‘Do say that you think it was an act of God.’
‘I may think so, and I do. But I object to other people telling me that they think so.’
‘We must ignore other people,’ said Alethea, ‘and anyhow we can do so for the next month.’
Indeed it was a lesson which she did well to begin to learn on her wedding day, for when they came home to Brokeyates, Alethea soon found that it was almost impossible for Nicholas to make a new acquaintance without detecting somewhere a tendency to insult or to oppose him. The ‘County’ called, and Alethea soon found herself manœuvring with all the finesse she possessed, so that she might receive her callers alone, without Nicholas being in the room. If he was there, something was always said to offend him. Later on, when the hunting began, he absolutely refused to go out, because he said the master had insulted him. Alethea could not get him to tell her any more about the supposed insult, but she too gave up hunting, as she would not go out without her husband. It was the same with politics. Both Nicholas and Alethea had dreamt of his some day going into the House of Commons, and with this in view, she wanted him to take his part in politics in the constituency. But he was far too sensitive for the give and take of public life: he was always ready to quarrel at Committee meetings, not being able to understand that it was possible to disagree round the table in the Committee room, and to forget the whole controversy outside it. He had great political theories, and he and Alethea enjoyed discussing them together, but he very soon retired in a huff from any position which would have made it possible to put these theories into practice.
This withdrawal into a life alone together at Brokeyates was what they both enjoyed. There they were supremely happy, for they were in love not only with each other, but with the place. They shared many tastes, caring for the country, for the farm, for gardening, for riding. They spent months of rapture making a rock garden. Rose catalogues filled their evenings for weeks. Nicholas personally managed his Home Farm, with the help of a bailiff and Alethea was as much interested in this as he was himself. Their lives were full of occupations, and they shared them all.
They did not always agree, but this gave zest to their intercourse. Alethea found her husband curiously different from herself in his relations with the people who lived in his cottages. He never made friends with them, and he really disliked his wife’s doing so. He looked upon his workmen as ‘hands’, thinking that in their aspect of human beings, they were no concern of his. In fact he went further, and considered it an impertinence on the part of an employer to take an interest in the private affairs of his men. When Alethea hurried off to visit a woman who had had a baby, or a child who had been scalded, or a man with pneumonia, Nicholas told her that such visits were ‘intrusions’ on her part. When she went further, and gave practical help to people who were in trouble, he most emphatically said that she ought to respect their natural pride, and not to force her ‘charity’ upon them.
‘We pay them well,’ he said. ‘They know what their wages are. We ought to respect their independence as we wish them to respect ours.’
‘But I don’t care whether they respect my independence or not,’ Alethea would say. ‘I want to like my neighbours and I want them to like me. I don’t care about independence.’
Such differences of opinion seemed trifles in their lives, and yet they did indicate a very fundamental unlikeness in their whole outlook. Alethea had grown up in a world where it seemed inherent in the very nature of things that many of her neighbours were not sufficiently well off, to face unaided any unexpected demand on their resources. For country neighbours of all classes, an illness is the glad opportunity for friendship, and Alethea was delighted, on such an occasion, to hasten off with her soup, her pudding, or her bunch of grapes. She felt no sense of patronage: the people she visited had no uneasy sense of inferiority. In the village, everyone was ready to help the other, and that Alethea was able to give larger help than the rest was accepted as part of the original scheme of life. It was the manner of a world in which they had all grown up, and which had lasted for centuries before them: none of them realized that it was a regime which was passing away.
On the other hand, Nicholas had come from a country where such an attitude would have appeared intolerable. He himself would never have accepted a kindness from anyone who was his superior in wealth, and in a new country wealth alone creates superiority. He considered that the man who did him a kindness had done him an injury; and nothing irked him more than to feel he was ‘under an obligation’ to anyone.
They often argued over these differing points of view, and laughed over their disagreements. Alethea told Nicholas that his pride was abnormal and he teased her for being still more proud than he was, she so much enjoyed the position of Lady Bountiful. And having thus played with the subject they each went their own way. Alethea really thought that her husband’s idiosyncrasies had their advantage. It meant that life at Brokeyates was a perpetual honeymoon. They lived entirely apart from other people.
Six months after their marriage, Colonel Bracton died, and this was a very real grief to them both. Alethea adored her grandfather, who had always been a delightful companion to her, in spite of the two generations which might have divided them, if it had not been for the bridge of the old man’s comprehension. And the Colonel was the only man whom Nicholas had never suspected of trying to patronize him. His was a friendship which could give and take on equal terms. During those first months, he had been at Brokeyates almost as much as in his own house. He entered into everything that was done or planned by Nicholas and Alethea. He was full of ideas, and could give very shrewd advice without being offended if it was not taken. He was indeed an ideal person with whom to talk things over, and his was a great loss, greater than they could know at the time.
But the shared sorrow brought them still nearer together. Alethea cried terribly; and Nicholas, while he tried to comfort her, did not disguise that he too needed comfort from her. Their mutual understanding went deeper than before.
And now their companionship entered upon a new phase. Alethea was going to have a baby, and for some months she felt desperately ill. She found it impossible to go on with the gardening and other outdoor occupations which she and Nicholas had shared; and she had to rest a great deal, returning to the embroidery which had taken so much of her time when she lived with her grandfather. This led them to new interests. Nicholas sat by her sofa and read aloud, and they found that books were far more interesting than they had known. It was a new discovery. Neither of them had lived among readers. Colonel Bracton only read Country Life, of which he had a complete set of bound volumes; and Nicholas at home had learnt from his mother that sensible people had something better to do than to swank about reading books. In fact there had been none at all in the Melbourne house, while at Brokeyates there was of course the usual country-house library, giving dignity to the walls, and consisting of a large number of books which were respected but not disturbed.
So nearly everything they read was new to them both, and they enjoyed together many books which most people would have read long ago. By a curious chance, they came upon Richard Feverel, and here they made acquaintance with the lady who read Blair’s Grave over and over again to her unborn child, so that by the time he was four, he ‘reelly was the piousest infant—he was like a little curate. His eyes was up. He talked so solemn.’
‘My dear! We must be careful. What do we want him to be like?’
‘Don Quixote I think,’ said Nicholas, who had just been revelling in the book for the first time.
‘I should like Philip Sidney,’ said Alethea, ‘but I have never read a life of him which gave the least idea of what he really was.’
‘How can you tell what he was like then?’
‘He is one of those people who are so immortal that they can’t be killed by what is written about them.’
‘Cynic that you are! What would the authors of the world say if they heard you? Who else do you know, in spite
of the writers?’
‘Moses. There’s really very little about him in the Bible, and yet I know him too well for all the sermons in the world to persuade me that he was a prig.’
‘Then you won’t read sermons over the baby?’
‘Please not,’ said Althea, and they read none; but every book became more interesting when it evoked discussions as to whether this or that would shock the baby’.
And when she came; she created fresh discussions for she turned out to be a girl, so neither Philip Sidney nor Don Quixote could be her model. Alethea vowed that she saw traces of resemblance to the frightful Dulcinea.
At last they agreed to call her Portia, as from the first, she showed a determination to argue every point, and the Merchant of Venice had certainly been read over her at least once.
Alethea was quickly well, and life at Brokeyates became fuller and happier than ever. That summer was a very joyful time.
When Portia was about six months old, Nicholas received one morning a troublesome letter from Australia. Although he liked to feel that he had cut himself altogether away from life in Melbourne yet he was still a partner in his mother’s business. She had seen to it that this fact should not interfere with her own powers as managing director, and hitherto his partnership had meant practically nothing. Now a new development was being planned, and it was essential that both partners should be on the spot for a short time. Nicholas was annoyed. He wanted nothing less than to go to Australia.
Alethea, on the other hand, was delighted when she heard the news.
‘O Nicholas, how lovely!’ she said. ‘I have always longed to go to Australia, and do let us make a real journey round the world while we are about it. I have never been anywhere. This is a splendid opportunity.’
‘I couldn’t think of taking you,’ Nicholas replied.
‘Not take me? But you can’t go without me.’
‘I’m afraid I must. Melbourne is not the place for you. You would hate Australia. And then, you can’t leave Portia for so long.’
‘Don’t say that. She will miss me more when she is older, but now nurse is far better with her than I am.’
‘You can’t possibly leave your child—our child—to the tender mercies of servants while you go careering round the world.’
His tone was cold and crushing.
Alethea had tears in her eyes.
‘Nicholas, you will be away six months. I can’t be without you for so long.’
He melted towards her then, but he did not give in. He held her in his arms.
‘Darling, I shall hate it much, much more than you do,’ he said, with a dark fervour. ‘ It will mean going back, though only for a few weeks, to what I hoped I had left behind for ever. It will be misery to me.’
‘Take me with you all the more,’ she begged. ‘If you are going to be unhappy, I must be there.’
‘I should be more unhappy if you were.’
‘But you don’t know. You have forgotten that we can bear anything together, and nothing apart. Take me Nicholas, take me.’
‘It’s not only what we want,’ he answered. ‘ Now we have got a child, we have to think of that first always. And then too, you might be going to have another, and you must remember how ill you were. If you were travelling in a country like Australia, you might permanently ruin the health of any child you were going to have.’
‘Why should I? A sea voyage is the most restful thing in the world, and in Melbourne, I need do nothing that I don’t want to do.’
‘Melbourne is … a very bad place for children,’ he said in decided tones.
‘But you yourself were a child there,’ she answered.
‘So I know what I am talking about,’ was his reply.
‘Please don’t leave me behind,’ she begged once more.
‘I must,’ he said; and he did.
Chapter Eight
ALETHEA’S was a generous spirit, and, as Mrs. Fanshawe had long ago perceived, Colonel Bracton had taught her that in life one does not always get one’s own way, though one does not mend matters by fretting over this truth. After her one passionate pleading, she did not therefore again refer to her desire to go with Nicholas to Australia. She saw that his mind was made up, and she did not wish to spoil their last days together by constant arguments. She made up her mind that they would make the most of every hour left to them, and although this made it even harder for Nicholas to leave her behind, he never flinched in his determination to do so.
‘We won’t make a tragedy of it,’ he said. ‘Think of soldiers and sailors. They have to leave their wives for much longer than this.’
‘Poor things. I can’t bear to think of them,’ she said. ‘Let us hope they don’t love each other so much as we do.’
‘Nobody can,’ he said wildly, and almost with fury in his voice.
They said good-bye at the door of Brokeyates, and they both appeared to be quite gay over it. Alethea was so busy trying to make Portia wave her hand as the motor drove away, that her eyes were on the child, and not on her husband.
Nicholas was glad, for he knew that she was crying.
‘I wish she didn’t mind so much,’ he said to himself, ‘and I wish I didn’t. It only means six months out of our lives, and I know I was right not to take her. Still I almost wish that I had refused to go at all. I daresay they could have done without me.’
A few weeks later Alethea found that she was going to have another child, and she knew that Nicholas would consider himself completely justified in having left her behind. For her own part, she was appalled at the prospect of these months without him, for she could not forget how ill she had been before Portia was born. She felt unutterably lonely, but she set her teeth and determined to be well, since it was for that reason that she had been left behind. And, much to her surprise, she found that she was well, in spite of her fears.
It was hard to fill up her time now that she was cut off from most of her activities. She and Nicholas had fallen out of the social life of the county, and she did not like to ask the old friends whom she had neglected since her marriage, to come and amuse her now. So she was thrown back upon herself. And then she found a real occupation.
The week before Nicholas left, he had engaged a new estate carpenter, who lived in a little house in the Park. Alethea discovered that these people had a little boy who was deformed and unable to walk. The mother was a hard-working woman, kind and clean, but the thought of amusing her child never came into her mind. She attended to his physical wants, and left him to lie for hours on a little bed, staring out of the window at the Park. Alethea made the child her charge. She walked to see him every afternoon, and, instead of the rather classical books which she and Nicholas had read before Portia was born, she now read nothing but fairy stories. The small boy, hump-backed, and with his head sunk deep between his shoulders, was very like some goblin of Hans Andersen’s, and Alethea felt as she read, that she was living in the books. She enjoyed them as much as the child did.
Her letters to Nicholas were full of fairyland. She told him that their baby would certainly be a Hans Andersen child, really magic, after her months among elves and marsh maidens and fairy godmothers. It was a surprise to find for how many hours of her day she was able to live in this world of the imagination. The stories filled her mind not only while she was actually reading them, but as she walked to and fro in the park; and very often, when she was sitting alone in the library after dinner, she would take down the book, ostensibly to decide on a story for the next day, but actually to find herself dipping into page after page for an hour or more.
‘There’s no doubt’, she said in one of her letters to Nicholas, ‘that if the baby is a boy, he will have to be called Hans. I should love that for him, and I have never heard of it as an English boy’s name.’
Hans was born about two months after Nicholas came home. From the first, he was an elfin baby, very tiny, with haunted eyes. They were never those pools of empty blue water with which most bab
ies stare at the world; they were unchildlike, and seemed to hold memories.
‘His eyes are like yours,’ Alethea told Nicholas the first time she saw her son. ‘You are both reincarnations, looking as though you could remember some tragic former life. Can you?’
‘I can, but I’m sure he can’t,’ said Nicholas. ‘The former life which I remember, was not in another age but in another continent.’
‘Nurse, have you ever seen so young a baby with such a wonderful expression in his eyes?’ Alethea asked.
Nurse said that she never had. She felt uneasy about the baby, although she did not say so to his mother. He was not an ordinary child, and she felt sure that there was something wrong with him.
Both Nicholas and Alethea were, however, immensely proud of their son; so much so that Portia became wildly jealous. She stamped her two little feet and clenched her fists, as she shrieked that they must ‘ Put the doll back in the toy cupboard. Don’t want it any more.’
She refused to obey her nurse, and to ‘love her little brother’.
It was not until after Hans had been given his fairy tale name that his parents had any suspicions that he was not like other children. He was now nearly six weeks old, and he had hardly grown at all since he was born. Yet he was not delicate. He took his food well, and he slept like other babies, but he remained as tiny as ever. Alethea became anxious.
‘Doctor, I am not satisfied about Hans,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he cannot be digesting his food properly. He seems to make no progress.’
The doctor gave an evasive answer, but he advised another opinion. He had known Alethea all her life, and he felt that he could not tell her that her child was a dwarf, though that was what he feared. It was better that a stranger should break the news.
The London specialist confirmed the worst fears of the country doctor, and Nicholas was told the truth.
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