"Yes, I think it must," said Ellen knowingly.

She called a waiter. "Would you like to try some other wine? I don't think I will. This has put me off for the night. No? Good. Two lemon squashes, one very sweet."

That was a good idea of Mrs. Yaverland's. The lemon squash was lovely when it came, and Ellen had time to drink it while they were eating the chicken, so that there was no compet.i.tive flavour to spoil the ice pudding. While they were waiting for that Mrs. Yaverland smoothed her eyebrows once again, and gave her nails one more perfunctory polish, and opened her mouth to speak, but caught her breath and shut it again; and said, after a moment's silence, "I hope I've ordered the right sort of pudding. It's so hard to remember all these irrelevant French names. I wanted you to have the one with crystallised cherries. Richard used to be very fond of it." She looked round the restaurant more lovingly. "He liked this place when he was a boy. We used to come here once or twice every holiday and go to a theatre afterwards."

But Ellen knew what it meant when Richard did that: when he opened his mouth and then shut it again and was silent, and then said very quickly, "Darling, I do love you." He had done it the very night before, in Grand-Aunt Jeannie's parlour at Liberton Brae, when he had wanted to tell her that his mother had been married to someone who was not his father before he was born. "It was not her fault. My father didn't stand by her. He was all right about money. But when he heard about the child, he was playing the fool as an aide-de-camp with a royal tour round the Colonies. And he didn't come back. So she lost her nerve"; and that he had a younger stepbrother, but that the marriage had not been a success, and that she was always known as Mrs. Yaverland. She was dying to know what Richard was like in his school-days, and she was willing to admit that Mrs. Yaverland, when she took him out for treats, had probably shown a better side of her nature that was not so bad, but because of this knowledge she leaned forward and asked penetratingly, "Now, what is it you are really wanting to say?"

The older woman dropped her eyelids guiltily, and then raised them full of an extraordinary laughing light, as if she was beyond all reason delighted to have her secret thoughts discovered. "How you see through me, dear!" she said in a voice that was rallying and affectionate, charged with an astringent form of love. "All that I wanted to say was simply that I am so very glad you have come. Perhaps for reasons that you'll consider tiresome of me. But Richard has been so much away, and even when he's at home he is out at the works laboratory so much of the time, that I've often wanted someone nice to come and live in the house, who'd talk to me occasionally and be a companion. Perhaps you'll think it is absurd of me to look on you as a companion, because I am much older. But then I reckon things concerning age in rather a curious way.

You're eighteen, aren't you?"

"Eighteen past," Ellen agreed, in a tone that implied she felt a certain compunction in leaving it like that, so near was she to nineteen. But her birthday had been a fortnight ago.

"And I was nineteen when Richard was born. So you see to me a girl of eighteen is a woman, capable of understanding everything and feeling everything. So I hope you won't mind if I treat you as an equal." She raised her winegla.s.s and looked over its brim at the girl's proud, solemn gaze, limpid with intentions of being worthy of this honour, bright with the discovery that perhaps she did not dislike the other woman as much as she had thought, and she flushed deeply and set the winegla.s.s down again, and, leaning forward, spoke in a forced, wooden tone. "I meant, you know, to say that to you, anyhow, whether I felt it or not. I knew you'd like it. You see, you get very evasive if you've ever been in a position like mine. You have to make servants like you so that they won't give notice when they hear the village gossip, because you must have a well-run house for your child. You have to make people like you so that they will let the children play with yours. So one gets into a habit of saying a thing that will be found pleasant, without particularly worrying whether it's sincere. But this I find I really mean."

As always, the suspicion that she was in the presence of somebody who had the singular bad luck to be unhappy changed Ellen on the instant to something soft as a kitten, incapable of resentment as an angel. "Well, I've got a habit of saying the things that will be found unpleasant,"

she said hopefully, in tones tremulous with kindness. "I'm just as likely to say something that'll rouse a person's dander as you are to say something that'll quiet it down. We ought to be awful good for one another."

Mrs. Yaverland turned on Ellen a glance which recognised her quality as queer and precious, yet was not endearing and helped her nothing in the girl's heart. For she was considering Ellen for what she would give Richard, what she would bring to satisfy that craving for living beauty which was so avid in him and because of his fastidiousness and his unwilling loyalty to the soul so unsatisfied. She wondered too whether Ellen could lighten those of his days which were sunless with doubt. And for that reason her appreciation brought her no nearer the girl than a courtier comes to the jewel he thinks fair enough to purchase as a present to his king. She became aware of the obstinate duration of their distance, and, trying to buy intimacy with honesty, because that was for her the highest price that could be paid, she said in the same forced voice, "You know, you're ever so much better than I thought you'd be."

"Am I now? What way?" Like all young people, she loved to talk about herself. "My looks, do you mean? Now, I was sure Richard was funning me when he told me I was nice. He talks so much of my hair that I was afraid he thought little of the rest of me. I'm sure he told you that I'm plain. And I am. Am I not?"

"No, you're beautiful. I expected you to be beautiful." There was a hint of coldness in her voice, as if she disliked the implication that her son might be lacking in taste. "It's the other things I'm surprised at: that you're clever, that you're reflective, that you feel deeply."

"As a matter of fact," said Ellen, confidentially, leaning across the table, "since we're being honest, I don't mind saying that I think you're not over-stating it. But how do you know all that? I'm sure I've been most petty and disagreeable ever since I arrived. I've just been hoping it's not the climate that's doing it, for that'd be hard on Richard and you."

The other woman became almost confused. "Oh, that was me! That was me!"

she said earnestly. "I told you I was evasive. One form it takes is that when I meet people I'm very much interested in, I can't show my interest directly; I take cover behind a pretence of abstraction. I polish my nails and do silly things like that, and people think I'm cold, and stupid about the particular point they want me to see, and they try to attract my attention by behaving wildly, and that usually means behaving badly. It was my fault, it was my fault!"

"Indeed, it was my own ill nature," said Ellen stoutly. "But let us cease this moral babble, as Milton says. I wish you'd tell me why you're surprised that I should be clever, though you were quite cairtain that he would have chosen a good-looking gairl?"

Mrs. Yaverland explained hesitantly, delicately. "Richard has tried to fall in love before, you know. And he has always chosen such stupid women."

Ellen was puzzled and displeased, though of course it was not the notion that he had tried to fall in love with stupid women that distressed her, and not merely the notion of his trying to fall in love with other women. Thank goodness she was modern and therefore without jealousy.

"Why did he do that? Why did he do that?"

There appeared on Marion's face something that was like the ashes of archness. Her heart said jubilantly to itself: "Why, because he loves me, his mother, so far beyond all reason! Because he thinks me perfect, the queen of all women who have brains and pa.s.sions, and all other women who pretend to these things seem pretenders to my throne, on whom he can bestow no favour without suspicion of disloyalty to me. So he went to the other women, who plainly weren't competing with me; those who were specialising in those arts that turn them from women into birds with bright feathers and a cheeping song and lightness unweighted by the soul. He went to them more readily, I do believe, because he knew that their lack of all he loved in me would send him back to me the sooner. I will not believe that any son ever had for his mother a more absurd infatuation. I am the happiest woman in the world. And yet I know it was not right it should be so. What is to happen to him when I die? And he takes all my troubles on himself and feels as if they were his own. But I can see that you, my dear, are going to break the spell that, so much against my will, I've thrown over my son. And no other woman in the world could have done it. You have all the qualities he loves in me, but they are put together in such a different mode from mine that there cannot possibly be any question of compet.i.tion between us. You are hardly more than a child, and I am an elderly woman; you are red and fiery, I am dark and slow; your pa.s.sion grows out of your character like a flower out of the earth, while Heaven knows that I have hardly any character outside my capacity for feeling. So he feels free to love you.

Oh, my dear, I am so grateful to you." But because for many years she had been sealed in reserve to all but Richard, she listened to free speech coming from her lips as amazedly as a man cured of muteness in late life might listen to his own first uncouth noises. So she said none of these things, but murmured, smiling coldly, "Oh, there's a reason....

I'll tell you some time...."

The girl was hurt. Marion bit her lip while she watched her crossly pick up her spoon and eat her ice pudding as if it was a duty. "This is like old times," she essayed feebly. "I've so often watched Richard eat it.

He went through various stages with this pudding. When he was quite small he used to leave the crystallised cherries to the very last, because they were nicest, arranged in a row along the rim of his plate, openly and shamelessly. When he went to school he began to be afraid that people would think that babyish if they noticed it, and he used to leave them among the ice, though somehow they always did get left to the last. Then later on he began to side with public opinion himself, and think that perhaps there was something soft and unmanly about caring so much for anything to eat, so he used to gobble them first of all, trying not to taste them very much. Then there came an awful holiday when he wouldn't have any at all. That was just before he insisted on going to sea. But then he came back--and ever since he's had it every time we come here, and now he always leaves the cherries to the last."

She was now immersed in the story she told; she was seeing again the slow magical increase of the small thing she had brought into the world, and the variations through which it pa.s.sed in the different seasons of its youth, changing from brown candid gracefulness to a time of sulky clumsiness and perpetually abraded knees, and back again to gracefulness and willingness to share all laughter, yet ever remaining the small thing she had brought into the world. With eyes cast down, trying to dissemble her pride, lest the G.o.ds should envy, she added harshly, "He was quite interesting ... but I suppose all boys go through these phases.... I've had no other experiences...."

Ellen was longing to hear what Richard was like when he was a boy, but she had been stung by that insolent, smiling murmur, and she could do nothing with any statement made by this woman but snarl at her. "No other experience?" she questioned peevishly. "I thought Richard said he had a half-brother."

There was no longer any pride in Marion's eyes to dissemble. She stared at Ellen, and said heavily, as one who speaks concerning the violation of a secret, "Did Richard tell you that?" Before the girl had time to answer cruelly, "Yes, he tells me everything," she had remembered certain things which made her stiffen in her chair and keep her chin up and use her eyes as if there still flashed in them the pride which had utterly vanished. "Oh, yes," she a.s.serted, in that forced voice, but very loudly and deliberately. "I have another son. He's a good boy. His name is Roger Peacey. You must meet him one day. I hope you will like him." She paused and recollected why they were speaking of this other son, and continued, "But, you see, I had nothing to do with him when he was a boy."

This struck Ellen as very strange. She went on eating her ice pudding, but she cogitated on this matter. Why had this second son been brought up away from his mother? Surely that hardly ever happened except when there had been a divorce, and a husband whose wife had run away with another man was awarded by the courts "the custody of the child." Had she not talked of this son in the over-bluff tone in which people talk of those to whom they have done a wrong? She was possessed of the fierce monogamous pa.s.sion which accompanies first and unachieved love, that loathing of all who are not content with the single sacramental draught which is the blood of G.o.d, but go heating the body with unblessed fermented wines; and she glared sharply under her brows at this woman, who after losing Richard's father married another man and then, as it appeared, had loved yet another man, as she might at someone whom she suspected of being drunk. It was true that Richard adored her, but then no doubt this kind of woman knew well how to deceive men. Softly she made to herself the Scottish manifestation of incredulity, "Mhm...." And Marion, for thirty years vigilant for sounds of scorn, heard and perfectly understood.

She remained, however, ma.s.sively and unattractively immobile. There came to her neither word nor expression to remove the girl's dubiety. Since she had heard such sounds of scorn over so lengthy a period they no longer came to her as trumpet calls to action, but rather as imperatives to silence, for above all things she desired that evil things should come to an end, and she had learned that an ugly speech ricochetting from the hard wall of a just answer may fly further and do worse. She knew it was necessary that she should dispel Ellen's suspicion, because they must work together to make a serene home for Richard, and she desired to do so for her son's sake, because she herself was possessed by the far fiercer monogamous pa.s.sion of achieved and final love, which is disillusioned concerning mystical draughts, but knows that to take the bread of the beloved and cast it to the dogs is sin. She had acquired that knowledge, which is the only valuable kind of chast.i.ty worth having, that night when she had been forced to commit that profanation. Shading her eyes while there rushed over her the recollection of a pallid face looking yellow as it bent over the lamp, she reflected that even if she conquered this life-long indisposition to reply, the story was too monstrous to be told. It would not be believed.

This girl would look at her under her brows and make that Scotch noise again and think her a liar as well as loose. So she sat silent, letting Ellen dislike her.

She said at length, "Let's go and have coffee in the lounge."

"I'm sure we don't need it," murmured Ellen, as a tribute to the magnificence of the meal.

Crossing the room was a terrible business. She hoped people were not staring at her because she was with a woman whom they could perhaps see had once been bad. No doubt there were signs by which experienced people could tell. Richard's presence seemed all at once to have set behind the rim of the earth.

They sat down at last on a kind of wide marble platform, which looked down on another restaurant where there dined even more glorious people, none of whom wore hats, who seemed indeed to have stripped for their fray with appet.i.te. They were nice-looking, some of them, but not like Richard. She looked proudly round just for the pleasure of seeing that there was not his like anywhere here, and found herself under the gaze of Richard's eyes, set in Richard's mother's face. Doubt left her. Here was beauty and generosity and courage and brilliance. Here was the quality of life she loved. She found herself saying eagerly, that she might hear that adorable voice and hoping that it would speak such strong words as he used: "Yes, Marion?"

"Ellen, when will you marry Richard?"

"We've talked it over," said Ellen, with a certain solemn fear. "We think we'll wait. Six months. Out of respect for mother."

"But, my dear, your mother won't get any pleasure out of Richard being kept waiting. She'd like you to settle down and be happy."

Ellen looked before her with blue eyes that seemed as if she saw an altar, and as if Marion were insisting on talking loud in church. "I feel I'd like to wait," she murmured.

The older woman understood. In such fear of life had she once dallied, one night long before, at the edge of woods, looking across the clearing at the belvedere, and the light in the room behind its pediment, which sent a fan of coa.r.s.e brightness out through the skylight into the pale clotted starshine. With one arm she clasped a sapling as if it were a lover, and she murmured, "He is there, he is waiting for me. But I will not go. Another night...." She had been so glad that there was no moon, so that he would not see her from his window. She had forgotten that her white frock would gleam among the hazel thickets like a ghost! So he had stepped suddenly from between the columns and come towards her across the clearing. It was strange that though she wanted to run away she could make no motion save with her hands, which fluttered about her like doves, and that when he took her in his arms her feet had moved with his towards the belvedere, though her lips had cried faintly but sincerely, "No ... no...." Such a fear of life was of good augury for her son.

Those only feared life who were conscious of powers within themselves that would make their living a tremendous thing. She was exhilarated by the conviction that this girl was almost good enough for her son, but her sense of the prevailing darkness of fate's climate caused her to desire to make the promise of his happiness a certainty, and she exclaimed urgently, "Oh, Ellen, marry Richard soon!"

Ellen turned a timid, obstinate face on this insistent woman, who would not leave her alone with her delightful fears. "After all, this is my life," she seemed to be saying, "and you have had yours to do what you willed with. Let me have mine."

But there had come on Marion the tribulation that falls on unhappy people when they see before them a gleam of happiness. She had to lay hold of it. Although she knew that she was irritating the girl, she said: "But, Ellen, really you ought to marry Richard soon!" She forced herself to speak glibly and without reserve, though it seemed to her that in doing so she was somehow partic.i.p.ating in the glittering vulgarity of the place where they sat. "I want Richard's happiness to be a.s.sured. I want to see him certainly, finally happy. I may die soon.

I'm fifty, and my heart is bad. I want him to be so happy that when I die he won't grieve too much. For, you see, he is far too fond of me--quite unreasonably fond. And even if I live for quite a long time I still will be miserable if he doesn't find happiness with someone else.

You see, I've had various troubles in my life. Some day I will tell you what they are. I can't now. I don't mean in the least that I'm trying to shut you out from our lives. But if I started talking about them my throat would close. I suppose I've been quiet about it for so many years that I've lost the way of speaking out everything but small talk. But the point is that Richard frets about these troubles far too much. He lives them all over again every time he sees they are worrying me. I want you to give him a fresh, unspoiled life to look after, which will give him pleasure to share as my life has given him pain. Do this for him. Please do it. Forgive me if I'm being a nuisance to you. But, you see, I feel so responsible for Richard." She looked across the restaurant, as if on the great wall at its other end there hung a vast mirror in which there was reflected the reality behind all these appearances. She seemed, with her contracted brows and compressed lips, to be watching its image of her destiny and checking it with her reason's estimate of the case. "Yes!" she sighed, and shivered and stiffened her back as if there had fallen on her something magnificent and onerous. "I am twice as responsible for Richard as most mothers are for their sons."

She would have left it cryptically at that if she had not seen that Ellen would have disliked her as a mystificator. She drew her hand across her brow, and immediately perceived that the gesture had so evidently expressed dislike of this obligation to confide that the girl was again alienated, and in desperation she cried out all she meant.

"I'm responsible for him in the usual way. By loving his father. Much more than the usual way, most people would tell me, because of course I knew it wasn't lawful. But there's something more than that. I was so very ill before he was born that the doctor wanted to operate and take him away from me long before there was any chance of his living. I knew he would be illegitimate and that there would be much trouble for us both, but I wanted him so much that I couldn't bear them to kill him. So I risked it, and struggled through till he was born. So you see it's twice instead of once that I have willed him into the world. I must see to it that now he is here he is happy."

Ellen said in a little voice, "That was very brave of you," and soared into an amazed exaltation from which she dipped suddenly to some practical consideration that she must settle at once. Her eyes hovered about Marion's and met them shyly, and she stammered softly, "Does having a baby hurt very much?" She did not feel at all disturbed when Marion answered, "Yes," though that was the word she had been dreading, for the speech she added, "If the child is going to be worth while it always hurts, but one does not care," seemed to her one of those sombre and heartening things like "King Lear," or the black line of the Pentland Hills against the sky, which she felt took fear from life, since they showed it black and barren of comfort and yet more than ever beautiful. It settled her practical consideration: she had known that she would have to have children, because all married people did, but now she would look forward to it without cowardice and without regret. Now she could soar again to her amazed exaltation and contemplate the woman who had given her Richard.

Even yet she was not clear concerning the processes of birth. But in her mind's eye she saw Marion lying on a narrow bed, her body clenched under the blankets; and her face pale and concave at cheek and temple with sickness and persecuted resolution, holding at bay with her will a crowd of doctors pressing round her with scalpels in their hands, preserving by her tensity the miracle of life that was to be Richard. If she had relaxed, the world would not have been habitable, existence would have rolled through few and inferior phases. When she stood at the windows of Grand-Aunt's house on Liberton Brae every evening after mother's death she would have seen nothing but dark gla.s.s patterned with uncheering suns of reflecting gaslight, and beyond a white roadway climbed by anonymous travellers. She would have wept: not waited, as she did, for the sound of the motorcycle that was driven with the dearest recklessness and would bring joy with it. She would never have had occasion to run to the door and open it impetuously to life. Her sensibility would have strayed on the dreary level of controlled grief.

It would not have sank under her, deliciously and dangerously, leaving her to stand quite paralysed while he flung off his cap and coat and gauntlets with those indolent, violent gestures, and whispered to her till his arms were free and he could stop her heart for a second with his long first kiss.

She would have sat all evening in the front parlour with Grand-Aunt and Miss McGinnis and helped with their sewing for the St. Giles's bazaar, instead of appearing among them for five minutes to let them have a look at her great splendid man, who had to bend to come in at the doorway and give Miss McGinnis an opportunity to cry, "Dear me, Mr. Yaverland, you mind me so extraordinary of my own cousin Hendry who was drowned at Prestonpans. He was just your height and he had the verra look of you,"

and to allow Grand-Aunt to declare, "Elspeth, I wonder at you. There was never a McGinnis stood more than five feet five, and I do not remember that Hendry escaped the family misfortune--mind you, I know it's no a fault--of a squint." There would not have been those hours in the dining-room when life was lifted to a strange and interesting plane where the flesh became as thoughtful as the spirit, and each meeting of lips was as individual as an idea and as much a comment on life, and the pressing of a finger across the skin could be watched like the unfolding of a theory.

But those were the fair-weather uses of love. It was in the foul weather she would have missed him most. If this woman had not given her Richard she would have walked home from the hospital alone and wept by the unmade bed whose pillow was still dented by mother's head; she would have had to go to the cemetery with only Mr. Mactavish James and Uncle John Watson from Glasgow, who would have said "Hush!" when she waved her hand at the coffin as it was lowered into the grave and cried, "Good-bye, my wee lamb!" Life was so terrible it would not be supportable without love. She laid her hand on Marion's where it lay on the table, and stuttered, "Oh, it was brave of you!"

The intimate contact was faintly disgusting to the other. She answered impatiently, "Not brave at all; I loved him so much that I would have done anything rather than lose him."

"You loved him--even then?"

"In a sense they are as much to one then as they ever are."

"Ah...." Ellen continued to pat the other woman's hand and looked up wonderingly into her eyes, and was dismayed to see there that this fondling meant nothing to her. She was not ungrateful, but for such things her austerity had no use. All that she wanted was that a.s.surance for which she had already asked. Ellen was proud, and she was a little hurt that the way in which she had proposed to pay the debt of grat.i.tude was not acceptable, so she held up her hand and said coolly, "I'll marry your son when you like, Mrs. Yaverland."