, Doda seemed very much to resent solicitude upon her health. "What should be the matter? I look perfectly well, don't I?"

"Doda, you don't. I've noticed it a long time."

"Well, I am perfectly well. If I wasn't I'd say so."

Strike on!