She bestowed upon Lonergan a smile that held all the conscious grace in the world.
“I’m really rather waiting to ring up a London number but one hasn’t got the courage to retire to that arctic spot, don’t you know what I mean. Did you get through to Ireland?”
“I did, thank you.”
He looked round.
“I suppose they haven’t all gone to bed? “
“No, no. Val is in the little breakfast-room, where I’m sure she’s waiting for you. Poor darling Val. She’s looking quite shattered to-night and I hate leaving her in the midst of all this agitation, but alas, duty calls.”
Lonergan hated her.
“I’ll go in to her,” he said curtly.
“Do, my dear. Too wretched for you both. She poured out the whole thing to me, of course—we’ve always been rather specially devoted to one another in spite of being in-laws, which I always think is such an odious expression. I just wanted to tell you that I’ll do everything I can to calm down Reggie, poor old pet, and make the family behave itself. I hear you’re off at once?”
“I’ve forty-eight hours’ leave before I go,” he answered with cold, deliberate significance.
Lady Rockingham seemed wholly unperturbed.
“Too nerve-racking, all these comings and goings,” she murmured. “Still, things settle themselves, one always feels, and I did so want you to know that Valentine will have me behind her, poor lamb, whatever happens. I always say I’m the most broad-minded woman of my acquaintance.”
Lonergan turned on her a furious look.
“I’d like to know, if I may, in what way it’s become necessary for you to be broad-minded where Valentine is concerned. Would it be because she’s promised to marry me?”
“My dear, she can promise to marry the crossing-sweeper if she likes. She’s quite old enough to know her own mind, as I’ve told her. But, since we’re talking so frankly, we do—all of us I mean—feel that it will be a thousand pities if she rushes just now into any rather irrevocable affair like marriage, don’t you know what I mean. One saw so much of that in the last war.”
“Just what is the insuperable objection to Valentine’s marrying me if she does me that honour? My nationality, or my religion, or my profession, or the class to which—I’m proud to say—I belong?”
Lady Rockingham got up from her seat, still smiling.
“I always think this sort of discussion is so embarrassing, don’t you? Personally, I detest the word class but then I’m democratic. Practically a socialist. One only feels that poor darling Val, out of her setting, Devon and Coombe, and the family and all that—would be too utterly lost and wretched, don’t you know what I mean. I mean, she’s not really adaptable, is she—even if she was a younger woman. One’s only thinking of her happiness, which I’m quite sure is all you’re thinking of either.”
She smiled at him again.
“Do forgive me. I must now wrestle with a trunk call. So impossible, nowadays. They always tell one the junctions are engaged, whatever that may mean, don’t they?”
Lonergan gave her a long, level look of anger and dislike.
“You’re right about one thing—which is as well, since you’re wrong about everything else on earth. I want nothing but Valentine’s happiness and I’ve the arrogance to be perfectly convinced that she’ll find it with me, and that she’s completely and entirely missed it with you and all the rest of her relations, God help her! It’s well she’s the courage to break away from the whole lot of you, and I’m going to see to it that she does so, the very first minute it can be done.”
He walked into the breakfast-room and shut the door.
“Val! I’ve been almost out of my mind—not able to get next or near you all day. Forgive me, love. Did Jess meet you this afternoon?”
“Yes. I got all your messages.”
She looked exhausted and distraught.
“I knew you’d understand how it was. There was everything in the world to do, and I’m not through yet. I’ve to go out again in an hour. Oh, God, Valentine, I’m not a free agent any more. I’m caught up in this machinery of war and now that I’ve found you, I can’t stay with you.”
He saw the wild look of pain in her eyes and it increased his sense of frenzied helplessness.
“When must you go, Rory?”
“My leave is up at nine o’clock on Friday morning.”
“I mayn’t even know where they’re sending you, may I?”
“I don’t actually know myself. But it doesn’t follow we shall sail immediately, sweetheart. We may be kept hanging about for weeks at the port of embarkation. Or, of course, we may sail directly.”
“I can’t bear it,” said Valentine, and she hid her face in her hands.
“What’ll we do?” he asked desperately. “I’ve a special licence, Val, that’ll be available to-morrow. We could be married before the Registrar immediately and have the next two days together. You might even join me for a while after that, if we’re not to be sent off at once. God knows I never meant to rush you like this, though.”
He knew, from her immobility, that he was hurting her, but the bitter anger and dismay that Venetia Rockingham’s insinuations had roused in him drove him on.
“It’s a mad thing, to have to take the decision of a lifetime in five minutes. It’s asking you to go against all your family, and your tradition and theirs. It’s asking you to take on something more or less blind, as things are now. How can I ask you to do that?”
“Rory——” she said entreatingly.
He went on recklessly, disregarding alike her suffering and his own.
“Dearest, dearest love—God knows I adore you, but the risk of it is so immense. I’ve been here, in your house, I’ve seen something of your life, of the people it’s linked up with—and I’ve nothing, nothing in common with any of it. Supposing I get through the war and come back to you—what’ll happen to us? What would we do? I could never live this kind of life, and what do you know of my kind? You’d be bewildered by my friends—riffraff of the artist world, most of them—and my good, simple, middle-class Irish relations. And there’s Arlette. I’m out of my mind about Arlette, now this minute. I couldn’t get her on the telephone just now and when I do, what can I say? That I’m leaving her in a place where she obviously isn’t happy, and that even if I come back after the war, I won’t be having her to live with me in Paris the way she thinks I will.”
“Arlette could come here,” Valentine said in a very low voice.
“Ah, you don’t understand. That isn’t what would ever make her happy. She’s used to an artist’s life—the kind that Laurence and I led. Freedom, and every sort of mad contact—a whole lot of drinking even—and conversation that really means something. Not the chitter-chatter about who So-and-so was before she married somebody’s first cousin from the next county. … Forgive me, Val!”
“Go on,” she said.
“Why do you say ‘Go on’ when it’s clear that every word I say is nearly killing you?”
The anger in his own voice horrified Lonergan as he heard it, even though it was not directed against her, and he strove to control it.
“You see, darling, I’m terrified—plain terrified—at the thought that we’d do this thing in a desperate hurry—as we must, if we’re to do it at all—and then not know how to make a success of it afterwards—if there’s to be any afterwards. I’m afraid of myself. Life is too complex for people of our age—there are too many adjustments to make. If we’d come together as we ought to have done, when we loved one another in youth, we’d have made a go of it. But we’ve had to make our lives separately. You belong to Coombe, and to these people—who all think you’d be ruining yourself by marrying an Irishman like me—someone who just draws pictures. You’ve got your own responsibilities, that you take so seriously.”
“Jess is the only responsibility that really counts. I could leave Coombe.”
She looked at him with the extreme gravity of a g
entle and sensitive child, seeking a formula in which to express her goodwill.
“I’d thought—but I see that it isn’t any use—that perhaps, if it was only ourselves—and Jess and Arlette sometimes—you’d live at Coombe, Rory. You wouldn’t, would you?”
“Ah, how can I answer that? You break my heart—you’re so gentle, so generous. But this place—it’s the background of almost all your life—it holds all your memories. But what about mine? What about Rory Lonergan? If I lived here I’d be betraying myself, as a person. You don’t understand” —he used the phrase that he had used before— “I’d continually need to get away from this way of living. It’s all right for you and Coombe, I know, but it all means nothing, and less than nothing, to me. I couldn’t stand these people. I’d miss my own raffish friends—all the goings-on that I’ve taken for granted—getting drunk— I’d lose my own soul. Oh, God, I’ll never be able to make you see what I mean.”
“I do see. You say that I don’t understand, but I do.”
She pushed back the silvery wave of hair from her forehead, still looking at him earnestly.
“Val—I’m out of my mind, going on like this. Dear God, what will we do? I love you so, and we’re not free—we’re being forced apart like this—we can’t even take time to make a decision as important as this one.”
Valentine drew his head to rest against her breast.
“Do you want not to marry me, Rory? For me to become your mistress?”
“Ah, no, not that, with you. I’d never want that.”
“I’m glad.”
Presently he said:
“Forgive me for what I’ve put you through, Val—you must forgive me. Sometimes I get these panics and I can’t manage them. Laurence was the only person who could help me—she had great instinctive wisdom. But I hurt her many times, God forgive me, and now I’ve hurt you.”
“It’s all right, Rory.”
“It is not,” he answered sadly.
“You told me once that everything had to be made clear between us. You said that our relationship was far too important for anything else to be possible. It was quite true. The things that you’ve said to-night had to be faced by us both, hadn’t they?”
“They had, but not in the wild, crack-pot state I’m in now. It’s been a shattering day, and finding that I couldn’t get the child on the telephone to-night just about finished it. To-morrow I’ll have sense, Val.”
He rose to his feet and looked down at her, appalled by the shadowed pallor of her face and the dark stains beneath her eyes.
“If we had time—if only we had time!” he repeated helplessly.
As though in ironic comment, the clock outside chimed the hour.
“I’ll have to go. It’ll be to-morrow when I get back.”
He took her in his arms and kissed the sorrowful line of her mouth.
“Will it be our wedding day, darling—darling?”
Valentine clung to him without speaking a word for a long moment.
Then she said:
“I don’t know, Rory. I love you.”
“And I love you,” he echoed passionately.
XIX
She heard the heavy, inner doors swing open and come together again, and then a more distant vibration that was the front door shutting behind Lonergan.
Valentine lay back in her chair, motionless. She was too much tired to move.
The frustrations and disappointments of the day, the news that Lonergan was to be sent overseas and, above all, his exposition of such deeply-rooted complexities of mind and temperament—so deeply rooted that they could temporarily take possession of his judgment and impinge upon his love—had left her desolate and exhausted.
She felt herself to be at last defeated, wholly and finally, in the long, inner conflict between her own romantic spirit and the reality of human relations.
Valentine had no falsely cynical comments to make upon this sense of disillusionment.
She knew still that life might have been otherwise. But defeat was natural to her. She felt it to be inevitable and she had no impulse of blame either towards herself or Lonergan, nor even towards those who had interfered in their affairs.
It was nothing outside himself that had caused her lover to speak the words that kept on repeating themselves over and over again in her mind.
“I’ve seen something of your life … I’ve nothing, nothing in common with any of it. … And there’s Arlette … she’s used to an artist’s life—the kind that Laurence and I led. …”
It came back to Laurence in the end, always. He had even said:
“I get these panics … Laurence was the only person who could help me. …”
His mad solicitude for Arlette, for whom he had had so little feeling throughout her childhood, was in reality an extension of his love for Arlette’s mother.
Not seeking it, but unable to escape it, Valentine was obsessed by the remembrance of Lonergan’s profound emotion when he had first told her about Laurence.
“Her forehead was lovely—I honestly can only think of one word that could ever describe the breadth and purity of it—and that’s luminous. She had that quality, and it was all in that beautiful, wide brow.”
And he’d said:
“We were crazy about one another. I’d decided long ago I wasn’t ever going to marry. But I had to ask Laurence to marry me.”
Laurence hadn’t married him. She’d stood in the little tonnelle in the garden of the tall, pink house at Saumur, with the tears running down her face, and she’d offered to come and live with him in Paris.
“That was the thing about Laurence—she understood and accepted things that were quite outside her own tradition.”
Lonergan’s words, the deep, musical intonations that his voice had given to them, were as living to her as though she were listening as she had listened on the night of his arrival at Coombe. Indeed, they had returned to her many times since then, always with that strange, agonizing pang made of jealousy, and of a deliberate acceptance of the inalienable truth.
He and she had found one another too soon, and too late.
In the years between their two encounters lay their separate lives.
Lonergan had met Laurence. He had loved her as he had not loved before or since, any of the women who had roused his easy susceptibilities. There would always remain in him the profound desire to keep something of this one true and passionate union alive, in his preoccupation with Laurence’s child.
Perhaps I could have borne that—I once thought that I could—Valentine told herself—but he won’t share it with me. I can’t make him feel that I accept it. He said: I’ll never be able to make you see what I mean. … You don’t understand. …
He’d said that more than once.
We ought to have spent our lives together, he and I, thought Valentine. I’d have been the person I was meant to be, then, and we should have felt safe with one another.
She heard a door slam and there was the indefinable sound that warned her of someone approaching.
Valentine put out her hand and turned off the light.
“Val, my dear! Where are you?”
It was Venetia Rockingham’s voice.
Valentine made no movement and no reply, and she heard her sister-in-law, after pausing for a moment, go upstairs.
Next day Venetia would have left Coombe. Soon they would all have gone—the girls as well.
Valentine rose wearily. She had felt herself too tired to move, but the physical effort automatically became possible at the remembrance of Primrose and Jessica.
She would go upstairs and say good-night to Jess, even though she might not intrude upon her other and most-loved child.
When she came downstairs again, to extinguish the lights and make certain that the door was unbolted for Lonergan’s return in the early morning, it was nearly midnight and Valentine was startled by the sound of the telephone bell.
There leapt instantly to her mind the wild hope that she m
ight hear Rory Lonergan’s voice, but it was a busy-sounding, impersonal tone that came through the receiver.
“I have a telegram for Colonel Lonergan. Will you take it?”
“I’ll take it,” said Valentine.
She drew towards her the little pad that swung against the wall and balanced it against the bracket on which stood the telephone. Her cold fingers found the blunt, small pencil that lay there in readiness. Her mind automatically registered, as it had done for years, a protest against the inconvenience of all these arrangements.
“Handed in at Kilronan at twenty-five minutes past four.”
Valentine’s pencil obediently wrote down: Kilronan 4.25. She waited while the male voice at the other end gave Lonergan’s name and address.
The message followed:
“Please come or send for me flying quite possible want terribly to see you please telephone first I implore you come to Babette qui rit please.
“That’s all. No signature. Shall I send a confirmation copy?”
“Yes, please.”
“What is the postal address?”
Valentine gave it, and hung up the receiver.
She stood in the cold, mechanically smoothing out the paper on which she had taken down Arlette’s message.
Babette qui rit.
Rory hadn’t told her about that pet-name, the familiar household joke that must have survived from Arlette’s baby days.
Poor, touching, frantic child, making use of it now to strengthen her appeal.
Valentine had no idea whether or not it would be possible for Lonergan to get to Ireland and back within the forty-eight hours of his leave. She supposed that probably it would.
Or he could send for Arlette if there was the least chance that the battalion might not be sailing at once.
She returned to the hall, moving slowly and stiffly as if the intense cold that gripped her was slowly freezing her body into rigidity. Her thoughts worked, with careful impersonality, over the mechanics of the situation.
Lonergan had missed Arlette at the telephone but he said that he had telegraphed to her in the morning.
That message must have reached her quickly enough, or she couldn’t have despatched her own telegram at twenty-five minutes past four.
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