And if, in pagan times, they could so consider the merit and national advantage of the spirit of joy, how much more ought we, in our Christian generation, to feel that we cannot do too much to inculcate that happy spirit among the young, — we, who have almost “touched” immortality in the divine teaching of Christ, — we, who know there is no death, but only a “passing on” from joy to joy!
Major Desmond was one of those few remaining “grand old men” who, without any cant or feigned excess of piety, believed humbly and devoutly in the holiness and saving grace of the Christian faith. Both as a man and a soldier, safe at home or face to face with death on the battle-field, he had guided his conduct as best he could by its plain principles, and it had, as he himself expressed it, “carried him through.” But it lay too close to his heart for him to willingly make it a subject of conversation, — yet while he talked with Boy, or rather while he elicited certain scrappy monosyllables from him in reply to his own easy chat, he became gradually aware that the lad was a complete atheist, — that he had no idea whatever of God, and no sense of the proportion and balance existing between the material and spiritual side of things. The deep, hard cynicism which showed itself more and more as the foundation of his character made him casual and flippant even in his “Yes,” or “No,” and by-and-bye, after trying him on various themes, — his home, his studies, his “sports,” his interests generally, — Desmond instinctively realized that this young and embittered scrap of humanity was sitting in cold judgment on himself, and relegating him to the level of a garrulous old man who did not know what he was talking about, for irreverence to age is one of the unadmirable features of a large proportion of the rising “new” generation. As soon as this idea was borne in upon his mind, the major came to a sudden halt.
“Well, you’re nearly where you want to be, aren’t you?” he demanded.
Boy looked about him. They were at the corner of Trafalgar Square.
“Yes. It’s just down Northumberland Avenue.”
“All right!” and Desmond glanced at his watch. “Five minutes to three! You’d better look sharp! Good-bye!”
“Good-bye!” said Boy, carelessly, without raising his cap, and in another moment he had gone.
Major Desmond paused a moment, staring after him. Then he shook his head. Then he took out his cigar-case, chose a cigar, and lit it. Then he walked slowly and thoughtfully to his club, where he found his old friend “Fitz,”
“of the rueful countenance,” in a favourite arm-chair near the window reading the paper.
“Hullo!” said that gentleman.
“Hullo!” responded the major, dismally.
“Where have you been?” enquired “Fitz.”
“You look as if you were down on your luck.”
“Do I?” and Major Desmond threw himself into the opposite chair. “It is not that. I’ve had a depressing companion.”
“Oh!” said Fitz. “Where did you pick him up? Who was he?”
“Boy,” said the major, with a sort of grunt that was half a groan. “At least, not Boy, but the young chap that used to be Boy.”
Fitz raised his melancholy blue eyes with a bewildered expression.
“Do you mean tire little fellow Miss Leslie was so fond of?”
“Yes. It’s a blow to her, Fitz! — I’m sure it must be a blow!”
Fitz was puzzled, and grew more saturnine of aspect than ever.
“What do you mean?” he asked. “What’s happened? Has he got anything the matter with him?”
“He’s got everything the matter with him!” said the major, bursting forth into hot speech —
“everything! Callousness is the matter with him — worldliness is the matter with him — indifference to affection is the matter with him, — d — n it, sir! general priggishness is the matter with him! By Jove! The rascal doesn’t seem to have an ounce of real, warm blood in all his body!”
The thin, stern physiognomy of the worthy Captain “Fitz” remained unmoved, except for the faintest flickering expression, which might have been satire, grief, surprise, scorn, or humour, whichever way the observer chose to take it.
“Ah!” he said, letting the ejaculation escape his lips slowly, as though it were a puff of smoke. The major rolled his eyes indignantly.
“Ah!” he repeated. “Is that all you can say?”
“My dear chap, what do you want me to say?” remonstrated Fitz. “There’s nothing to be said.”
“That’s true,” said the major, and relapsed into silence. But not for long, however. Drawing his cigar out of his mouth after an interval of meditative smoking, he began in subdued tones, —
“When I think of her, Fitz, — you know who I mean — Letty, — when I think of her sweetness and patience and goodness, and when I remember all the pretty, tender ways she had with that little fellow, — and when, — after all these years, he came to visit her to-day, and I saw her looking wistfully at him to see if he had the smallest pulse of affection beating in his hard young heart for her, I could have cried! Yes, I could! I’m an old fool, of course, — you can call me one if you like and have done with it. But that’s how I felt. Of course, years have gone by, — he was a child when she saw him last, — but I should have thought, — yes, I should certainly have thought, — that if he had any recollections of his childhood at all, he would at least have remembered her, and how she loved him.”
Whereupon Fitz roused himself to utterance.
“There’s where you are wrong, Dick,” he said. “You have made the same fatal mistake we all make when we think that love — love of any kind — will last.”
The major looked at him steadfastly, but did not interrupt him. “It’s the same thing everywhere. Men and women fall in love, swear eternal fidelity, and by-and-bye we find them figuring in the divorce court. Other men and women resign themselves gracefully to the monotony of each other’s companionship for life, and God sends them children to cheer up the dulness a little, and they think those children are perfect paragons, who will grow up to love them in their old age. Not a bit of it! Not nowadays. Old folks are voted a bore, and the young cub of the present day may often be heard declaring that the ‘Governor’ has had ‘too long an innings’ and ‘doesn’t know when to die.’ As for Boy, — Miss Letty’s pet Boy, — from all you tell me, he has gone, there’s only a young cub left now — a cub who doesn’t care, and doesn’t mean to care, about anything or anybody but himself. That’s the supreme result of modern training, — it is, ‘pon my soul! Boys are brought up in the code of selfishness from the very beginning. Their mothers spoil them and foster all their bad points instead of their good ones, and as soon as they begin to go about in the world a lot of idiotic girls and women, — the kind of women who must have a masculine thing to pay court to them, whether he be a raw youth or a seasoned old stager, get hold of them and make shameless love to them. And their heads are, of course, turned the wrong way round, — they think they are the most precious and amazing objects in all creation, — and instead of paying court to women, and learning to be chivalrous and reverential, they expect to be courted themselves and admired, as if they were full-blown heroes from the classic world of conquest. That’s the way of it. Boy has no doubt caught the fever of conceit. He probably expected Miss Letty to kneel down and kiss his boot-ties.”
“Part of your argument may be right,” said the major, “but part of it is entirely wrong. You said in the beginning that we all of us make a mistake when we think that love — love of any kind — will last. Did you not?”
“I did,” admitted Fitz, looking slightly shamefaced under the calm stare of the major’s eye.
“Well, you know that’s d — d nonsense!” pursued the major, bluntly. “You know as well as I do that I — I, for example, — have loved the same woman ever since I was thirty, and there’s no change in me yet. And Letty, — Letty has loved the same ne’er-do-well all her life, though he’s a corpse and not a very entire one by this time, I should say, thou
gh she thinks, God bless her! that he’s a sort of angel-king on a throne in heaven — which is a pleasing and pretty picture enough, only it doesn’t seem to quite fit Harry Raikes. However, there you are, you see, — love does last — when it is love!”
“When it is — yes, — but when is it?” asked Fitz, with the smile which so beautifully altered his features beginning to illumine his deep-set eyes. “You see, you and Miss Leslie are old-fashioned. — that’s what it is. You’re old-fashioned, sir;” he repeated, getting up and prodding a finger into the major’s waistcoat. “You belong to the last century, like one’s grandmother’s old china. You are a part of the days when, if a married woman entertained a score of lovers apart from her own husband, she was considered a disgrace to her sex. All that is altered, my boy. She is now a ‘queen of society’! Ha! ha! ha! You believe in God’s blessing on true love. But, my dear fellow, the present generation doesn’t care whether there’s a God to bless anything or not, or whether love is false or true. It isn’t love, you see. It’s something else. Love has gone out with the tinder-boxes and stage-coaches. It’s all electricity and motor-cars now — flash and fizzle through life at a tearing pace, and leave a bad smell behind you! Ha! ha! You’re old-fashioned, Dick, — I like you for it because I’m a bit old-fashioned myself, — but we’re out of it, — we’re old stumps of trees that can’t understand the rank and quickly withering weeds of youth that are growing up around us to-day — weeds that are going to choke and poison the destinies of England by-and-bye.”
The major got up, possibly moved thereto by the pressure of his friend’s fingers in the middle of his waistcoat.
“By that time you and I will be underground, Fitz,” he said, half-lightly, half-sadly, “and thank God for it! — for if any harm comes to England, I don’t want to be alive to see it. I wonder if I shall be sitting on a gold throne in heaven, next to Harry Raikes? If so, angel Letty will have to choose between us.”
He laughed, and the two old friends presently left the club together and went for an afternoon stroll through Piccadilly and the Park, where they saw Miss Letty driving in her victoria with pretty Violet Morrison by her side. They raised their hats to both ladies, and Fitz commented on their looks.
“Nothing will ever make Miss Letty old,” he said. “She always has the eyes of a child who trusts both God and man.”
The major nodded approvingly.
“That’s very well said, Fitz, and it’s true. But she’s had a blow to-day. I’m sure she has. She doesn’t say much, — she’s not one to say much; she may say nothing, even to me, — but she’s had a blow — Boy’s not what she thought he would be.
I’ve got a bit of a heartache over it. I’m sorry we came back to England.”
Fitz was silent. He fully understood and participated in his old friend’s feelings, but he felt that the subject was too sore a one to be discussed, and when he spoke again it was on a different theme.
That evening Major Desmond escorted his niece and Miss Letty to the theatre, and just before starting, while Violet was still engaged in putting the finishing touches to her pretty evening toilette, Miss Letty came in alone to the major, where he pensively waited in the sitting-room, and said softly, —
“Dick!”
He started and turned round, and was fairly taken aback for the moment by the spiritual beauty of her gentle face framed in its snow-white hair. She was fully attired for the theatre, and wore an opera-mantle of some silvery neutral tint, showered with lace; and a pretty flush came on her cheeks as she met the faithful, tender gaze of the man who had loved her so loyally and so long. Having expressed his admiration of her charm by a look, he responded, —
“Well, Letty?”
“I want you,” she said, laying her delicately gloved hand on his arm, “to promise me one thing. Will you?”
“Anything and everything in the world!” said the major, recklessly.
“It is only just this, — do not talk to me at all, or ask me what I feel, about Boy.” Her voice trembled a little, — then she went on: “It is no use; it only makes me think of what might have been and what is not. I am a little disappointed; but then, what of that? We all have disappointments, and it is no use brooding upon them. We only make ourselves and others miserable. You see, I loved Boy as a child; — he is not a child now — he is getting to be a young man, — and — he does not want me, — it is not natural he should want me. Do you understand.”
The major was profoundly moved, but he only nodded and said, —
“Yes, I understand.”
“He is just a college lad now, like — like all the rest,” went on Miss Letty, quietly, “and it was my mistake to have expected him to be in any way different. He will no doubt turn out very well and be a good soldier. But” — and she suddenly looked up with a swift glance and smile that went straight to the major’s heart—” he is Robert D’Arcy-Muir now, — he is not Boy!”
The major said not a word, but he took up the little gloved hand resting on his arm and kissed it. A moment afterwards Violet entered, looking like a blush-rose in a pretty gown of pink chiffon, and the two elderly folks, welcoming her presence as a relief from emotion and embarrassment, turned to admire her sweet and fresh appearance. And then they went to the theatre and enjoyed “David Garrick,” and the subject of Boy was avoided among them by mutual consent, both on that evening and for many a long day afterwards.
But he was not forgotten. Day after day, night after night, Miss Letty thought of him and wondered what he was doing, but she never heard whether he had passed his examination or not. His mother never wrote, and he himself was evidently unmindful of his promise. Major Desmond, however, kept his eyes and ears open for news of him, not so much for the lad’s own sake as for Miss Letty’s. He had friends at Sandhurst, and to them he confided his wish to have all the information they could get concerning “young D’Arcy-Muir,” if he should eventually go there. To which he received the reply that if the young chap did get to Sandhurst at all they would let him know. With this he had to be satisfied, knowing that it would be worse than useless to enquire about him from his parents, the Honourable Jim being half paralysed, and Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir being incapable of giving a straight answer at any time to a straight question.
By-and-bye, however, the attention of both Major Desmond and Miss Letty began to be entirely engrossed by a new cause of anxiety and perplexity. Violet was looking ill and getting pale and thin, and it was evident she was unhappy. Yet she never complained, and always tried to be cheerful, though it seemed an effort to her.
“Look here, Letty, what is the matter with the girl?” asked the major, bluntly, one day. “I have worried her to tell me and she won’t. Does she tell your Miss Letty’s kind face clouded, and her eyes grew very sorrowful.
“No, Dick, she has not actually told me, but I can guess. She has not heard from Max Nugent for a long time, — his letters have practically ceased.”
“Ceased!” repeated the major, getting very red. “What do you mean, Letty? Ceased!”
“She will not admit it,” continued Miss Letty. “She will not acknowledge, even to herself, that he is neglecting her. When I ask her if she has heard from him, she answers me all in a nervous hurry, and assures me that it is because he is away travelling somewhere that she has received no letters. She says he has no time to write. But one would think that if he loved her as he professed to love her, he would certainly find time, or make time, to write.”
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli Page 447