The Ballad and the Source (16 page)

“Yes,” I said. “I don't know all the words, but still—”

“Tell me which you want explained.”

“Oh no,” I said hastily. “Please not. I like hearing the ones I don't know. I mean, I do understand them, even when I don't.”

The importance of the
unknown words she used, the excitement of apprehending their meanings, the fact that she never diluted her language to fit the infirmity of my understanding—all these things formed a major part of my joy in her company.

“I am not weak and not afraid.” She stopped, and then said: “In those days I was not afraid. I judged others by my own standards, and trusted in their good faith. When I left the man I had married I took the only course that could save us from a life of self-contempt and spiritual dishonour.” She drew in a hissing breath, and continued rapidly: “Unfortunately he was a man not sensible to such considerations. He had
once
been capable of nobility, or naturally I would not have married him; but his spirit had petrified. The sole concern of that man had grown to be his position in the eyes of the world. I took a step which destroyed his prestige as a man of property. I was his property: he had lost it. Therefore he would destroy me.”

I stole a glance at her. Her nostrils were dilated, her expression dramatic but composed. Her words came so smoothly, with such precision of timing, it was impossible not to feel that she was presenting a part she had rehearsed a hundred times. I experienced a curious moment of disabused vision, and thought I saw myself not as uniquely privileged, selected after a lifetime to receive her secrets, but as one of a long shadowy series of confidential audiences, all gazing, listening, as spellbound, as gratified as I.

“He was a man,” she went on, “in whom violent and strangled jealousies took the place of heart. A creature incapable of disinterested love. Yes, yes.” Her eyes flicked. “I pity any being delivered over to Charles Herbert's passions.”

“Didn't he love Ianthe?”

“Love her!” Her mouth stretched disdainfully. “Oh, he loved her so devotedly he must make a prisoner of her, deny her the light of day and the fresh springs of freedom. He must cut her from her natural roots. Not enough that she should grow up outrageously deprived of a mother. No! She must be taught to link the name of mother with all that is the enemy of truth and goodness.”

“He—he taught her to think you were horrid?”

“He did.”

“How beastly of him!” I cast my eyes down and inquired: “Couldn't you take her with you, then, when you went away?”

“He refused me that.”

“Her own mother!”

She nodded.

I felt Tilly's revelations, and consequently my duplicity, weighting my tongue; but if her suspicions had been aroused or were kindled by the disingenuous manner which accompanied my next inquiry, she passed them over.

“Not even
part
of the time?”

“Not for a day. Or for an hour.”

“Poor Ianthe.”

“Yes. Poor Ianthe.”

“Was he kind to her? Did she love him? I suppose she must have, as he was her own father.”

“Oh, they fastened upon one another,” she said coldy. “They battened.”

This time I recoiled from the meaning of her words. She made them sound disgusting.

“How long was it,” I said, “till you
—
How long before you saw her again?”

“I never saw my child again,” said Mrs.
Jardine.

“Oh, but the Park!” rose to my lips. I bit back the reminder. There was silence; then she added:

“I have seen Ianthe. I have stood at a distance and watched her. I have spoken to her. But I have no daughter.”

She got up and drew her cloak around her, and together we started to pace over the lawn towards the nearer lime alley. We passed through one of the arches into the clipped, leafy enclosure, and she went and stood before the stone figure of a graceful, nude, meditative young man with a cap of curls, and said, smiling faintly up at him:

“This is the temple of Apollo. I brought him from Italy. He is safe here. He is worshipped.”

Unearthly, incandescent, their mysteriously harmonious heads answered one another within the green light. Then she looked round and stooped to pick up a bicycle pump, some string, a doll's tea-pot, and a match-box lined with scraps of checked cotton stuff and cotton wool.
“Untidy children!” she exclaimed with maternal sharpness. “That boy assured me, positively assured me, that his pump had been stolen from the shed on Wednesday by some master padlock-picker. He shall be well scolded when he comes back. Careless fellow. … Cherry likes to play here by herself.” She fingered the match-box with a tender expression. “Harry has taken her on the river. They will be back before very long. Let us go in. You must stay and keep me company at tea. We will send a telephone message to your mother that I am sending you back in the car as soon as it returns from the river.”

She began to stroll up the lime alley, drawing in luxurious breaths of the leaf-scented air. Tension had vanished from her manner; she appeared collected and alert.

“So when they come back it'll be for good?” I said, walking beside her with the flower-basket.

“Oh yes, certainly. This is their home. That woman Flora Mackenzie—she is an excellent woman. But she has no natural sympathy with children, or understanding of them. However, I believe her to be perfectly good-hearted and scrupulous.”

“You mean Auntie Mack?”

“That is their name for her. She is merely a distant cousin on the father's side. Yes, she has been good to them, according to her lights.”

“Will she be coming back with them?”

“I have offered her a home for the present. She has been under a severe strain and is greatly in need of rest. It will not be a permanent arrangement. It seems that her ambition is to share a cottage at Bude with a woman friend, a retired schoolmistress. Harry will provide her with the means to compass her ambition. A lifetime of care for others—and then to be left elderly, solitary, penniless; without prospects or qualifications. … No. Such cast-off members of society are not enviable. There are thousands in similar case. Where do they creep to, to drink cups of tea, and starve and freeze by fireless grates, and preserve their rags of gentility in camphor, and wait in the night for those clawing pains they dare not own or name
…?
Distressed gentlewomen!” Her voice and eye grew full with pity, scorn and indignation. “It was very pleasant,” she added, “to be able to reassure her about her future. We had a long talk yesterday evening. Most interesting. She is a sensible, simple, responsive woman.”

I saw them pacing the paths in earnest
t
ê
te-
à-tê
te.
I felt the firm magnetic pressure of Mrs. Jardine's hands at work, manipulating Auntie Mack, softening her out. … Then the deeps quaking—opening—yielding up all: all the difficulties, doubts, devotions of a lifetime impetuously, rejoicingly exposed.

“As a matter of fact,” said Mrs, Jardine in a casual way, stooping to pick up a screw of grubby paper—a crumpled sweet bag—“we have corresponded, at long intervals, for some years. Since Ianthe left the man Thomson, to be precise. So soon as I discovered the fact, I wrote to Flora Mackenzie, requesting a private interview. It seems that she consulted her conscience and came to the conclusion that, situated as she was, a dependent beneath the man's roof, under an extorted vow to him to preserve them from all possible contact with their mother or their mother's family—she came to the conclusion that it would be both unethical and unsafe to comply with my request. On the other hand,” continued Mrs. Jardine in her crispest expository manner, “being a woman of feeling
and
a prudent Scotswoman, she was unwilling to jettison what chances of happiness remained to those young creatures by depriving them irretrievably of my support—Harry's and mine. She foresaw the need that would arise—the desperate situation. She explained all this to me. She offered to keep in touch with me to the extent of two letters a year—begging me neither to write back to her nor to write to my grandchildren, for fear of interception. I promised her this in exchange for a promise that she would inform me immediately of any major crisis. We kept our pledges. Twice a year she wrote me bulletins. She does not carry a soul in her pen, but still … Up to a point it was satisfactory. Oh, yes. I owe a debt of gratitude to Flora Mackenzie. I am the first to acknowledge it. It shall be repaid. The moral conflict must have been a heavy burden for a woman of her strict religious principles.”

Needless to say, no suspicion of irony then struck me; and even now, looking back, summoning her voice in memory, I detect no ambiguous ring. I told myself that Auntie Mack must have taken this—this too—to God. But how account for the simultaneous impression that visited me: a consciousness of the spiritual rewards of guilt—the pride, the romance, the sense of secret power and peril—which must have sustained her through those long years of uncongenial duty?

So Auntie Mack had been in the plot all the time. I pondered on this. How far, how tenaciously the net had been flung, and flung again; with what cunning and singleness of purpose; what strange and various fish had been netted!

I said:

“So when their father got ill, she wrote and told you?”

“She did.”

“Did she think he wouldn't get better?”

“She knew he would not.”

“
Soon
… !
”
I heard Auntie Mack whisper, twitching on the end of her line. And then: “NOW!”

“She put it to him,” continued Mrs. Jardine briskly, “that it was his duty to attempt some provision for his otherwise destitute children by an appeal to me—their only close living relative: certainly the
only
one with means. She offered to spare him a distasteful task by making that appeal herself, on his behalf. At first he vehemently refused. At late last he yielded; and their visit to me was arranged. She must have used considerable tact and patience. He was a bitter, stubborn man. However,” added Mrs.
Jardine,
“no doubt his illness weakened him. And no doubt his responsibilities lay heavy on his mind. It seems he cared for them, after his own dour fashion. He had nothing to leave them. They had scraped and pinched along on his inadequate salary as a schoolmaster; and that would, of course, cease with his death.”

“So they might have starved?”

“Well, naturally I should have come to the rescue in any case, after his death, if not before. And in the event of my dying before him, I had made provision for them in my will. But I did not choose that he should know that. No. As it has been, it has been for the best. He yielded to death at last in tranquillity of spirit. He even sent me a message with his last breath.”

“What was it?”

“He thanked me. He confided them to my care.”

Again Mr. Thomson rose before me—sad horse, trying to get on his legs again. I had seen one once in the village street, a huge cart horse, colossally struggling to rise, urged on by human goads and shouts. As his head sank convulsively at last between the shafts, Nurse had hurried us away.

“Did you write and tell him you would—would look after them?”

“I had already done so. Yes. Yes, of course.” Mrs. Jardine drew a heavy breath. “One cannot let a human soul go out utterly uncomforted, no matter how poor in grace it has been, if one is granted the power to soothe it. I sent him four lines. I told him I loved them; that all three had magnificent appetites, and the glow of sun and health; that all had put on weight; that Malcolm and Cherry had become effortlessly at home beneath our roof; that Maisie's character and loyalties should be treated with the respect they deserved.”

“What a good thing you did that,” I said, nearly choking with emotion.

“I am glad you think so,” said Mrs.
Jardine,
as if a little surprised. “God knows I have no reason to honour the memory of Robert Thomson. But I see him now as one more unfortunate, unequal to his destiny. A small man. He undertook what only one of exceptional stature could have carried out. And even then
… !
Well, now the wheel has come full circle. In my end is my beginning. A sort of miracle. Only I am old, not young.”

Again she drew a heavy breath, lifting her head to gaze in triumph and desolation at what was hidden from me. We had emerged from beneath the lime tunnel and were in the sun-flooded loggia, facing the expanse of lawn. Calmly she stared into the full light; and now, I told myself, now was my moment to release what I had all this time been hooding and clutching in anxious preoccupation: the carrier words that would float me—me too—back into the beginning from which, since her outburst, we had so strayed. I said:

“She did what Tilly didn't, then?”

She looked at me, raising her eyebrows in inquiry,

“Auntie Mack. She sent for you when—when you were needed. Not like Tilly.”

“Ah, Tilly. … Poor Tilly, she was—is, I should say—an emotionally frustrated woman. It was not to be expected that she should have vision beyond such an extravagant opportunity for paying off a score.
‘
You alone,' said the child.
‘
Tell no one.'”

“If Ianthe said that … said it was a secret, I suppose she thought she had to keep it?”

“That is what she would tell herself,” agreed Mrs. Jardine. “That would be the common level of behaviour
—
the world's level. Wisdom and magnanimity are not attributes of the world. I bear Tilly no grudge at all. I will explain.”

She leaned against one of the pillars of the loggia in an unfamiliar pose: relaxed, informal. She said:

“You must imagine Ianthe a beautiful girl of sixteen, living in an Italian city called Florence, having for well-nigh sole daily companion a sick, elderly man: sick in body and in spirit. They chose to live as exiles, so it seems: let us say in the manner of a dispossessed monarch and his princess daughter. In pride, isolation and sterility.”