Two Worlds and Their Ways (26 page)

“What was your trouble?” said his father.

“I feel guilty in drawing attention from the children's trouble to my own. I made a conspicuous friendship.”

“With a boy?”

“No, no, Father. You and Grandpa have your own knowledge of life; no doubt you have gained it; but there is no need to drag it in. Only with another master.”

“The young man, Oliver Spode?” said Mr. Firebrace.

“It sounds like the Bible and goes on sounding like it. The only son of his mother, and she is a widow.”

“Did your friendship attract attention?” said Sir Roderick.

“I think only that of Uncle Lucius.”

“I was afraid it might do so,” said the latter, “and lead to unfounded suggestions. I had no personal uneasiness.”

“How much less well you think of other people than of yourself!” said Oliver. “I suppose that is a tribute to anyone.”

“What did you mean by saying you had no mother?” said Maria. “What difference did that make?”

“Well, no one cared whether I was a success or not.”

“So I am the culprit. I see that the guilt is mine, and I am glad to see it. You see it too, Oliver, and I see you are glad, though I do not know your reason.”

“It is the same as yours. We are glad that no helpless person is cast for the part. We see that it is good.”

Sefton threw himself into his mother's arms and broke into weeping. She held him close and looked at Lesbia over his head. Sir Roderick beckoned to Clemence, and drew her on to the sofa at his side.

“They are ours, Maria. They owe us life, and therefore we owe them everything. Their sins and sorrows are ours. Who else are the authors of them?”

Clemence leant against her father and sank into tears, and he kept his arm about her.

“So it is all true,” said Juliet, “all that we have tried to disprove. A mother does love her erring children best, and it seems that a father does too, though no one has thought about it. We may be the first people to see an instance. And men do not have to hide their feelings, and mothers are not the last people to bring up their own children, and there is no hostility between fathers and sons, and home life is best. And keeping a school is a thing to be ashamed of. Not that people have ever thought it anything else, but their reasons were not the right ones. Schoolkeepers should be despised on quite different grounds, or anyhow on some extra ones. And cynicism has no place in life, though it will make conversation very difficult. No one will be able to be clever.”

“I think someone will be able to be,” said Lesbia, laying a hand on her sister's arm.

“How was it? Why was it?” said Maria. “Have I urged them too much, asked more of them than they could do? Were they forced to it to satisfy me? But they knew I would rather they did nothing than sink to this.”

“But you were not prepared for them to do nothing,” said Oliver.

“But had I any reason to be? Had I any ground for thinking of them in that way? Look at their heads; look at their faces. What would any mother have thought?”

“What you did, Maria,” said Lesbia, gently. “And she would have been right in thinking it. Your children have good abilities, in some ways high ones. There was no reason for them to hide their talents in the earth, or for you to wish them to do so.”

“Oh, I should have been so pleased, so proud. If only it had not been for this! Indeed, I was pleased and proud, when I heard of their first success.”

“We went too far,” said Sir Roderick, identifying himself with his wife. “That was our mistake. We urged them beyond their bounds, and they could not cross them of
themselves. We forgot their lonely position; we forgot their childhood.”

Maria was silent, facing the accusation in the only form it would be made.

“And so they looked to higher aid,” said Juliet. “Well, it was lower aid, I suppose. They looked to aid and it failed them; and that was hard on them in a school, which is a place designed to give aid. But I am glad they gave Maria pleasure. They had their reward.”

“They are getting it, poor children!” said Sir Roderick.

There was a pause.

“I am sorry, Miss Petticott,” said Lesbia, turning and putting a hand on Miss Petticott's arm. “You will let me say it.”

“It is a great shock and trouble to me, Miss Firebrace. I was quite unprepared. There has never been anything of the kind in all the years I have taught them. It is strange that a new environment should bring about such a change.”

“It would be strange,” said Lesbia, allowing the faint smile to reach her lips. “But a new environment does not cause essential change. It can only reveal or release something that is there. Or we will say something that has grown somehow out of the earlier experience.”

“Shall we say that, Father?” said Oliver.

“The new environment supplied the conditions that led to the change,” said Sir Roderick. “That and an undue pressure from home, which we acknowledge. The fact that the result was the same with them both, shows that it came from something outside.”

“You do not allow for a possible likeness between them, arising from the same blood and the same upbringing?” said Lesbia. “How do you explain the tact that no other pupil in either school has done the same?”

“I do not explain it. It cannot be a fact.”

“Neither can it,” said Mr. Firebrace. “But do not lose hold on yourself, my boy.”

“Actually, Roderick it is very rare,” said Lesbia.

“What is the truth, Lucius?” said Sir Roderick, hardly attending to Mr. Firebrace's injunction.

“Well, ‘rare' is scarcely the word in a general sense. But in a case of a sustained course like this, I am afraid it is.”

“Poor little boy!” said Maria.

Her husband held Clemence closer to his side, in lieu of voicing a similar sentiment.

“It is clear that the schools exercised a disruptive influence.”

“Honestly, Roderick, we considered seriously whether we could keep the children in them,” said Lesbia.

“And came to the conclusion that you could. I have considered equally seriously, and come to the conclusion that I cannot.”

“Why have so much honesty, my dear?” said Mr. Firebrace to his daughter. “It is not always the best policy. You must have found that.”

“Oh, Roderick, Roderick,” said Lesbia, shaking her head and seeming just to avoid amusement. “Will anything do for an excuse to indulge yourself?”

“This will do well enough. When I did the opposite thing, we see what came of it. And when two innocent children stumble and fall on the same path, it shows that it is too rough for them, and that it is wise to guide them to another.”

“Then they are of weaker stuff than the other children.”

“It has emerged that they are of different stuff.”

“Roderick, it is not an occasion for pride.”

“I was feeling that it was,” said Juliet.

“I have felt it all the time,” said Oliver.

There was a pause.

“You would not like them to live it down?” said Lesbia, just raising her eyes. “You have not that amount of respect—or we will say that kind of respect—for them?”

“Parents have too little respect for their children, just as the children have too much for the parents,” said Sir Roderick, stating the belief as it came to him. “But I have
a father's love for them, and that can be my guide. I could not have a better.”

“And an ordinary human love for yourself, Roderick?”

“Well, that is to say I am an ordinary human being.”

“But surely you would not say that,” said Oliver.

Sir Roderick was silent, finding that his mood of the moment did prevent his doing so.

“So it is settled that Clemence is not to return to us, Maria?” said Lesbia, making a movement of rising from her seat. “Because, if so, I must telegraph that there is a vacancy.”

“If you will draft the telegram, it will be taken for you,” said Sir Roderick.

Lesbia disengaged her skirt from her chair, and went to the door, thanking Oliver for opening it. As though at a sign, Maria turned to her children, and as though at another, Juliet followed her sister, and was followed by her husband, father and nephew.

“It seems pitiless,” said Oliver, as they gained the hall. “But they had better strike while the iron is hot, if I say what I mean. A scene in cold blood leads to the worst results, and as the blood always gets hot in the course of it, it leads to everything else as well.”

The door opened and Miss Petticott broke into the hall, suddenly aware that her presence was preventing the family solitude.

“So you are like the rest of us,” said Mr. Firebrace. “You can bear things better if you do not see them.”

“I am in such distress, Mr. Firebrace, that I hardly know what I am doing,” said Miss Petticott, smoothing her hair, as if she felt it ought to be dishevelled.

“Come along, my boy,” said Mr. Firebrace to his grandson. “The children have their years to forget the scene, and the same cannot be said of me. So I will not concern myself with it.”

“I shall not be myself until it is over,” said Oliver. “It shows what a feeling heart can beat under a polished exterior.”

“No one would be more ashamed of a rugged one,” said
Lesbia, smiling at him in disregard of her own preoccupations.

“No one indeed. And it is natural for the better heart to result in the better exterior, though no one has thought of their going together. You are looking at the door, Aunt Lesbia. You are thinking what a door may hide. I wish I dared to think of it.”

“The judges and the culprits are facing each other,” said Lesbia, with a sigh.

“I dare to think of that. But the parents and children are doing so.”

This was the case, and continued to be so after the door had closed. Clemence afterwards remembered the things that had passed through her mind in those moments. It was almost a relief when Maria spoke. The extreme moment had come, must soon be actually past.

“Now, Clemence, tell me it all from the beginning. We took your part before outsiders. We are your parents, and owe you our help in any kind of need. But we do not know how to face such a thing, hardly how to listen to it.”

“I expect they wish that was the case,” said Sir Roderick, tightening his arm round his daughter. “And I think we have done our listening. I do not expect that Lesbia left out anything.”

“There was nothing more than she said,” said Clemence.

“And surely it is enough,” said her mother. “How did you come to do what you did? You had been taught the difference between right and wrong. You could not have thought there was any meaning in a false success. You could not have taken any satisfaction in it.”

“We thought you would be pleased. We did not know you would ever come to know the truth.”

“The truth! The thing I have taught you comes first in life! What mistake have I made? Would you have been better if you had had another mother?”

Maria seemed to hear her own words, and to be seeking an answer to them from herself.

“They would in a sense,” said Sir Roderick. “They
would not have been urged to a point beyond their scope, and forced to things not natural to them. That is what it was. That was your—that was our mistake.”

“But I thought they were children above the average, and would naturally go beyond the others.”

“My dear, good wife, there you are again! We must accept what they do, not plan it ourselves beforehand. That is how the trouble came.”

“We are above the average in many ways,” said Clemence, with a pang for her mother's baffled, disappointed face. “Miss Firebrace said we were. That is how it all began. We did do better than the others, and then we tried to keep it up more than we could.”

“If only you had been content to be true to yourselves! How proud I should have been! Even now I can't help being proud of what you did at first. But nothing counts but trustworthiness. Or nothing counts without it.”

“Proud we cannot be, my pretty,” said Sir Roderick, bringing another pang to his daughter's heart, and as he saw it, again tightening his hold. “We must be content without that. But there are better things that we can be. We can be loving and loyal enough for the feelings to hold through a test, and our children are not the people whom they should fail. We will let the dead past bury its dead, and go back to the old days and the old ways and the old happiness.” Sir Roderick glanced at his children, saw the admiration in their eyes, and felt that he and they were at one.

“But is that making it too easy for them? Will it lead to their taking too light a view of it? Is it really indulging ourselves? God knows, I should like to make it easy. But is that where the danger lies?”

“We need not avoid self-indulgence at their expense. And we need not fear it has been easy. There was the effort and suspense through the term, and at the end the shock and shame. And heavy guns were brought to bear on them. Account was not taken of their helplessness.”

At these words the children gave their mother her
answer. They broke into convulsive tears, and at the sound the group outside the room turned and vanished up the stairs. Lesbia alone held her ground, and in a moment moved towards the door.

“Well, I will be guided by you, Roderick,” said Maria. “I suppose I often am, though I hardly realise it. I will leave the burdens on you and follow my own heart.”

“You will not be wrong, my pretty. And so the trouble belongs to the past. We shall remember its cost, and the memory will do its work. We shall not talk of it again. It will be as if it had never been. And now I hear Lesbia coming, I can always recognise that noiseless step.”

“Run up to the schoolroom, my dears,” said Maria, in her ordinary tones. “We do not want her to see you in tears. After all, you are in your own home and have a right to happiness there. And you have a right to your mother's help in leaving a stumble behind. It is not the end of everything. Go up and settle back into the life that suits you, and lets you be what you are. It was breaking it that was the mistake; and the mistake was ours, not yours.”