The Sleeping Fury (19 page)

• • • • • • • •

When the car taking Eric to Haughton had turned in at the lodge gates, and was already half way up the drive, it overtook Lord Mardale, who was walking towards the house. Eric stopped the car and got out.

“Hallo, there you are!” Lord Mardale came up with outstretched hand. The car drove on, and Eric and Lord Mardale paced slowly towards the house.

“I'm glad we have met now,” said Lord Mardale, “because we can now get our talk finished before we reach the house.”

“I'm afraid, sir,” Eric began, “you and Lady Mardale may have thought it rather sudden. You … you must want to know all sorts of things about me before. … You see, I really didn't know what was the right thing to do on these occasions.”

Lord Mardale smiled. “Then it's your first occasion, it seems, Eric?”

“Yes, sir, the first. I ought, oughtn't I, to tell you of my income and prospects, and of my family?”

“Well, I think we could talk of them later, don't you? As for the present … now, you must not be disappointed, my boy, by what I am going to ask of you, because Lady Mardale and I have no wish to discourage you and Sylvia; but we feel that you and she—and, in fact, all of us—should know each other a little longer before you are actually engaged. Remember, you have only seen one another … five or six times, isn't it?”

“Yes,” Eric admitted, “I'm afraid that's all, sir. It seems so much more.”

“Of course. Time, where love is concerned, doesn't seem to matter, does it? But, for all that, we want you both to wait for at least a few months before the question of an actual engagement is settled. I hope you will not feel that we don't sympathise or are unreasonable.”

Eric raised his eyes. The kind, penetrating eyes which he had first seen last summer at the Manor House were fixed upon him.

“I should be unreasonable if I did, sir,” he said.

“You must come and stay with us when you can get away from the office, and you're certain, aren't you, to be at the Penningtons' too from time to time, so you and Sylvia will not be cut off from one another.”

“May I write to her, sir?”

“Certainly you may.”

“Does she … know about this?”

“About our wanting you to wait? Yes, we talked it over this morning. You would probably like to have a word with one another now, before tea. I
expect we shall find Sylvia in the morning-room. Come along; I'll show you the way. Remember, if you really must catch the five-forty-five at Temple-ton you will have to leave here at twenty-five past.”

“You've been awfully good, Lord Mardale,” Eric stammered as they climbed the steps to the front door.

Lord Mardale took his arm. “So have you, old man,” he said.

They crossed the hall, and Lord Mardale opened the morning-room door.

• • • • • • • •

When, half an hour later, Sylvia and Eric came into the drawing-room for tea, it seemed to Charlotte and Alfred that they brought with them a glow of youth and happiness that filled the whole room and spread its light and warmth into their hearts too. It was as if all four of them on that January afternoon sat irradiated in a springtime of the heart that blossomed in the eyes of those two enchanted young people, and sang in subtle overtones in the sound of their voices. How foolish, thought Charlotte as she watched their shining glances, to regard life as a sad disillusionment when it can awake such rapture as this.

When the time came for Eric to go, and Sylvia had gone to the door to see him off, Charlotte turned to Alfred, and they smiled at one another. “Aren't they adorable?” she said.

The same evening, after dinner, Eric sat with his mother in their little drawing-room. The curtains were drawn, a big fire purred and crackled in the grate, and they sat with their chairs drawn close up to it, for the weather was very cold. He had been telling her of his brief visit to the Penningtons', and was making up his mind to tell her about Sylvia. But it was difficult. He was not usually shy with his mother, but now an unexpected hesitation impeded him. He kept edging towards the point of confession, and then sheering off and resolving to postpone it to another occasion, and under the stress of this indecision he kept discovering that he had forgotten his mother and fallen into a dream.

He was so preoccupied that he did not notice that she too was ill at ease and only half attentive when he spoke to her. At last, after a longer silence than usual, she stirred in her chair and began to talk.

“Eric, there is something I must tell you; something, my dear, that you may think I ought to have told you long ago, but I thought it better to wait till … till you …” Her voice failed, and Eric saw that the small hand that grasped the arm of her chair was trembling violently.

“Mother,” he said, jumping up from his chair and kneeling beside hers, “what is it? Don't be upset. Has something dreadful happened?”

“I'm so afraid, my boy,” she said, swallowing down her tears, “of what you may think.”

He stroked her hand. “Why, you needn't be afraid of that, Mother. Tell me. You thought it better, you said, to wait … ”

“Yes, till you had seen something of the world, and could, perhaps, judge more … more charitably. When you fall in love, Eric, as you will, my dear …”

His heart leapt. He was on the point of saying, “But I am in love, Mother,” but again his shyness checked him. “When I fall in love, Mother …”

“When you fall in love yourself, you will perhaps understand better. When I was two years older than you are now, Eric, I fell in love.”

“With my father?”

“With a man who was already married—unhappily married. I loved him very, very deeply, Eric. Your grandmother and I and the two younger girls were living in London then, and he and I used to meet every week, when he came to town on business, and lunch together. My mother knew of it—I had told her—and was very much upset. She urged me to give up seeing him; it could lead to nothing but unhappiness, she said, and would prevent my settling down in life. Besides, as she said, it was not right. If people got to know, as they would be sure to do, there would be talk and scandal. I knew what my mother said was true, but love seemed to me such a wonderful, such a beautiful thing, that nothing else mattered to me. I couldn't give him up. My mother wrote to him, telling him that he was spoiling my future and my good name, and he tried—honestly and honourably tried—to
persuade me that we ought to part. But I refused. I would rather have died than not see him. And then, soon after that, I left home. He never tried to persuade me, Eric; remember that. I did it of my own free will, and I have never regretted it.”

“You went to live with him, Mother?”

“Yes. He took a little house in London and I went to live with him. How happy we were! How well worth while it seemed to me to have thrown away everything, and devoted my life to him! He spent half the week with me and half at his country home, and, except for a few intimate friends, everyone believed that we were husband and wife. A year later you were born.”

“I!” Eric's voice was sharp with surprise. “Then I'm …” He paused, and his voice grew quiet again. “Go on, dear,” he said. He knelt beside her still, and still stroked the small white hand that grasped the arm of the chair.

“Your father is still alive, Eric; not dead, as you supposed. You have always believed he was your uncle. I often dreaded that you might get to know from someone else. You never did?”

“Never, Mother.”

“At first he changed his name a little; we were Mr. and Mrs. James Danver. Then, when you grew older and we left our little home, and I came to live here, he became Sir John Danver, and I was his sister-in-law. He actually had a younger brother, you know, who had died a few years before in Australia. What a nightmare such pretences and precautions can become, Eric! They were the only
blot on my happiness at first. But then came another—my anxieties for your future, my darling, and fear for the ways in which this might trouble it.”

Eric's hand lay now on the arm of the chair beside her own. It no longer stroked hers. She turned her head anxiously to look at his face. All the healthy colour had died out of it; he was very pale, and his eyes were fixed dazedly in front of him, as if he were watching a ghost.

“My darling,” she said, with agony in her voice, “is it too awful? Are you horrified at your mother?”

Her despair recalled him to himself. For a moment he looked at her, bewildered: then she saw the old warmth and affection flow back into his eyes. “Poor Mother,” he said, laying his face against the small hand on the arm of the chair. “Horrified? No, dear, I'm not horrified.”

“Do you think I did wrong, Eric? Do you think I ought to have given him up?”

“You did right, dear, if you loved him so much.” His eyes looked straight into hers, and she saw that he meant what he said.

“I'm so glad,” she said, tears running down her face, “so very, very glad. It's been a load on my mind for years.”

He took her hand again. “And now the load has gone, dearest.”

• • • • • • • •

After his mother had gone to bed, Eric sat for a long time staring into the fire, and staring, through the fire, into the gulf that had so suddenly opened at his feet. He was so stunned by the shock of what his mother had told him that he could not yet realise
all its implications. His first feeling had been regarding his mother. Her story, if it had been told him, as she had told it, of another woman, would have aroused only his sympathy and admiration for one who could so bravely devote herself to the man she loved. But that it was his own mother's story—that she, however blameless her action might seem to a generous mind, had incurred this social stigma—had shocked him deeply. He had always looked upon her as irreproachable; but now she had broken one of the laws of society, and, if society chose to regard her as an outcast, it would be within its rights. Yes, she and he, her illegitimate child, were under a stigma; it was useless to blink that. None the less he felt profoundly that she was blameless; her story, the gentle tone of her voice, with its old way, which never failed to move him, of giving to a word or phrase a ring of exquisite pathos, and her painful agitation as she told it, had pierced him to the heart. He longed to protect and comfort her, and he had resolved at once, while she was still talking, that, whatever happened, he must never give her the smallest cause for remorse. He came to that resolve almost at the same moment that he realised, with a sudden chill at the heart, what this new discovery might mean, and almost certainly would mean, to himself and Sylvia. It was at that moment that his mother had seen the pallor of his face and the brooding speculation in his eyes. With a great effort he had mastered himself, and, thank God, he had succeeded in reassuring her. The load had been lifted from her mind.

But that load had fallen upon him, and he sat
now staring at the fire, almost crushed by the weight of it. His first impulse now—a duty which it never occurred to him to shirk—was to write to Lord Mardale. What would be the result of that? He was only too sure of the result, but the letter must be written. His mind became so urgently concerned with it that he determined to write it at once. There was a small bureau with pens and paper in the drawing-room. Eric went to it, and, sitting down, began his letter. For three-quarters of an hour he sat there, alternately writing and staring in agitated thought at a picture that hung on the wall in front of him. Then, having addressed and stamped the letter, he went downstairs, let himself quietly out of the front door, and went and posted it.

The sharp, clear air of the winter night struck cold on his forehead. The sky was thickly sown with the cold blue sparkle of stars, as though even it were frosted. When he had returned to the house and shut the front door he was aware, deep within him, of a vague consolation. He did not know the cause of it.

When he reached the drawing-room he closed the door and flung himself into his chair again. Again he stared at the fire. What did it mean, what did it involve, to be illegitimate? How he hated the word! Many people, many of his own friends perhaps, would not receive him if they knew. Good God! All these years he had been unconsciously living on false pretences. It was as if his whole life had suddenly been undermined. He was seized with the quixotic impulse to go to all his friends and tell them, uncloak himself and give them the chance of dropping him. Then it struck him that
to do so would be to uncloak his mother also, to make a public exhibition of her. What a horror!

Mr. and Mrs. Pennington and John. What would
they
think? He could hardly believe that it would make any difference to John: John, under his screen of cynicism, was such a loyal and generous fellow. He found himself coining phrases for him. “Unmarried, Eric? An inconvenient but surely an unimportant oversight.” Miserable as he was, he smiled at his own unuttered mimicry of his friend.

Ah, if only it were unimportant! But to him, brooding there in his chair, it seemed of overwhelming importance. Already it had changed the whole complexion of his life. Sylvia. She appeared to his mind's eye suddenly with extreme vividness. She stood and smiled at him in the jasmine-coloured silk she had worn at the dance. How irresistibly lovely she had looked! The memory of her thrilled him body and soul. And now this new, rapturous life which had so miraculously dawned for them was to be ruthlessly abolished. Despair swept through him. His whole being rose up and protested against the sacrifice of such love as theirs to an inhuman convention.

Crouching forward, motionless, in his chair, he struggled helplessly in the meshes of those cruel abstractions which were so relentlessly closing in upon him. Then, with a deep, quivering sigh, he lay back and stretched himself wearily, and then sat up and glanced at his watch. It was ten minutes past twelve. With a lead weight at his heart he rose slowly to his feet, switched out the lights, and went upstairs to his bedroom.