“Old Tasburgh and I got Bentworth to speak to the Home Secretary, and I had this note from ‘the Squire’ last night. ‘All Walter would say was that he should treat the case strictly on its merits without reference to what he called your nephew’s status—what a word! I always said the fellow ought to have stayed Liberal.’”
“I wish he WOULD treat it on its merits!” cried Dinny; “then Hubert would be safe. I do hate that truckling to what they call Democracy! He’d give a cabman the benefit of the doubt.”
“It’s the reaction from the old times, Dinny, and gone too far, as reaction always does. When I was a boy there was still truth in the accusation of privilege. Now, it’s the other way on; station in life is a handicap before the Law. But nothing’s harder than to steer in the middle of the stream—you want to be fair, and you can’t.”
“I was wondering, Uncle, as I came along. What was the use of you and Hubert and Dad and Uncle Adrian, and tons of others doing their jobs faithfully—apart from bread and butter, I mean?”
“Ask your Aunt,” said Hilary.
“Aunt May, what IS the use?”
“I don’t know, Dinny. I was bred up to believe there was a use in it, so I go on believing. If you married and had a family, you probably wouldn’t ask the question.”
“I knew Aunt May would get out of answering. Now, Uncle?”
“Well, Dinny, I don’t know either. As she says, we do what we’re used to doing; that’s about it.”
“In his diary Hubert says that consideration for others is really consideration for ourselves. Is that true?”
“Rather a crude way of putting it. I should prefer to say that we’re all so interdependent that in order to look after oneself one’s got to look after others no less.”
“But is one worth looking after?”
“You mean: is life worth while at all?”
“Yes.”
“After five hundred thousand years (Adrian says a million at least) of human life, the population of the world is very considerably larger than it has ever been yet. Well, then! Considering all the miseries and struggles of mankind, would human life, self-conscious as it is, have persisted if it wasn’t worth while to be alive?”
“I suppose not,” mused Dinny; “I think in London one loses the sense of proportion.”
At this moment a maid came in.
“Mr. Cameron to see you, Sir.”
“Show him in, Lucy. He’ll help you to regain it, Dinny. A walking proof of the unquenchable love of life, had every malady under the sun, including black-water, been in three wars, two earthquakes, had all kinds of jobs in all parts of the world, is out of one now, and has heart disease.”
Mr. Cameron entered; a short spare man getting on for fifty, with bright Celtic grey eyes, dark grizzled hair, and a slightly hooked nose. One of his hands was bound up, as if he had sprained a thumb.
“Hallo, Cameron,” said Hilary, rising. “In the wars again?”
“Well, Vicar, where I live, the way some of those fellows treat horses is dreadful. I had a fight yesterday. Flogging a willing horse, overloaded, poor old feller—never can stand that.”
“I hope you gave him beans!”
Mr. Cameron’s eyes twinkled.
“Well, I tapped his claret, and sprained my thumb. But I called to tell you, Sir, that I’ve got a job on the Vestry. It’s not much, but it’ll keep me going.”
“Splendid! Look here, Cameron, I’m awfully sorry, but Mrs. Cherrell and I have to go to a Meeting now. Stay and have a cup of coffee and talk to my niece. Tell her about Brazil.”
Mr. Cameron looked at Dinny. He had a charming smile.
The next hour went quickly and did her good. Mr. Cameron had a fine flow. He gave her practically his life story, from boyhood in Australia, and enlistment at sixteen for the South African war, to his experiences since the Great War. Every kind of insect and germ had lodged in him in his time; he had handled horses, Chinamen, Kaffirs, and Brazilians, broken collar-bone and leg, been gassed and shell-shocked, but there was—he carefully explained—nothing wrong with him now but “a touch of this heart disease.” His face had a kind of inner light, and his speech betrayed no consciousness that he was out of the common. He was, at the moment, the best antidote Dinny could have taken, and she prolonged him to his limit. When he had gone she herself went away into the medley of the streets with a fresh eye. It was now half-past three, and she had two hours and a half still to put away. She walked towards Regent’s Park. Few leaves were left upon the trees, and there was a savour in the air from bonfires of them burning; through their bluish drift she passed, thinking of Mr. Cameron, and resisting melancholy. What a life to have lived! And what a zest at the end of it! From beside the Long Water in the last of the pale sunlight, she came out into Marylebone, and bethought herself that before she went to the Foreign Office she must go where she could titivate. She chose Harridge’s and went in. It was half-past four. The stalls were thronged; she wandered among them, bought a new powder-puff, had some tea, made herself tidy, and emerged. Still a good half-hour, and she walked again, though by now she was tired. At a quarter to six precisely she gave her card to a commissionaire at the Foreign Office, and was shown into a waiting-room. It was lacking in mirrors, and taking out her case she looked at herself in its little powder-flecked round of glass. She seemed plain to herself and wished that she didn’t; though, after all, she was not going to see ‘Walter’—only to sit in the background, and wait again. Always waiting!
“Miss Cherrell!”
There was Bobbie Ferrar in the doorway. He looked just as usual. But of course he didn’t care. Why should he?
He tapped his breast pocket. “I’ve got the preface. Shall we trot? And he proceeded to talk of the Chingford murder. Had she been following it? She had not. It was a clear case—completely! And he added, suddenly:
“The Bolivian won’t take the responsibility, Miss Cherrell.”
“Oh!”
“Never mind.” And his face broadened.
‘His teeth ARE real,’ thought Dinny, ‘I can see some gold filling.’
They reached the Home Office and went in. Up some wide stairs, down a corridor, into a large and empty room, with a fire at the end, their guide took them. Bobbie Ferrar drew a chair up to the table.
“‘The Graphic’ or this?” and he took from his side pocket a small volume.
“Both, please,” said Dinny, wanly. He placed them before her. ‘This’ was a little flat red edition of some War Poems.
“It’s a first,” said Bobbie Ferrar; “I picked it up after lunch.”
“Yes,” said Dinny, and sat down.
An inner door was opened, and a head put in.
“Mr. Ferrar, the Home Secretary will see you.”
Bobbie Ferrar turned on her a look, muttered between his teeth: “Cheer up!” and moved squarely away.
In that great waiting-room never in her life had she felt so alone, so glad to be alone, or so dreaded the end of loneliness. She opened the little volume and read:
“He eyed a neat framed notice there
Above the fireplace hung to show
Disabled heroes where to go
For arms and legs, with scale of price,
And words of dignified advice
How officers could get them free—
Elbow or shoulder, hip or knee.
Two arms, two legs, though all were lost,
They’d be restored him free of cost.
Then a girl guide looked in and said…”
The fire crackled suddenly and spat out a spark. Dinny saw it die on the hearthrug, with regret. She read more poems, but did not take them in, and, closing the little book, opened ‘The Graphic.’ Having turned its pages from end to end she could not have mentioned the subject of any single picture. The sinking feeling beneath her heart absorbed every object she looked upon. She wondered if it were worse to wait for an operation on oneself or on someone loved; and decided that the latter must be wor
se. Hours seemed to have passed; how long had he really been gone? Only half-past six! Pushing her chair back, she got up. On the walls were the effigies of Victorian statesmen, and she roamed from one to the other; but they might all have been the same statesman, with his whiskers at different stages of development. She went back to her seat, drew her chair close in to the table, rested her elbows on it, and her chin on her hands, drawing little comfort from that cramped posture. Thank Heaven! Hubert didn’t know his fate was being decided, and was not going through this awful waiting. She thought of Jean and Alan, and with all her heart hoped that they were ready for the worst. For with each minute the worst seemed more and more certain. A sort of numbness began creeping over her. He would never come back—never, never! And she hoped he wouldn’t, bringing the death-warrant. At last she laid her arms flat on the table, and rested her forehead on them. How long she had stayed in that curious torpor she knew not, before the sound of a throat being cleared roused her, and she started back.
Not Bobbie Ferrar, but a tall man with a reddish, clean-shaven face and silver hair brushed in a cockscomb off his forehead, was standing before the fire with his legs slightly apart and his hands under his coat tails; he was staring at her with very wide-opened light grey eyes, and his lips were just apart as if he were about to emit a remark. Dinny was too startled to rise, and she sat staring back at him.
“Miss Cherrell! Don’t get up.” He lifted a restraining hand from beneath a coat-tail. Dinny stayed seated—only too glad to, for she had begun to tremble violently.
“Ferrar tells me that you edited your brother’s diary?”
Dinny bowed her head. Take deep breaths!
“As printed, is it in its original condition?”
“Yes.”
“Exactly?”
“Yes. I haven’t altered or left out a thing.”
Staring at his face she could see nothing but the round brightness of the eyes and the slight superior prominence of the lower lip. It was almost like staring at God. She shivered at the queerness of the thought and her lips formed a little desperate smile.
“I have a question to ask you, Miss Cherrell.”
Dinny uttered a little sighing: “Yes.”
“How much of this diary was written since your brother came back?”
She stared; then the implication in the question stung her.
“None! Oh, none! It was all written out there at the time.” And she rose to her feet.
“May I ask how you know that?”
“My brother—” Only then did she realise that throughout she had nothing but Hubert’s word—“my brother told me so.”
“His word is gospel to you?”
She retained enough sense of humour not to ‘draw herself up,’ but her head tilted.
“Gospel. My brother is a soldier and—”
She stopped short, and, watching that superior lower lip, hated herself for using that clichй.
“No doubt, no doubt! But you realise, of course, the importance of the point?”
“There is the original—” stammered Dinny. Oh! Why hadn’t she brought it! “It shows clearly—I mean, it’s all messy and stained. You can see it at any time. Shall—?”
He again put out a restraining hand.
“Never mind that. Very devoted to your brother, Miss Cherrell?”
Dinny’s lips quivered.
“Absolutely. We all are.”
“He’s just married, I hear?”
“Yes, just married.”
“Your brother wounded in the war?”
“Yes. He had a bullet through his left leg.”
“Neither arm touched?”
Again that sting!
“No!” The little word came out like a shot fired. And they stood looking at each other half a minute—a minute; words of appeal, of resentment, incoherent words were surging to her lips, but she kept them closed; she put her hand over them. He nodded.
“Thank you, Miss Cherrell. Thank you.” His head went a little to one side; he turned, and rather as if carrying that head on a charger, walked to the inner door. When he had passed through, Dinny covered her face with her hands. What had she done? Antagonised him? She ran her hands down over her face, over her body, and stood with them clenched at her sides, staring at the door through which he had passed, quivering from head to foot. A minute passed. The door was opened again, and Bobbie Ferrar came in. She saw his teeth. He nodded, shut the door, and said:
“It’s all right.”
Dinny spun round to the window. Dark had fallen, and if it hadn’t, she couldn’t have seen. All right! All right! She dashed her knuckles across her eyes, turned round, and held out both hands, without seeing where to hold them.
They were not taken, but his voice said:
“I’m very happy.”
“I thought I’d spoiled it.”
She saw his eyes then, round as a puppy dog’s.
“If he hadn’t made up his mind already he wouldn’t have seen you, Miss Cherrell. He’s not as case-hardened as all that. As a matter of fact, he’d seen the Magistrate about it at lunch time—that helped a lot.”
‘Then I had all that agony for nothing,’ thought Dinny.
“Did he have to see the preface, Mr. Ferrar?”
“No, and just as well—it might have worked the other way. We really owe it to the Magistrate. But you made a good impression on him. He said you were transparent.”
“Oh!”
Bobbie Ferrar took the little red book from the table, looked at it lovingly, and placed it in his pocket. “Shall we go?”
In Whitehall Dinny took a breath so deep that the whole November dusk seemed to pass into her with the sensation of a long, and desperately wanted drink.
“A Post Office!” she said. “He couldn’t change his mind, could he?”
“I have his word. Your brother will be released to-night.”
“Oh! Mr. Ferrar!” Tears suddenly came out of her eyes. She turned away to hide them, and when she turned back to him, he was not there.
CHAPTER 37
When from that Post Office she had despatched telegrams to her father and Jean, and telephoned to Fleur, to Adrian and Hilary, she took a taxi to Mount Street, and opened the door of her Uncle’s study. Sir Lawrence, before the fire with a book he was not reading, looked up.
“What’s your news, Dinny?”
“Saved!”
“Thanks to you!”
“Bobbie Ferrar says, thanks to the Magistrate. I nearly wrecked it, Uncle.”
“Ring the bell!” Dinny rang.
“Blore, tell Lady Mont I want her.”
“Good news, Blore; Mr. Hubert’s free.”
“Thank you, Miss; I was laying six to four on it.”
“What can we do to relieve our feelings, Dinny?”
“I must go to Condaford, Uncle.”
“Not till after dinner. You shall go drunk. What about Hubert? Anybody going to meet him?”
“Uncle Adrian said I’d better not, and he would go. Hubert will make for the flat, of course, and wait for Jean.”
Sir Lawrence gave her a whimsical glance.
“Where will she be flying from?”
“Brussels.”
“So that was the centre of operations! The closing down of that enterprise gives me almost as much satisfaction, Dinny, as Hubert’s release. You can’t get away with that sort of thing, nowadays.”
“I think they might have,” said Dinny, for with the removal of the need for it, the idea of escape seemed to have become less fantastic. “Aunt Em! What a nice wrapper!”
“I was dressin’. Blore’s won four pounds. Dinny, kiss me. Give your Uncle one, too. You kiss very nicely—there’s body in it. If I drink champagne, I shall be ill tomorrow.”
“But need you, Auntie?”
“Yes. Dinny, promise me to kiss that young man.”
“Do you get a commission on kissing, Aunt Em?”
“Don’t tell me he wasn’t goin’ to c
ut Hubert out of prison, or something. The Rector said he flew in with a beard one day, and took a spirit level and two books on Portugal. They always go to Portugal. The Rector’ll be so relieved; he was gettin’ thin about it. So I think you ought to kiss him.”
“A kiss means nothing nowadays, Auntie. I nearly kissed Bobbie Ferrar; only he saw it coming.”
“Dinny can’t be bothered to do all this kissing,” said Sir Lawrence; “she’s got to sit to my miniature painter. The young man will be at Condaford tomorrow, Dinny.”
“Your Uncle’s got a bee, Dinny; collectin’ the Lady. There aren’t any, you know. It’s extinct. We’re all females now.”
By the only late evening train Dinny embarked for Condaford. They had plied her with wine at dinner, and she sat in sleepy elation, grateful for everything—the motion, and the moon-ridden darkness flying past the windows. Her exhilaration kept breaking out in smiles. Hubert free! Condaford safe! Her father and mother at ease once more! Jean happy! Alan no longer threatened with disgrace! Her fellow-passengers, for she was travelling third-class, looked at her with the frank or furtive wonderment that so many smiles will induce in the minds of any taxpayers. Was she tipsy, weak-minded, or merely in love? Perhaps all three! And she looked back at them with a benevolent compassion because they were obviously not half-seas-over with happiness. The hour and a half seemed short, and she got out on to the dimly lighted platform, less sleepy, but as elated as when she had got into the train. She had forgotten to add in her telegram that she was coming, so she had to leave her things and walk. She took the main road; it was longer, but she wanted to swing along and breathe home air to the full. In the night, as always, things looked unfamiliar, and she seemed to pass houses, hedges, trees that she had never known. The road dipped through a wood. A car came with its headlights glaring luridly, and in that glare she saw a weasel slink across just in time—queer little low beast, snakily humping its long back. She stopped a moment on the bridge over their narrow twisting little river. That bridge was hundreds of years old, nearly as old as the oldest parts of the Grange, and still very strong. Just beyond it was their gate, and when the river flooded, in very wet years, it crept up the meadow almost to the shrubbery where the moat had once been. Dinny pushed through the gate and walked on the grass edging of the drive between the rhododendrons. She came to the front of the house, which was really its back—long, low, unlighted. They did not expect her, and it was getting on for midnight; and the idea came to her to steal round and see it all grey and ghostly, tree-and-creeper-covered in the moonlight. Past the yew trees, throwing short shadows under the raised garden, she came round on to the lawn, and stood breathing deeply, and turning her head this way and that, so as to miss nothing that she had grown up with. The moon flicked a ghostly radiance on to the windows, and shiny leaves of the magnolias; and secrets lurked all over the old stone face. Lovely! Only one window was lighted, that of her father’s study. It seemed strange that they had gone to bed already, with relief so bubbling in them. She stole from the lawn on to the terrace and stood looking in through the curtains not quite drawn. The General was at his desk with a lot of papers spread before him, sitting with his hands between his knees, and his head bent. She could see the hollow below his temple, the hair above it, much greyer of late, the set mouth, the almost beaten look on the face. The whole attitude was that of a man in patient silence, preparing to accept disaster. Up in Mount Street she had been reading of the American Civil War, and she thought that just so, but for his lack of beard, might some old Southern General have looked, the night before Lee’s surrender. And, suddenly, it came to her that by an evil chance they had not yet received her telegram. She tapped on the pane. Her father raised his head. His face was ashen grey in the moonlight, and it was evident that he mistook her apparition for confirmation of the worst; he opened the window. Dinny leaned in, and put her hands on his shoulders.
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