Chapter XVII The End of the Summer
It was a golden day in September, which is perhaps the most beautiful of all English months, though touched with a gentle melancholy that may be either soothing or saddening, according to circumstances. Regarded as the time for taking up a new spell of work or duty after the relaxation of summer holiday, it is a delightful month, especially when the surroundings in which the work is to be done are such as existed at Royd. The Grant family had returned from the seaside and the Vicar-novelist was positively revelling in his enjoyment of home, and declaring that the best day of a holiday was its last. He had acquired a splendid idea for a novel which should excel all previous novels of his by many degrees, and put into the shade a large number of novels by other writers who had hitherto enjoyed a success in advance of his own. He had sat down to write the first chapter on the morning after their arrival at the Vicarage, and felt to the full the restful charm of his clean, comfortable room, with all his books and conveniences around him, and the garden outside in the full coloured glow of its autumn profusion.
Jane and Pobbles had resumed their studies under the guidance of Miss Minster, and if they were without the experience of satisfaction on that account which their father enjoyed, there was yet satisfaction to be gained from returning to the society of Harry, to whom they had an enormous amount of information to impart.
Harry had also begun work again. The next three months were to be strenuous ones for him, with many hours to be spent with Wilbraham and many more with an army coach who had been called in to supplement Wilbraham’s deficiencies. This was Mr. Hamerton, an obscure man of middle age, who hated coaching embryo subalterns, hated the society of women, and enjoyed life only when in the embrace of the purest of pure mathematics. He was probably the most serenely happy of all the inhabitants of Royd Castle at this time. His hours with Harry were strictly defined, and his pupil, though not an enthusiast in mathematics as he would have liked him to be, showed intelligence and application. The house was not always full of fresh people with whom he had to begin all over again, and he was not expected to spend valuable hours in desultory and desolating conversation with the ladies of the house itself, whom he met only at meal-times. He had most of his time to himself in the large quiet house, which he seldom quitted, and Harry had given up to him his room in the tower, from the top of which he could observe the stars through a telescope of more respectable dimensions than it was customary to find in a country house. Mr. Hamerton, retiring to the absolute seclusion of his room, and the hours of undisturbed study or astronomical contemplation so happily accorded him, would rub his hands with furtive glee over his good fortune in having obtained such employment as this; and the relief to all other members of the household in having him out of the way was unspeakable.
Harry was with the children in the log cabin. They had been home a fortnight, but this was the first time that they had succeeded in drawing Harry there, though they had raced up to it themselves at the first possible moment after their return.
It was Saturday afternoon. They had had a picnic tea, with the “billy” boiled on a fire made of sticks outside, and everything in orthodox backwoods fashion. Jane and Pobbles had looked forward to it enormously, but somehow it had not been quite the success that they had anticipated, though Harry had made himself very busy with the preparations, and on the outside everything had seemed to be as it had been before they went away. Now he and Jane were sitting on the bench outside the cabin, while Pobbles had reluctantly retired to fulfil a half-hour’s engagement with Miss Minster, consequent upon some scholastic failure on his part earlier in the week.
The two of them had been talking, as they had been wont to talk, playing with the idea of such a life as this as a real life and not a make-believe. But the virtue had gone out of such play for Harry. Even now, as he did his best to respond to Jane and not to let her see that his heart was no longer in any game, he was thinking of the last time he had sat where he was sitting now, with Viola, and talked in something of the same way, but with how different a meaning behind the talk!
The talk died down. In Jane’s sensitive little soul was the knowledge that Harry’s heart was not in it. She looked up at him and saw his eyes fixed on something beyond the green and russet of the trees in front of them, and caught the look of yearning in his face.
“Aren’t you happy, Harry?” she asked. “I’ll go away and not bother you, if you’d like me to.”
He turned quickly to her, full of compunction that he should have failed her after all. He had been so determined that the children should see no difference in him. Why, indeed, should there be any towards them? He had looked forward to their return after Viola had gone away. His affection for them, because of their childhood, was in some ways nearer to his love for Viola than other affections of his life; they would console him for the loss of her. And they had done so; but his longing for her was so great, and no consolation was of much avail to ease it.
“Of course I don’t want you to go away, dear,” he said. “I’d rather have you with me than anybody. No, I’m not unhappy—perhaps a little sad sometimes. Lots of things have happened since you went away, you know. I shall be going away myself before long, and as long as the war lasts nothing will be quite like what it was before.”
“Is it only the war that makes you sad?” she asked. “If there’s anything else, I wish you’d tell me, now we’re alone together. Of course, with Pobbles I suppose I’m rather like a boy, and with you, too, when we’re all three together. But I’m not always like that—inside, I mean. I’m really more grown up than you’d think.”
Harry put his arm around her thin shoulders and gave her a fraternal hug. “You’re a dear,” he said. “I don’t really think of you as like a boy. There’s something comforting about your being a girl, though I don’t think about you as being grown up, either.”
“Well then, tell me, Harry,” she said, coaxingly. “We’re real friends, aren’t we? I’d tell you if there was anything that was making me unhappy. I suppose I should tell mother first, but after her I’d tell you—because we’re friends.”
The inclination came to him to pour out his burdened heart to her, but he put it aside. She was a dear loyal little soul, and it would assuage his longing to talk to her about Viola; but he could not burden her with a secret, to relieve his own burden. “I’m not really unhappy,” he said, “only rather sad. There is something—perhaps I’d tell you if you were older, because we’re friends. Anyhow, being friends with you makes me less sad. I didn’t mean you to know anything.”
“Of course I should know,” she said. “But I won’t ask you any more if you don’t want to tell me.”
He smiled at her affectionately. “You’ll be the first person I shall tell when I tell anybody,” he said. He thought for a moment, with a frown of concentration. “I don’t think there’s any harm in our having a little secret together—one of our play secrets. If I ever have anything rather important to tell you—something that I shouldn’t want other people not to know, but I should like to tell you first—I shall come here very early in the morning and put a little note just under the window sill, in the crack, do you see?”
“Oh, yes,” said Jane, her face alight. “That’ll be lovely. I don’t mind your not telling me now, Harry, if you’ll do it like that, so that I shall know before anybody else. Thanks ever so much.”
The return of Pobbles at this moment, with his soul as emancipated as his body, changed the current of their conversation. For the rest of their time together Harry was all that he had been as a companion, and Jane exercised a more rigid control over Pobbles than the women of a family usually bring to bear upon the men. But every now and then she looked at Harry with a glance that belied the extreme masculinity of her deportment. How much did she guess, with her budding woman’s mind and her wholly woman’s sympathies? Nothing of the truth, it may be supposed; but her instincts told her that there was a change in him that would not pass away through the solution of any difficulty that might be troubling him, and that he would never be quite the same as he had been before.
Others had noted it besides Jane. The Grants and Miss Minster talked it over that evening as they sat in their pretty drawing-room after dinner, to the adornment of which had been added an old walnut wood bureau and a pair of Sheffield plate candlesticks, brought home as spoil from the seaside town where they had been staying. Grant’s eyes rested on them with satisfaction many times during their conversation. The war might be entering upon a stage which promised a far longer and harder struggle than any one had hitherto anticipated, and royalties as well as other payments might be affected by it; but Grant’s royalties had come in lately to an encouraging extent and there was still good old furniture to be picked up at bargain prices if you kept your eyes open, and plenty of room in the Vicarage for more.
Not to appear to be criticizing our clerico-novelist too severely for a detachment that was shared by thousands who were afterwards personally drawn into the turmoil, it may be said that nobody at this time, unless it was those at the very heart of it, gauged the immensity of the disaster that was settling down upon Europe and would presently involve the whole civilized world. In future years, with the knowledge of the more than four years of war that were then still to come in retrospect, it will be difficult for the student to understand just how life was altered and how it remained unaffected, and the slow stages that England passed through until there was nobody anywhere whose life remained what it had been before the war.
In those early days there was immense interest in the incidents of warfare, more, indeed, than was taken at a later date, when the lock of vast armies on a line that remained very nearly the same until the end had reduced the expectation of surprise; the papers were eagerly read every morning for the hoped for news of decisive success, but unless there was a personal interest in it, as there was not at this time at Royd, the war did not obscure other interests, or even affect them.
The advent of Mr. Hamerton had brought the approaching change in Harry’s life more into evidence. “I think he’s taking it all very seriously,” Mrs. Grant said. “Thank goodness he is too young to go and fight, but, of course, it will bring it nearer to him, going to Sandhurst; and, anyhow, it will be a great change in his life.”
“I think he is worrying a bit that he’s not old enough to go and fight,” said Grant. “Most boys of his age—nearly old enough, but not quite—would feel like that about it.”
“He has changed a good deal since we went away,” said Mrs. Grant. “He seems to me older altogether. I think the children feel it too. He’s just as sweet to them as ever, but Pobbles said this evening that he wasn’t nearly so much fun to play with.”
“Pobbles brings everything to that test,” said Miss Minster. “If he does not mend his ways, I anticipate an evil future for him.”
“You’ve always been hard on Pobbles,” said Mrs. Grant. “There’s very little that’s really wrong with Pobbles.”
“Thanks chiefly to me,” said Miss Minster. “I’m inclined to think that there’s friction again at the Castle. Poor Mrs. Brent was as lugubrious as possible when she came yesterday, and Mr. Wilbraham has the same disagreeable air as he used to go about with earlier in the summer.”
“That’s true about Wilbraham,” said Grant. “He has been seeing a great deal of a London artist who was lodging at Mrs. Ivimey’s on the common. Perhaps it has made him discontented with his lot here once more.”
“Has he said anything to you about it?” asked Mrs. Grant.
“No. Curiously enough, he didn’t seem to want to talk much about the artist. He just said that he was an interesting fellow to talk to, but they’d decided not to ask him to the Castle. He had his daughter with him, and I suppose they’d have had to ask her too, though Wilbraham didn’t give that as a reason, and only just mentioned her. But he seems to have gone up to talk to the father most afternoons.”
“You know the village gossip about the artist, don’t you?” said Mrs. Grant.
“I don’t encourage village gossip,” said the Vicar.
“How very superior you are!” said Miss Minster. “I love it.”
“Perhaps you would rather I didn’t tell you what they say, dear,” suggested Mrs. Grant.
“I think it’s my duty to hear it,” said the Vicar with a grin.
“Well, they say he was a hard drinker, and the number of empty bottles he left behind him was past belief.”
“Perhaps Mr. Wilbraham went there to drink with him,” said Miss Minster, “and that accounts for his moroseness.”
“You oughtn’t to say a thing like that,” said Grant. “Wilbraham is a teetotaler. None of them drink anything at the Castle.”
“Perhaps that’s why he liked going to see the artist,” said Miss Minster, impenitently.
“And he doesn’t even drink a glass of claret when he lunches or dines here. No, you ought not to say that, even in fun. I think what’s the matter with him is that his teaching of Harry is coming to an end. Of course he has been here for many years, and I suppose he’ll have to look about for something else to do. I don’t suppose he really likes handing Harry over to Hamerton for a lot of his work. In fact, he said as much. He’s devoted to the boy.”
“Everybody is,” said Mrs. Grant, “and at the Castle everything centres round him. Poor Lady Brent seems more stiff and stand-offish than ever. I suppose she feels it too, that everything she has lived for, for years past, is coming to an end, and now it will be tested whether she has been right in bringing a boy up as she has Harry, shut away from the world.”
“I shouldn’t call Lady Brent stiff and stand-offish,” said Grant.
“I only meant in everything that has to do with Harry. One would like to talk to her about him, but——”
“Surely she’s always ready for that!” interrupted Miss Minster.
“Only on the surface. She wouldn’t think of telling one anything that she must be feeling about the future. Oh, I do hope everything will turn out right. It is dangerous to keep a boy shut up as Harry has been, but I think it will pay with him. He’s good right through, and he’s a splendid boy too—physically, I mean.”
“A good man on a horse,” said Grant, in a voice indicative of quotation marks. “Yes, he’s not been mollycoddled. I’m afraid he’ll have some rude shocks when he gets among other young fellows of his age, but he’ll be just as good as they are in the things that young men admire, and he has a fine character to carry him through. I hope she’ll be justified in the course she has taken. I think she will.”
September wore itself out, to the sadness of October, but in days now and then the boon of summer seemed to linger. Early one sunny morning, when the grass was drenched with dew and sparkling gossamer curtains hung upon all the bushes, little Jane ran through the garden and up to the wood where the log cabin was.
The day before Harry had come to tea with the children in the school-room. They had had an uproarious game together afterwards, and Pobbles had said that it was more fun to play with him now than it had been before the holidays. Jane, too, had felt that there was a difference in him, and had been not the least uproarious of the three. There was a weight removed; perhaps Harry would tell her what his secret was now.
Harry had kissed both her and Pobbles, who was just not too old to take the attention as anything but a compliment on saying good-bye. He had said nothing to Jane, but had given her a quick look which she interpreted at once.
That was why she had got up as early as possible that dewy, sparkling morning and was running to the cabin as fast as her long thin legs would take her.
Between the board which formed the sill of the window and the vertical half-logs beneath it was a space which she had often examined before, but with no result. Now she drew from it a piece of folded paper. It was Harry’s promised message to her—first of anybody:
“Dear little Jane—I’m off to be a soldier. Good-bye, dear, and love from
HARRY.”