“I hope she is going to be happy in her own way,” said Quentillian.
The Canon’s brow instantly became thunderous again.
“Not one word, Owen, not one word on those lines,” he commanded sternly. “I appreciate your generosity deeply, but there is such a thing as carrying generosity too far.”
“I can see small generosity in relinquishing to someone else what is no longer mine.”
The Canon swept on, unheeding.
“My faith in my child has received a rude shock. Valeria is unfit for wifehood and motherhood. How can I let her undertake responsibility when she has proved herself unworthy up to the hilt? No, Owen, let it rest there. I will deal with Valeria, and may God help us both!”
Quentillian felt inclined to echo the petition wholeheartedly.
He could not doubt that the Canon’s misery was utterly unfeigned. So, also, was his wrath.
The incongruous sound of the dinner-gong vibrated violently through the room.
The Canon did not stir.
His voice, when next he spoke, was almost a groan.
“I cannot see Valeria tonight. God forgive me, I am not master of myself. Your calm shames me, Owen. But it is not natural, not natural. You will, and must, suffer for it later on. Tell me, dear fellow — that I should have to say it! — do you wish to leave us — do you wish to go?”
Owen wished for nothing so much as an immediate adjournment to the dining-room, but he felt that it would indeed be impossible to say so.
“You would not wish me to send Valeria from home, I know. Nor do I know where I could send her.”
“Let her marry Cuscaden,” said Quentillian boldly.
“Never, Owen. Give my child — my weak, untrustworthy child, to a man who could behave as Cuscaden has behaved? Believe me, I appreciate the generosity that prompts you, but you know not what you ask — you know not what you ask.”
Quentillian, entirely unaccustomed to any such accusation, was silently annoyed.
He was also hungry.
“I have sometimes thought,” said the Canon with a trembling voice, “that my tendency has been to idolize my children. I lost their mother so early! You know how it was with me, Owen. Lucilla was my eldest born, my right hand. I have come to depend upon Lucilla, parodoxical though it may sound, from a father towards his child. David, my eldest son...” the Canon paused a long while, and then murmured softly: “ ‘Whilst he was yet a great way off’ — David is in a far country, but he will return to us yet, and though his Morning Prayer be our Evensong, who shall say that there is separation between us? And I have kept my other children by my side, Owen. Little Flora has never yet tried her wings away from home. She is more like her mother than any of them — she and the dear Adrian.”
A smile like an illumination came into the Canon’s eyes as he spoke Adrian’s name. “The light of mine eyes, that dear lad has always been. My Benjamin! There are no words for what I went through whilst Adrian was fighting, Owen. One could only remember in Whose keeping he was, and that all must be well, in reality. But all one’s faith was needed — it must be so, with poor human nature. The soul goes through dark waters, Owen, as you are finding now.”
The protest which Owen almost automatically registered within himself at this interpolated reference to the despair which he could not feel, was necessarily a silent one.
“Valeria has been the brightest, the most lighthearted, of all my children. She is naturally gifted with high spirits, and she and I have made innocent fun together, have shared the humourous view of life, a thousand times. Have I allowed that gaiety of hers to turn to flippancy — that mirthful spirit to cloak a lack of principle? I ask myself again and again wherein I have erred, for I cannot hold myself blameless, Owen. I have thought over my motherless children, I have prayed, and yet it has come to this — it has come to this!”‘
The Canon’s head dropped back into his hands once more, and Quentillian felt as though this despairing round of anger, self-blame, self-pity, and genuine misery, might go on forever.
He glanced at the clock. The dinner-gong having failed of its appeal, it appeared as though nothing need ever interrupt them again.
“I will give him five minutes more, and then I shall stand up,” Quentillian decided.
The Canon lifted a haggard face.
“Perhaps I had set my heart overmuch upon your marriage with my child, Owen. It may be so — it may be so. I may have forgotten that we poor mortals cannot, after all, see very far — that all plannings and schemings are very vain, seen by the light of Immortal Wisdom. If so, I am receiving my punishment now.”
The Canon groaned again.
“I am at a loss how to act. I can decide nothing. I must see Valeria, but how can I do so until I can command myself?”
Even as he asked the question, the veins stood out upon the Canon’s forehead, his nostrils quivered and his face became suffused.
“Three minutes more,” Quentillian reflected.
“Owen, one thing I must ask. Has she asked your pardon?”
“Yes, but indeed I don’t think—”
“No, Owen, no.” The Canon raised his hand in instant protest. “Each generous plea from you, stabs me afresh. I ask myself if my unhappy child even knows what she has lost. I thought I knew Valeria through and through — that nothing in her nature was hidden from me, from her father. I have been strangely mistaken, indeed.”
(“Another half minute.”)
“Am I harsh with her, am I harsh to my motherless girl? God knows that I was angry when I met her this evening, distraught-looking, crouching before me like a shamed and terrified creature. I cannot even now fully understand what has occurred, but her own admission was that, engaged to you, she believed herself to love another man — that she had allowed him to make love to her.”
Owen stood up resolutely.
“Aye, Owen, I do not wonder at it, if you seek the relief of movement. It is more natural so. I, too, in my day, have paced this room.”
Quentillian, however, had no desire to pace the room except for the very few steps that would put him outside it.
He debated in vain within himself the most tactful method of making this clear to Canon Morchard.
“I suppose I have been blind. This blow has come upon me with fearful suddenness — I suspected nothing — nothing. How could I—”
The door opened.
Quentillian looked round thankfully at Lucilla. She did not go up to her father, but spoke quietly from the door.
“Father, don’t you think Owen should come to dinner?”
A quick frown drew the Canon’s always formidable brows together.
“Since when do my children interrupt me in my own room, at my work, Lucilla?” he enquired.
Her face did not change, but she looked at Quentillian.
“Thank you,” he said quickly. “I will come.”
The Canon rose. His hand went once more to the resting-place now rapidly becoming habitual to it — Quentillian’s shoulder.
“Do not let my foolish child impose her trivial urgencies upon you.”
The Canon’s other hand went out towards his daughter.
“Did I speak over-sharply, my daughter? Perhaps Mary was nearer my mood than Martha, just now — Martha, careful and troubled over many things. Go, then, children. Lucilla, you will come to me later. Until then, I do not wish to be disturbed again.”
With a heavy sigh, the Canon turned again to his writing-table.
Owen and Lucilla went out.
“He is terribly upset. Could he not be persuaded to come to dinner?”
“No, I knew he wouldn’t want that. But I shall take in a tray when I go to him later. Sometimes, if he’s talking, he eats without thinking about it. I was counting on that — and besides, he would have disliked my suggesting that he should come in to dinner as usual.’’
Lucilla’s voice and her face alike were entirely guiltless of irony.
Quentillian followed he
r into the dining-room:
“The others have finished,” Lucilla said. “Would you rather I stayed, or that I went?”
“Stay, please.”
She sat down opposite to him at once.
“I wish your father were less angry with poor Val, although perhaps it is not my place to say so. But in his — his generous sympathy for me, I am afraid he has rather lost sight of what she must have been suffering.”
“I don’t think suffering, in my father’s eyes, would ever condone what he considers wrong-doing.”
The comment seemed to Owen to be rather an illuminating one.
“I suppose not. It may surprise you to hear that I do not, personally, consider that Canon Morchard is entitled either to condemn or condone whatever Valeria may have done.”
“I quite agree with you.”
Quentillian was less gratified than astonished at the assertion.
“Val herself would hardly agree to that.”
“No.”
“Well, but don’t you see, Lucilla, how difficult that’s going to make things? To my mind, the only natural proceeding is for Valeria and George Cuscaden to marry and go to Canada.”
Quentillian paused almost without meaning to, on a pronouncement that would certainly have met with drastic and emphatic interruption from Canon Morchard.
Lucilla, however, received it unmoved.
“Don’t you think so?” said Quentillian, slightly disappointed.
“Yes.”
“But will Valeria do it? Won’t her strange ideas of filial duty interfere? I am absolutely convinced that one of the principal reasons for her ever becoming engaged to me, was her wish to please her father.”
“I don’t think it was altogether that, Owen. But you did ask her to marry you at a time when she was just beginning to realize that the sort of life she led before the war wasn’t going to be enough for her.”
“Need it have taken a European war to make her see that?”
The smile that Lucilla turned upon his petulance was disarming.
“Don’t be so cross, Owen.”
She might have been talking to a little boy.
“I think,” said Quentillian with dignity, “that perhaps you forget it was only a few hours ago that I learnt how completely cheated and — fooled, I have been.”
He could not avoid a recollection that the Canon would not have needed such a reminder.
“Indeed, I don’t forget at all,” said Lucilla earnestly. “It must be very vexing for you, but — Owen, do forgive me for saying that I can’t really feel as if you minded dreadfully. You’re much too understanding, really, not to know that poor Val didn’t wilfully cheat you, any more than she cheated herself. And I think you, too, perhaps, in another way, were beginning to feel that you’d made a mistake in promising to marry one another.”
Lucilla, Quentillian realized half ruefully and half with amusement, had beaten him at his own game. Her unvarnished appraisement of the situation brought to it no more and no less than the facts warranted.
His answering gaze was as straight as her own.
“You’re right,” he said abruptly.
She held out her hand with a laden plate in it.
“Pudding?” she enquired, prosaically.
“Thanks.”
He made an excellent dinner.
“But what will happen to us now, Lucilla?”
“Well, George Cuscaden will be here again, and that’ll make Val feel better. And you’ll help, won’t you?”
“Certainly.”
And, on the strange assurance, they separated.
It was much later that Owen, from his own room, heard the door of the study immediately below him, open once more, and then shut.
Barely audible, but still unmistakable, he heard a steady stream of sound, rising and falling, easily to be identified as the Canon’s voice.
“Good God, what more can he have to say about it?” reflected Quentillian. He was destined to ask himself the question again, for the sounds, punctuated by the briefest of pauses, doubtless consecrated to the delivery of laconic replies from Lucilla, continued far into the small hours of the morning.
Finally, after Quentillian had fallen asleep, he was roused by a gentle, reiterated knocking at the door.
Only too well aware whose hand was responsible for those considerately modified taps, he rose and went to open the door, omitting the usual invitation to enter.
As he expected, the Canon, unutterably pale and weary-looking, stood without.
“Dear fellow, I knew that I should find you awake. Owen, I could not but come to tell you that all is well with me now. I have forgiven, even as I myself hope — and need — to be forgiven. I will see Valeria tomorrow, and tell her that she has my full and free pardon. Together we will consider what is the best thing that we can make of this most unhappy business.”
“And Cuscaden, sir?”
Quentillian intended to suggest the inclusion of Captain Cuscaden in the proposed conference, which might reasonably be supposed to concern him closely, but the Canon misunderstood the elliptical reference.
“Aye, Owen, I have no bitterness left in my heart, even for him. “Unto seventy times seven.” Those words have been ringing in my ears until I could almost bring myself to believe that I heard them uttered aloud. I need not ask if all is well with you, dear boy? Your self-command and generosity have shamed me all along.”
The absolute sincerity of the utterance caused Quentillian, with considerably more reason than the Canon, to feel ashamed in his turn.
“I am very far from being what you think me, sir,” he said, earnestly, and with complete truth. “I am afraid you are very tired.”
The Canon, indeed, looked utterly exhausted.
“If so, it is in my Master’s service,” said Canon Morchard gently. “And you remember, Owen— ‘there remaineth a rest.’ May it be mine, and yours, too — all in His own good time! Goodnight to you, my dear.”
For the first time since Owen’s childish days, the Canon placed his hand upon his head and murmured a word of blessing.
Then, with a smile as wistful as it was tender, he turned and went away upstairs.
VIII
The following day was one of singular discomfort, and of private interviews that were held to be of the greatest necessity, in spite of the fact that the participants always emerged from them in worse plight than they went in.
The Canon saw Valeria in his study, and she came out crying.
Valeria sought Flora, and both wept.
Quentillian deliberately demanded an interview from Captain Cuscaden, but was baffled in his design of a rational discussion of the three-cornered situation by Cuscaden’s honest bewilderment at the mere suggestion of disinterested counsel.
It seemed, indeed, that Captain Cuscaden would have understood Owen better, and certainly have thought more highly of him, had the traditional horse-whip, abhorred of all Owen’s most deeply-rooted prejudices, held a place in their conversation, at least as threat, if not as actual fact.
Failing the horsewhip, Cuscaden was inclined to follow in the wake of the Canon and attribute to Valeria’s discarded fiancé a spirit of generous heroism that was even less to Quentillian’s liking.
“Captain Cuscaden takes primitive views,” Quentillian observed to Lucilla, whom alone he suspected of summing up the whole situation very much at its true value.
“Yes, that will suit Val very well.”
“You think she takes primitive views, too?”
“Yes, don’t you?”
Owen realized that, although he had never thought Valeria subtle, he had at least supposed her to be capable of appreciating his own subtlety. But subtleties had not, apparently, really weighed with Val at all.
The sight of her tear-mottled face annoyed Owen’s aesthetic sense so much, and he felt so sincerely ashamed of his annoyance, that it constrained him to absent himself from the house all the afternoon. He would gladly have left St. Gwenllia
n altogether and felt sure that the Canon expected nothing less of him, but Flora brought him a piteous little message from Val to beg that he would remain until “something was settled.”
In the forlorn hope that this had been achieved, Quentillian returned.
An eager grasp met him almost upon the threshold.
“Owen, dear lad! Where have you been? I have been uneasy — most uneasy, at your prolonged absence.”
“I’m very sorry, sir.”
“Nay, so long as all is well with you! I should have had more faith.”
The Canon smiled gravely, and relief was latent in the smile. Quentillian suddenly realized that Canon Morchard had not improbably known the sub-conscious fear of his guest and protégé having sought some drastic means of ending an existence in the course of which he had been played so ill a turn.
His sense of his own inadequacy increased every moment.
“May I know how things stand?” he enquired abruptly.
“May you? Who has a better right than yourself, dear Owen? Come you out with me, and let us have a few words together.”
Owen followed his host.
“It has been a trying day — a sad and trying one. But I need not tell you that — you, whose grief is so much greater than mine own, even. Though you, at least, Owen, have nothing to reproach yourself with, whereas I am responsible for the weakness in my poor child which has led to this unhappy state of affairs. But at least she is fully sensible of error — she knows what she has done.”
It would be strange indeed if she did not, Owen reflected, in the universal bouleversement that had characterized Valeria’s surroundings ever since her sudden departure from the conventions.
“To my surprise, Lucilla, upon whose judgment I place a certain reliance, although it may sound somewhat odd to hear of a father seeking counsel of his child — Lucilla advocates my sanctioning her sister’s marriage. My first instinct was of course to cut her short at the mention of anything so premature — so-so lacking in all taste or feeling. But — I hardly know”
“There is nothing against Captain Cuscaden, is there?”
Quentillian made the observation in the simple hope of expediting the Canon’s decision, but he immediately perceived that it led him open once more to the imputation of high-minded generosity.
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