“Thank God. And thank you. So that is the word of the enigma.”
“Yes. There is no other.”
“And if he had been less—what shall we say—Quixotic—less scrupulous on the point of a woman’s honour—you would have followed him to the end of the world——”
“I?” She started back from the table. “I? What do you mean?”
“Why the friend, Sister? Why the camouflage?” He reached out his hand and grasped hers. “Confess.”
She returned his pressure, shrugged her shoulders, and said, without looking at him:
“I suppose it was rather thin. Yes. Of course I would have thrown everything to the winds for him. It was on my account that he went away—but, as God hears me, I never sent him.”
A long silence stole on them. There was so much that struggled to be said, so little that could be said. At last the young man gripped his crutches and wriggled from his chair. She rose swiftly to aid him.
“Let us have a turn in the sun. It will be good for us.”
So they went out and she helped him, against his will—for he loved his triumph over difficulties—down the majestic marble stairs, and they passed the happy tennis courts and the chairs of the cheery invalids looking on at the game, and on through the Japanese garden with its pond of great water-lilies and fairy bridge across, and out of the gate into the little beech wood that screened the house from the home farm. On a rough seat amid the sun-flecked greenery they sat down.
He said: “I may be a sentimental ass, but you seem to be nearer to me than anyone I’ve ever met in my life.”
She made a little helpless gesture. He laughed his pleasant laugh, which robbed his lips of their hardness.
“You supply a long-felt want, you know.”
“That sounds rather nice, but I don’t quite understand, Mr. Baltazar.”
“Oh, Mr. Baltazar be blowed!” he cried. “My name’s Godfrey. For God’s sake let me hear somebody call me by it! You of all people. Why, you knew me before I was born.”
He said it unthinking—a boyish epigram. Her sudden flush brought consciousness of blunder in elemental truth and taste. He sat stiff, horrified; gasped out:
“Forgive me. I didn’t realize what I was saying.”
She glanced covertly at his young and consternation-stricken face, and her heart went out to him who, after all, on so small a point of delicacy found himself so grievously to blame.
“Perhaps, my dear boy,” she said, “it is well that you have touched on this. You and I are grown up and can speak of things frankly—and certain things that people don’t usually discuss are often of supreme importance in their own and other people’s lives. I didn’t know you before you were born, nor did your father. It’s he that counts. If he had known, he would never have left your mother to. … No, no! He would have found some other way. He couldn’t have left her. It’s incredible. I know it. I know all the strength and the beauty and the wonder of him.”
“My God,” said the young man, “how you must have loved him!”
“Without loving him, any fool could have looked through his transparent honesty. He was that kind of man.”
“Tell me,” he said, “all the little silly things you can remember about him.”
He re-explained his eagerness. He had been such a lonely sort of fellow, with no kith or kin with whom he could be in sympathy: an intellectual Ishmaelite—if an inexplicable passion for mathematics and a general sort of craving for the solution of all sorts of problems, human and divine, could be called intellectual—banned by the material, dogmatic, money-obsessed Woodcotts; referred back, as he had mentioned, for all his darling idiosyncrasies to his unmentionable father. Small wonder that he had built up a sort of cult of the only being who might have taken for him a sympathetic responsibility. And now—this was the greatest day of his life. All his dreams had come true. He was not a sentimental ass, he reasserted. If there was one idiot fallacy that the modern world was exploding, it was the fallacy of the debt due by children for the privilege they owed their parents for bringing them into this damned fool of a world. The only decent attitude of parents towards their children was one of profound apology. It was up to the children to accept it according to the measure of its fulfilment. But, after all, an uncared-for human atom, with intelligence and emotions, could not go through life without stretching out tentacles for some sort of sympathy and understanding. He must owe something of Himself—himself with a capital H—to those who begot and bore him. Mustn’t he? So when they impressed on his young mind, by way almost of an hereditary curse, the identity of his spiritual (or, to their way of thinking, anti-spiritual) outlook with that of his father, he, naturally, stretched out to his unknown father the aforesaid tentacles: especially when he learned later what a great man his father was. Yes, really, he considered it the most miraculous day of his life. He would have given another foot to have it.
“There’s another thing,” he said. “Once I found in an old book some odds and ends of his manuscript. I fell to copying his writing, especially his signature. The idiotic thing a boy would do. I got into the trick of it, and I suppose I’ve never got out. Look.”
He scrawled a few words with his signature on the pad. She started. It was like a message from the dead. He laughed and went on with the parable of his father.
“You see,” he concluded, “it is gorgeous to know, for a certainty at last, that the Family were vilely wrong, and my own instinct right, all the time.”
He had spoken with a touch of the vehemence she so well remembered. And she had let him speak on, for the sake of the memories; also in the hope that he might forget his demand for a revelation of them. But he returned to it.
“Another day,” she replied. “These things can’t all be dragged at once out of the past. We’ll have many opportunities of talking—till your new foot comes.”
“You will have another talk—many others, won’t you?” he asked eagerly.
“Why should you doubt it?”
“I don’t know. Forgive me for saying it—I don’t want to be rude, but women are funny sometimes.”
She smiled from the wisdom of her superior age—his frankness had the disarming quality of a child. “What do you know of women, Godfrey Baltazar?”
He wrinkled his brow whimsically and rubbed his hair.
“Not much. What man does? Do you know,” he asked with the air of a pioneer of thought, “you are all damnably perplexing?”
At this she laughed outright. “Isn’t she kind?”
“She—who—oh, yes. How did you guess?”
“The way of Nature varies very little. What about her?”
“She would be all right, if it weren’t for my brother——”
“Your brother? Oh, of course——” She had to reach back into unimportant memories. “Your mother was a widow when she married—with an only son.”
“That’s it. Seven or eight years older than I am. Name of Doon. Christened Leopold. We never hit it off. I’ve loathed the beggar all my life; but he’s a damn fine soldier. Major. D.S.O. Doing splendid work. But the brute has the whole of himself left and isn’t a dot and carry one, like me.”
“And the lady?”
“I’ll tell you another time—in one of our many talks. At present it doesn’t seem to amount to a row of pins compared with my meeting you. My hat!” he exclaimed after a pause. “It’s a funny little world.”
He thrust his hands into his pockets