PART I DULCE DOMUM (continued 2)

“Miss Roberts, aren’t we going for a walk this afternoon?” Lottie trotted in, with the moral shine about her of having that morning helped Bunny remake Nina’s bed, and that afternoon kept Honor Rose amused for three-quarters of an hour while Nurse dressed.

“Yes, dear, now. And tell Ursula I wish her to come too. I’ve something to tell you both.”

“Something nice?”

“I’m afraid not—but,” brightly, “things can’t always be nice, can they?”

Grace, with a low: “Thank you so much. You’ve been such a help,” left the room.

The tidings of “something wrong” were beginning to creep about the house, to make themselves felt uneasily ... but Nina was still in ignorance, for the straightforward reason that Hal himself and every one else dreaded too much the ordeal of breaking it to her. In the end it was William who voluntarily undertook the task.

“I’ve just been with Lottie,” he informed Nina, in the passage outside the door of her room. “And she’s just been with Miss Roberts.”

“Get on with it,” laughed Nina, knowing that no dynamo on earth would urge William beyond his own stolid conception of speed.

“Grace told Miss Roberts, and Mother told Grace. Aunt Lavvy told Mother.”

“Well, what?” Nina was careless of the abyss on whose brink she stood.

“That Hal stole the pound belonging to the Bank.”

“You’d better be careful what you’re saying, young man.” Nina laughed scornfully. “Hal, indeed!”

William looked at her with round eyes that held something of pity. “You’d rather it was Bunny. But it wasn’t. It was Hal. I’m sorry he did it, but I’d rather for once it was him.” He paused. Then, with a disgusting lapse from chivalry: “You never thought much of Bunny next to Hal, did you?”

Nina stood for a moment rigid, as though the whole of her life were in suspension. Then, angrily brushing William aside, she marched straight into the boys’ den. To Hal’s moody vision, she seemed strangely out of proportion in her big hard-ringing incredulity. He clenched his hands, dreading the next few minutes; wishing that a powerful wave could lift him bodily and set him down again on the leeward side of them.

“William has the cheek to say——”

“Yes. It’s true.”

“You didn’t?”

He was silent.

“Hal, not ... you?”

“Why shouldn’t it be me?”

“Stealing?” Her mouth was drawn in pain as though she were sucking at some bitter fruit.

He nodded. No hope of explaining with any success to Nina, as to Bunny, the slippery differences which separated his act from stealing. He had only just learnt himself that such differences existed; and Nina certainly would not and could not admit them, except as an attempt at cowardly shirking of consequences.

He had hardly glanced at consequences, yet.

“I wish I was dead,” Nina broke out suddenly.

“Don’t be a damned idiot.”

“It’s as ghastly for me as for you. Can’t you see that? I’ve always backed you up.”

No, there were no surprises in conduct from Nina, as there had been from himself, from Aunt Lavvy and from Bunny. Every one of the raging contemptuous accusations which stammering she hurled at him, had already sounded across his mind during the past hour. Nina, like all those cool clear people who hold that it is bad form to show or even to feel emotion, was betrayed by a genuine blow into melodrama.

“I’ve always backed you up. If you had got into any decent scrape.... But—Good Lord!—the commonest board-school cad would have more sense of honour.... Men sometimes steal when they’re hungry—starving—but you—— What do you suppose they’ll say at Winborough? A girl from our school was expelled once for pinching half-a-crown that didn’t belong to her—serve her right—but she was a snivelling little rat, and her people were no class. I suppose you’d cheat at games now. Oh, I—I don’t want ever to see anybody again ... they’ll be laughing at me even if they don’t say it straight out. I’ve swanked about you, and you’ve let me down.”

It was all in that last phrase.

“I never asked you to swank about me,” said Hal slowly. He was standing with his back to her, looking out of the window, and bidding good-bye to a Nina deferential in spirit, though offering, for appearance’s sake, a casual surface to his lordly good humour. A Nina persistently engaged in his service, preoccupied with his interests, obstinately compelling family and outsiders to acknowledge his supremacy. Hal sighed, relinquishing his glorious past.

“I wish to God you’d shut up and go away.”

With her hand on the door, Nina turned: “How was it found out?”

“Found out?” Hal was glad of a cue to be angry in his turn. “What the devil do you mean—found out? I told Aunt Lavvy directly——”

“Directly she asked you? It was at the ’phone, and you lied about it. I was there and heard you. You pretended to look in your pockets.”

Hal shrugged his shoulders. “All the same I told Aunt Lavvy myself. Directly after lunch.” But “directly I came to my senses ...” was what he had been going to say before.

“I suppose she’ll try and shield you. I wouldn’t in her place.”

“You would. But she won’t. She’s livid.”

“Aunt Lavvy!” A short scornful laugh from Nina. Aunt Lavvy, with all her gentle wisdom, her sweet eyes, her pretty dainty habits, her silvery sense of humour, her tolerance, her tact, and the secret niche of favouritism which Hal and Nina jointly occupied in her heart—livid indeed!

She would be deeply sorry, yes! Nothing more damaging than that.

“Better go and find out for yourself.”

“I will, then.”

But Aunt Lavvy was down in the drawing-room, having tea.

Tea, as the first public re-union since lunch, was also the tangible betrayal of moral disorganization at the Laburnums. Aunt Lavvy, Miss Roberts, Ursula and Lottie were present. Mrs. Maxwell and Grace had been invited to tea with Mrs. Fennimore, the banker’s wife; and, after a hurried talk-over with Miss Roberts, Grace had decided it the wiser policy and the truest service to her country—i. e., the family—to go as though nothing had happened, and make excuses for Mrs. Maxwell, whose blotched and tear-swollen condition still kept her to her room. “You see, Miss Roberts, nobody outside the house knows anything yet, and we mustn’t let them begin to suspect....”

Hal, aware that by some pressure of invisible law he would have to appear at dinner, renounced his tea, and, like his mother, shut himself up in his room. He shut himself up there too long, so that the prospect of ever leaving it and facing publicity swelled to abnormal difficulty.

Bunny forlornly marched away for a solitary walk; and William, with the precaution of a large bun annexed from the tea-table, had followed him. He did not catch up with Bunny, but was satisfied to march unobserved about a hundred yards behind him. He saw him fling himself face downwards in a field; sat down and waited ... and finally arrived home about eight minutes in Bunny’s rear.

Nina, bursting open the door in her search for Aunt Lavvy, had thrown a look of disgust at the “schoolroom mess” present, and rushed out again.

Lottie asked if she might carry up a cup of tea and some cake to poor Hal. Aunt Lavvy’s face became smooth and uninterested. But Miss Roberts, to Ursula’s horror, gave assent: “Do, dear, that will be very nice of you.”

“You’re not to, Lottie,” Ursula cried passionately.

“Really, Ursula——”

“She’s only curious. Let her take Mother a cup if she wants a canteen job.”

Aunt Lavvy said, with the faint lisp in her voice a little more assertive than usual: “Do you know, Lottie darling, I’d have given you the job of bringing my tea upstairs if I’d only had a little sitting-room of my own. Food in one’s bedroom is not very tempting, is it? But just today——”

She sighed. Then smiled bravely, with the corners of her mouth—not with all of it—when Miss Roberts sympathetically asked whether she had a headache, and replied: “No, I mustn’t indulge myself by pretending I have. The headache pose is fatally tempting to old ladies. You’ll know one day, Miss Roberts.”

“That was meant for Mother,” reflected Ursula; “and sending Miss Roberts down for stronger tea—she’s never done it before—was to impress Gums and the servants that she has a right to it because she pays.” Ursula was making the same discovery as erstwhile Hal had made. “‘Just today’ was a stinger for Hal. And ‘the little sitting-room of her own’ she aimed at——”

Ursula, subconsciously, winced with fear.

“Are you going to split on Hal to the Bank?” she asked, wondering what made her voice sound so noisy.

Again that curious glassy obstinacy passed over Aunt Lavvy’s usually mobile prettiness. She replied nothing, but with careful selection she put aside the slices of the Swiss Roll and cut herself a piece from the uncut portion.

“Ursula, really, this is going too far. This is disloyal. When your Aunt Lavvy is doing her best to behave as though nothing had happened——”

“Why should she? Something has happened. But it’ll be like that all the time, I know. Mother will come down to dinner trying to look as though she hadn’t cried, and we’ll all look as though of course she hadn’t. And Father will simply shut up and not play. He’s never supposed to join in when the rest of us pretend. And Grace will talk tactfully to Stanley about the babies, and how town is looking, and her tea-party, and the leaves falling. And Gums will ‘draw out’ Lottie, and we’ll all of us not stare at Hal, and feel beastlier than we’ve ever felt before, and goodness knows what Nina and Bunny will do, because I haven’t seen them since it happened. But it might be a bit better—not much, but a bit—if we could all be as glum as we liked.”

“Would you have said that during the war, Ursula? Why, I think it was splendid how every one hid their own feelings and were cheerful.” Miss Roberts, having been officially given charge of the situation by Grace—who had not got it to give—and asked to take care of it until a quarter to six, was feeling the hours unwontedly taut and thrilling.

“This isn’t the war. It’s us.”

[VIII]

MR. MAXWELL and Stanley returned together from the golf-house about six o’clock, and were at once anxiously taken possession of by their wives. Presently, Hal received the summons he expected to the study.

It was not to be the old thunderous “You young rascal” business, such as Bunny always encountered, but a Serious Talk; the kind that began: “Don’t be afraid of me, my boy....”

Hal was afraid. A wrathful parent was a thing that might happen to any fellow. There was, however, a strange solemnity, proving his crime in an unspeakable category, about a father who suddenly treated him as an equal. “I want your confidence, my boy. After all, I’m your father. What was your motive?”

If Hal had kept the money to extricate himself from some tangible male scrape—such as a bar-maid—he might have been able to respond to the spirit of gruff intimacy which the crisis had brought about. It was obviously impossible to pour out in his own defence a lot of vaporous drivel about Michaelmas daisies and the goodness of God. He was miserably certain in his own mind that his father was going to drag in religion pretty soon—real religion, the Sunday kind.

And sure enough, Tom Maxwell, really staggered in his pride and his safe trust in permanence, by Hal’s lapse from everyday honesty, was unable to find any other contribution to the scene than the Eighth Commandment.

“Yes, I know,” muttered Hal.

For the last six years they had talked only of sport: cricket, football, boxing, rowing, and, occasionally, to humour the older man, golf. On this basis, they had presented an appearance of chumminess which, the world declared, was so typical of the modern unformidable relations between two generations.

Now—“Can I go, father?”

“Suppose it gets talked about round here? Suppose your Aunt Lavvy refuses.... Your future career.... A good name travels by road, a bad name by express.” Mr. Maxwell was too dispirited even to disavow his originality by a pretence of inverted commas.

Hal’s dread of public humiliation did not stretch beyond Winborough. That was bad enough, and too bad to face. Home was only an episode that occurred three times a year.

Mr. Maxwell went slowly back to his wife, and closed the bedroom door behind him. “He won’t confess. I did my best.”

“She’ll tell.” Florrie Maxwell, with shaking fingers, tried to fasten up her plentiful black hair.

“Nonsense. What nonsense you talk, Florrie. One would think Lavvy was a vindictive woman. She’s as fond of the children as we are. After all these years! Besides, the thing that matters is not whether everybody gets to know, but that Hal should have——”

“Hal’s Hal to me, whatever he did. I want to save him being punished, that’s all. But Lavinia is vindictive. You’ve never seen it. You’ve only seen that she’s got a best-china-tea-set face and a pretty refined voice, and knows just the right thing to say.... D’you think I’ve liked it, having her always in the house to put matters right with you or Nina or Bunny, after I’ve maybe been too quick or clumsy and blundered somewhere? I’d have rather they stayed wrong, thank you. A paying guest’s one thing, for you know exactly what you’re getting from her; and how much ‘Aunt Lavvy’ here, and ‘Aunt Lavvy’ there, you can allow her for the money. But what she’s been doing in the house for the last fifteen years ... unless it was for you to keep on comparing her with me, as I’ve seen you doing over and over again. And the children, too. But they can be excused, because she’s clever, and she worked for it, and the Lord gave her silver hair and a sweet voice, and it’s worth a bit of play-acting to be the one in the house that everybody comes to first. But you, Tom, to have been taken in too—she’s selfish and hard, for all her soft ways, and as obstinate.... Well, you’ll see in the next few days, and I’m glad of it, because for you to have thought she was the sort of lady you’d rather have married—and I’ve seen you thinking it over and over again. Oh, I may talk too loud and laugh too heartily, and perhaps I’m not dainty enough, and my dresses don’t look like Lavvy’s.... Nina says they always gape where they do up.... For all that, when it comes to a wife, you’re better off with me than with her, or else you ought to have known beforehand which was the kind you admire, and not have special manners for her and the ordinary kind will do for me....”

And having several times worked up to a climax without achieving it, Mrs. Maxwell went on with the suspended work of fastening that thick untidy tail of black hair. She was rather tremulous, but hopeful, now that she had at last relieved herself, that Tom would give the cue for a sentimental reconciliation. As a matter of fact, the poor woman believed that she had expressed her secret bitterness far more poignantly than was actually the case. Her personality was not fitted to translate pathos ... with those dropping hairpins, and the bodice of her purple stuff dress dangling limply downwards from the waist, where she had just now slipped her arms out, to wash.

Her husband was angry. He fumbled for his justification. Florrie knew quite well why Miss Lavinia had become Aunt Lavvy, and why she had stayed on in the house after they could have afforded to manage without her. If the world accepted her welcome entrance in the character of delightful-old-Aunt, her sudden exit as a superfluous lodger would have upset the whole illusion. No need for Florrie to pretend that she wouldn’t have minded Buckler’s Cross knowing it had been a vulgar financial arrangement. And then, Florrie owned up barely half her own shortcomings as though these were all, which he felt vaguely was an injustice to his tolerance; not only had he suffered her loud voice and coarse laugh and her dresses that were always failures, and her lamentable lack of tact; but she had no delicate little reserves; and her fresh complexion had deepened to mauve with tiny scratching red lines where the colour was most violent; and she was too intimate with inferiors, hoping vainly thus to ingratiate herself ... and ... oh, thousands of minor irritations! If she owned she was one thing, she ought to own to the rest, in fairness to what he had to put up with.

Her dressing-table ... useless china ornaments and stands and trays pushed about anyhow, and her brush with the handle broken off years ago and never mended; she wielded it from the jagged stump. A lace collar that had not been put away; a bottle of medicine, half empty, dusty; pins and safety-pins and brooches; a photograph of her parents; and a twist of paper screwed into the support of the looking-glass so that it should not swing backwards....

He was conscious of a tired nausea at the sight of her dressing-table.... What did Lavvy’s look like? Ah, that was it? She did not see that Lavvy could still represent to him a woman mysterious and fragrant, coming down to dinner from behind closed doors. He remembered now having once said to Florrie in a burst of confidence after a successful “musical evening,” that they ought to be right-down proud of having Lavvy to live with them, because anybody could spot that she was better-class than themselves.

If Florrie had been offended then, why didn’t she say so? Hang it, he had included himself in the inferiority!

He was accumulating grievances, while he moved about the room, changing from his golfing tweeds into “something comfortable,” while Florrie waited, with turbulent heart, for the miracle of understanding to take place in him.

The children. They carried their confidences to Lavvy, and Florrie was jealous. Women were always jealous, and never logical. If, instead of being cattish, she had studied the reason why Grace and Nina and Hal and Ursula and Bunny and Lottie and William preferred Aunt Lavvy, except for the perfunctory “of course Mother comes first” ... Florrie was so brusque and boisterous with them—laughed at their bruises and snubbed their sorrows; furthering her ridiculously overdone theory of “not putting up with any nonsense.” Had Florrie been tenderer——

Then Ronald might have been alive still.

And Hal would probably not have disgraced them all by keeping money which did not belong to him.

Queer—how this stormy business with Hal had tossed up the forgotten jetsam of the years! How long was it since he had grieved for Ronald? The child was only three when he had died of the measles.... “Better let ’em all have it together, and get it over” ... that was Florrie. And Ronald had got it over—promptly.

But if Florrie had only taken a decent mother’s care of the little chap....

And Mr. Maxwell said so, quite suddenly, having reached this point in his reflections without giving his wife any clue as to how he got there. She had hoped he was all the while dreaming back to their courtship. Perhaps he might break out with: “By George, Flo, d’you remember that drive home from Richmond in the hansom, after the Wilkinsons’ ball?”

But ... Ronald? She stared, stupefied. And then she gulped: “You might as well say straight out I’m a murderess.”

“I didn’t say that, but it doesn’t do to be too slapdash with babies. Tender at the two ends, tough in the middle, is most persons’ lives!”

“I’ve brought up seven healthy ones for you. Or perhaps Lavvy brought them up?” Her uncontrollable grievance had possessed her again, and she linked it on to his, with: “I suppose—if Lavvy had been Ronald’s mother——”

“He might not have,” Tom Maxwell answered her. And left the room.

Downstairs in the hall, on the salver, a letter awaited him, just come by the seven o’clock post. And next to the letter stood Bunny:

“It’s for you, dad.”

“Ah—thank you, my boy!”

With eyes more than usually bright and dark, Bunny watched him read it. He had known from the postmark and uncertain handwriting, “Mr. Maxwell” instead of “T. Maxwell, Esq.,” that it was from the tuck-shop to which he owed fifteen bob. Hal’s note, written after lunch, and containing a postal order for that sum, was too late to save him from exposure. But Bunny was glad of it. His imagination had given birth to a scheme in bold colourings and with some surprising dramatic effects, directly he had spotted that letter on the salver.

“I thought I’d forbidden you to owe to the tradesmen round your school, Bunny.”

But it would have been “Bernard,” and a much sterner tone, if Hal’s crime had not dwindled a mere scrape to insignificance.

“Yes, I know, dad. I’m sorry. You’ve guessed now, of course, why Hal kept back that quid from the Bank?”

“You asked him——?” And the burden of depression lightened with Bunny’s answer:

“Yes, I was dead scared that old Swayne would write to you. He’d threatened to; so I owned up to Hal—and he sent off the fifteen bob today, and told me not to worry any more. It—was awfully decent of him, wasn’t it, dad?”

“Theft is never decent, my boy.”

“But it makes a difference,” Bunny urged, “that he grabbed the note to shield me from your wrath?”

“To shield me from your wrath” was overdoing it. And if Mr. Maxwell had remembered more about boys in their teens, he would have realized here that Bunny’s confession was too glib and well-produced to be natural. If Bunny had been relating a true state of affairs, his manner would have been either sullen or abashed, and his speech a stumbling incoherence.

“It makes a difference, yes. Go and tell Hal I want him.”

Hal listened disgustedly to Bunny’s account of the altered situation.

“You costly young fathead. What in the name of Mike made you spin him a yarn like that?”

“Just an idea,” Bunny explained airily.

“Idea your grandmother! Well, you can march straight down again, and tell him it’s all bunkum.” Hal hated theatricals. And no small part of his shame at the recent situation was the fact that it seemed to twitch everybody’s behaviour well away from the normal.

Bunny had known Hal well enough not to expect from him a quick flush of emotion, a grateful hand laid on his shoulder, a gruff: “It’s—awfully decent of you, Bunny, old man. I shan’t forget ...” which was the way a boy accepted another boy’s sacrifice in the noblest type of school fiction. But he had just hoped to persuade Hal to acquiesce in the inspired falsehood.

“The letters crossed. You did send off fifteen bob for me today. Wasn’t it the same quid?”

“No.”

“Well, but it works out to the same. When you hung on to Aunt Lavvy’s pound, wasn’t it because lending me that fifteen bob made you fifteen bob short?”

“No. Nothing to do with it. She’d had her ’phone call from the Bank, and asked me about that extra pound note, before you came out to me at the earthworks about your tuck-shop scrape.”

Bunny immediately collapsed into tears again.

“Oh—don’t!” Hal was unhappy and frightened beyond ordinary exasperation now. He simply could not understand what had occurred to Bunny, to weaken him like this. Nor could Bunny, except that his own scrapes always left him something to do, something to suffer, some poise to maintain, and an inner conviction that, in spite of all the surface fuss, they really did not fundamentally matter. Whereas Hal’s loss of moral prestige did matter. And it had, moreover, robbed Bunny of a prerogative. Bunny liked being the bad boy of the family. Hal’s usurpation of the position was unnatural; and when Bunny tried to adjust the look of things—only the look of them—Hal resisted and made brutal statements of fact. And Bunny felt helpless.... Especially as he had lulled his quivering and damaged faith in Hal into a belief that the money had really been annexed in his own interest, and that, therefore, the tuck-shop scrape was at the bottom of all the recent widdershins action of the world.

Still showing stained cheeks, and with listless feet, Bunny returned to his father, and repeated Hal’s dogged denial of his tale. And Mr. Maxwell spread about the house how Bunny had tried to shield his elder brother by pretending his elder brother was shielding him. And Bunny gained more halo, and was correspondingly more downcast and wretched, wearing it uneasily, as a woman in a resplendent new hat which does not suit her.

[IX]

DINNER forced the scattered agitations of the Laburnums round the same table. It was Hal’s reluctance, and not his sense of climax, which brought him last into the dining-room. The occasion was very much as Ursula had foretold, except that she had not reckoned on the swift personal misery which conquered her at the first sight of Hal, hitherto invulnerable, now exposed without his armour of unconscious lordliness.

Up till now, she had been aware of the blow which the family had sustained, without, as it were, becoming intimate with it. But now—“I can’t bear it,” she told herself, fingers interlocked and crushed together under the cloth, knees rigid, and heart pounding at a ridiculous pace....

Aunt Lavvy was saying to Stanley: “I’m afraid all your favourite books are too solemn for me, Stanley. I tried hard to read more than seven pages of ‘Archæological Splendours of the Dolomites,’ but it was doleful work!”

Did none of them see ... that unless he could be quickly protected, big splendid Hal was injured for life?

Surely Aunt Lavvy would not make him face the world—school and ’Varsity and Buckler’s Cross—as he now faced the family, apologetically, and with careful eyes that fixed themselves only on inanimate objects. Oh, surely she would not tell?

But Ursula knew she would.

Aunt Lavvy was wearing her prettiest lilac dress, with a strip of black velvet ribbon round the throat, and a cobwebby lace fichu held in its place by a pearl miniature brooch. But Mr. Maxwell was pointedly not admiring her, with a—“There you are?” to the false suspicions of his wife; and Florrie Maxwell was thinking of her sons Ronald and Hal, but mostly of Ronald; and Grace tried, in low tones and by dumb pressure of hand, to cheer her up. Bunny moped, and Nina displayed an attitude of savage silence that defied any reminder of her lifelong championship of a Hal without peer. Lottie, who only had milk and biscuits, passed things to Hal far more often than was necessary; and Stanley and Miss Roberts and Aunt Lavvy divided the conversation between them.

“And they’re the only three not of the family,” thought Ursula, to whom alone that night the foggy atmosphere was pellucid. “And they’d none of them do a thing to help Hal, either!”

She lifted her lids suddenly, and met Hal’s gaze full upon her. It was as though he pleaded: “Get me out of this ...” and then his eyes were downcast again, leaving her with the responsibility.

Stanley Watson and his father-in-law remained over their wine, after the others had left the table with a precipitation that suggested escape rather than withdrawal. Stanley immediately tackled the delicate subject from the point of view neither of Hal nor of Aunt Lavvy, but the bank-clerk:

“Just because our natural desire is to shield Hal, we ought to remember that all the time the poor chap who made the mistake in cashing the cheque will get into trouble unless the guilt is clearly acknowledged in other quarters. Don’t you agree with me, sir?”

“No,” said Mr. Maxwell resentfully, wondering what his eldest daughter had ever seen in this long-winded prig of a fellow.

Afterwards, he tackled Grace in a corner of the drawing-room.

“But I do so respect Stanley for being able to be just and impartial about it, when, of course, we’re all so over-heated, father dear.”

“I don’t save your husband rent and rates all the year round so that he should be just and impartial when I don’t want him to be!” and Mr. Maxwell strode wrathfully away to his study.

Grace, in a sudden shower of tears at the unkind reminder of an obligation, flew in search of her confidante, Miss Roberts. The nursery slid back into a schoolroom directly the babies were in bed; but finding there only Ursula, Bunny, Nina, Lottie, and William in pyjamas—five in hot conclave—she gave them a mere glimpse of her piteously working features, and ran on up to the attic bedroom.

“Now, what’s the matter with ‘our sensible one’?” Ursula mimicked her mother’s usual introduction of Grace to strangers.

“I expect Stanley’s taking Aunt Lavvy’s side, and father’s rowed her about it,” was the solution laid down by William’s drawl.

“And she tells Gums everything, and they say, ‘it’s been such a relief to talk matters over and get something settled,’” Lottie contributed towards enlightenment. She was a child who could usually be trusted by her elders not to tittle-tattle, but William need not suppose he was unrivalled in the intelligence department.

“Stanley—Aunt Lavvy—Gums——” Ursula sat sideways on the big rocking-horse, her small smooth head, with its lustreless gold hair brushed back to a long plait, tilted against the wallpaper, on which the legend of Miss Muffet and the spider was stamped in nauseous pale-blue-and-mustard repetition. “Hasn’t anything funny struck you about just those three being against us?”

“Against Hal, you mean?”

“Isn’t it the same thing?”

Silence duly acknowledged that it was. Nina might be horrified, and Bunny shocked, and William tactlessly quick to emphasize a Bunny no longer inferior, but even in their disillusion they were all untried in the endeavor not to let Hal’s humiliation escape beyond the radius of the Laburnums itself.

“Well, what about them?” asked Lottie.

“I know.” Bunny listlessly supplied the correct answer to Ursula’s flung question. “They’re just the only three in the house who aren’t family.”

Ursula nodded at him. “And it’s a mistake to have people living with you who don’t belong to the family,” she said. “In a crisis, they’re black-legs.” She was not sure of the exact meaning of black-legs, but it expressed her secret angry conviction of a citadel betrayed from within.

“I don’t believe Aunt Lavvy’s really not one of us, and I’m going to her now,” and Nina dashed off in a spasm of fierce impulsive energy.

“We should look awf’ly silly,” Lottie remarked after a pause, “if she came back and said that Aunt Lavvy said that of course she wouldn’t tell on Hal, and never meant to, and why hadn’t any of us asked her about it before.”

William chimed in: “After all, no one except Hal himself and Mother have heard Aunt Lavvy say a word about telling Mr. Fennimore when he comes to supper tomorrow.”

“Is that when she means to, William? Who told you?”

It proved on closer examination that William had not been told. It had just drifted into his consciousness that Sunday evening after supper was the time when Aunt Lavvy would elect to inform Buckler’s Cross and the world that Hal Maxwell was a thief. They had all wondered exactly when ... but uncertainty penned them in no longer. Somehow they felt William had answered the unspoken query correctly.

“I shouldn’t be s’prised if Bunny went to Oxford now,” continued William in thoughtful tones.

Immediately, he was smote upon the head. “Why the devil should I?” demanded the second son of the Maxwells.

“Well—” William was in no way perturbed, “now that everything’s changed——”

“Nothing’s changed!”

And then Nina returned to them with the expression of one who has dashed her head with violence into hard clear glass where she expected to find only air.

“Time you were back in bed again, Sweet William,” was all she said. “And you, too, Lottie.”

“I was just saying,” William repeated, with a subtle relevance which was almost incredible, considering his years, “that I shouldn’t be s’prised if Bunny went to Oxford now.”

[X]

THE Laburnums next morning resembled a fever-patient whose temperature has inexplicably rushed up in the night.

Everybody in the disturbed household had either lain awake, quietly working up the dimensions of their grievance, viewed from all four points of the compass; or else had awoken with a start to remember that their average life was now occupied by a bogey of horror, which, during the few hours’ oblivion, had swelled to a frightfulness out of all proportion.

Aunt Lavvy’s bogey was “What must the Bank think of Me.” She lay and chafed at the thought that she had not yet freed herself, in the Bank’s eyes, from all complicity with the theft of the missing pound note. A good many little spinsters, with an otherwise well-balanced set of values, have this curiously over-rated respect for all male-run institutions connected with capital, income, investments, dividends and cheques. It struck her, while the rain spattered at the window, and the wind creaked the boughs, that she had probably been thrust—through Hal—nearer than ever before to the outer edge of that safe circle which enrings the Law abiding. Her impeccable name had perished.... She was entangled in an Unpleasant Affair with the Bank.... Oh, Mr. Fennimore must be told when he came. She would explain the whole situation to him, down to the final details. It was urgent.... She was not afraid, but angry, very angry. Sheer impertinence of Nina to have urged her so impatiently to save Hal at all costs. Hal, indeed!—and unless she looked after her own good name, who would do it for her? The Maxwell children did not really love her, as they always pretended to do; they merely used her as an auntly convenience. And now they all turned upon her as the cause of trouble, even though it was obviously hers and not theirs to be resentful and vindictive.... But that was always the way, living with families not your own.... She ought to have taken a flat at the time, and not heeded the Maxwells’ financial difficulties. A charming, bijou flat—then she could have owned a parma and primrose boudoir as well as a bedroom——

Ursula, who had been dreaming, woke up with a thumping heart, and stretched out her hand to fumble for the matches.... She wanted sight of dear familiar things to lull this dreadful uneasiness that sleep and the darkness and memory of yesterday had smuggled into the room.

Familiar things.... The tiny grate, in which she had not yet lit her first triumphantly solitary fire; a framed coloured picture, on the wall, of pierrots and a vivid blue background and balloons that were balls of gold fire; very popular for four-and-sixpence in the picture-shops at the time; and very popular with the flappers of a period grown beyond “Sir Galahad” and Burne-Jones, and far indeed beyond “The Souls Awakening,” to a taste that was “quaint” and “whimsical” or sometimes (proudly) “barbaric.”

Ursula, in her barbaric phase, had hung over the mantlepiece a necklace of beads and shark’s teeth once given to her by Aunt Lavvy, who had known a missionary.

The pierrot picture and the beads and the fireplace represented to her the supreme gems of the room.

The rag-mat on the linoleum was faded, and the other mat, near the door, did not match it. The wallpaper merely covered the wall with a yellowish-brown effect, and the chintz on the one rickety basket-chair was dim; the cushion a crewel-work relic. The white lumpy spread had been carefully turned back over the iron bedposts. The blind was awry, and showed, beyond the window, a corner of wall and a cistern belonging to the house beside the Laburnums. Warm red stuff curtains which Ursula rather liked, and a light wood dressing-table and washstand which she would have hated had they not also been, like everything else in the room, emphatically hers,—these, with another curtain run on a rod across the bulging corner, behind which were her dresses, completed the actual furnishings. She had coaxed Hal to fix up a shelf for her books—about a couple of dozen, with none of the battered look to them which indicates an owner who is also a lover. Indeed, Ursula valued them more because their rich, cosy appearance covered part of the wall, than for their contents. She treasured far more intimately the lumps and sticks of coloured sealing-wax, gold and lilac and black and emerald-green, and the squat seal, stamped with a “U,” which, with her ink-bottle, lay on the small bamboo table. Also the blue pottery jug on the mantleshelf, holding its bright spread of autumn leaves.

How can one explain the magic of enjoyed loneliness which made each object in the room, the room itself, the shape of it, and the door that kept it apart from the rest of the house, and the view contained in the window, precious and significant to the little girl, sitting up in the bed?

A single bedroom can hold a thousand different dreams—a double bedroom only one reality. And so we imagine wide-eyed sixteen in an obviously appropriate setting of spotless white walls and rosebud cretonne; with a deep-cushion window-seat, and a view of the sea and moonlight, or a wild-cherry tree in bloom.

Ursula was very far from being a woman yet; very far from being a child. She could be sullen—tomboyish—sedate—pert, without knowing yet which of these personalities was the fundamental herself. Actually, the fundamental herself was Ursula sedate, shyly impudent, deliciously clear-cut, her brows drawn low and straight over demurely amused eyes; her voice uttering with conscious gentleness some startling decision or idea. “I am the cat that—without defiance and without fuss—walks by itself.” That was the real Ursula, which would outlast the romp, the flapper and the stormy adolescent, but which was now only rarely visible through her inevitably tormented years of trying to imitate everybody she admired; and trying to grab and make permanent those glints and hints of splendour which shook pure lights from the leaves on late afternoons in May, or glowed suddenly in the lit wet hedges of October when, towards evening, the sun battled its way from under a day of rain.

Life at the Laburnums was—well, not exactly dull; not a bit dull, in fact, but lacking in wayward glory. No action was ever performed that filled her with bursting gladness, amazement, pride, or a queer big sorrow. Every one was just rather ragged and incomplete, getting over the patchwork somehow, yes—but Ursula’s veneration was for completeness. She once thought Aunt Lavvy had achieved it in porcelain fashion. Hence her phase of Aunt-Lavvy-worship. She once thought Nina had achieved it, in her sporting well-groomed golden-boy fashion, hence her phase of Nina—worship. And now—oh, couldn’t they see what Hal had lost? What he had lost for ever if Aunt Lavvy kept to her threat of “telling”? He had been invulnerable, a broad-shouldered, careless, lordly creature. It was, she felt dimly, and then with sudden sureness, Hal’s one asset, and the one asset of ten thousand Hals, that they were the type of youth who were ever unconscious of what they did, because what they did was so naturally the right and decent thing.

And now he was maimed—spoilt. His family knew, and that was why he came into dinner with such a poignantly defenceless feeling about him. His family knew, but they might easily forget in a little time, if the rest of the world could be kept in ignorance. Ursula’s simply-splendid Hal was menaced, but not yet actually destroyed. And she was aware that since she alone recognized the menace, she was—somehow—responsible.

After some restless tossing, she fell asleep.

[XI]

THE LABURNUMS spent the next day in viciously proving how much too small it was for its occupants.

It was Sunday, and the men were at home. All the morning and afternoon it rained. Everybody had slept badly.

On the previous day, uneasy ancient feuds were swelling up in their pods of silence. Now they suddenly burst from tight enclosure, and were very definitely present and visible. Bitter words had been spoken; accusations flung from one member of the family to another. They were repeated, and rolled round, within limits of the walls of the house—loyalty would not suffer any outlet to beyond—and rolled back again to their owners. It seemed impossible that so much grievance and anger had lain stagnant until Hal’s lapse from the average had sanctioned everybody’s lapse. Had Mr. Maxwell really been brooding for years on Florrie’s criminal carelessness in letting Ronnie die? Had Florrie Maxwell from the very beginning hated and distrusted and been jealous of her friend, Lavinia? Was all Aunt Lavvy’s sweetness and affection for the family hitherto, a mere disguise for her malignant stubborn will, that cared not how she wrecked them all to keep her white reputation at the bank from the faintest suggestion of grubbiness? And Hal—had he never been the splendid Hal, the traditional eldest son, the athletic hero of his almost first-class public-school? And if Mr. Maxwell had resented having the Watsons in the house, and did not consider Stanley as one of the family, why had he waited until now to say so? And whose territory was the schoolroom-nursery?... The politeness of Miss Roberts and Nurse had become an Awful Politeness; Nurse was an indignant ally on the side of Hal, her first male nursling; and Miss Roberts, flattered by Gracie’s confidences, and thoroughly sympathizing with the Watson point of view, followed their lead of strict impartiality and constant references to the probable state of mind of the bank-clerk, and the injury done to Miss Lavvy, who had always been so kind.

There was no room for all the currents and cross-currents and complications of feeling. They were jostled and bruised together; rebounded, reeling, from one contact, only to bump up against another. There was only just room at the Laburnums for everyday harmony to fit itself in, with no fraction of margin where emergency emotions might expand at ease ... they were learning that at last. The first big out-of-the-ordinary upset showed them how they were cramped. Perpetually banging doors jarred a dozen headaches, as those who sought an empty room or one special person in the room, irritably vented their disappointment at an unexpected encounter with the wrong occupant. Snatches of irrelevant quarrel drifted about. Crashing voices were overheard, and those who did not shout, whispered and rustled and cast meaning looks. Alliances were suddenly formed that were a surprise even to themselves, and the old unassailable partnerships of ten and twelve years had come unglued.

And that rough intruder, Passion, was the unseen tenant at the Laburnums.

Nobody cared to meet anybody face to face, and they were doing it sixty times an hour. Florrie Maxwell had no means of avoiding; Aunt Lavvy unless either of them stopped in their bedrooms; and the servants, mercilessly curious, were all over the bedrooms, clattering slop-pails, purposely slow at their jobs, until one o’clock. Besides, Aunt Lavvy had recently discovered that a gentlewoman’s gracious passage through a day should lead her inevitably from a fragrant toilet and a dainty meal, to a pretty boudoir or parlour, and not back again to the disturbed scene of the toilet. In other words, she sat in the drawing-room. So did Mrs. Maxwell, with intervals in the dining-room, when she could bear no longer the torture of Aunt Lavvy placidly behaving as though nothing had happened.

But Stanley and Grace were in the dining-room; Stanley good-humouredly detached from the Upset (the comprehensive name they had begun to use, for want of a better, in allusion to all that was happening), and Grace offended, because what “father” had said naturally involved “mother.” Sometimes she slipped away to talk things over with Miss Roberts. “If only they would all be as sensible as you” was soothing to hear; besides, whenever by quiet policy they re-settled a by-issue, they had a pleasant illusion that, as representatives, they had thereby settled the main issue once and for all.

Miss Roberts was sitting up in her attic room that Sunday morning; but Ursula and Lottie were hanging about in the schoolroom, barely tolerated by Nurse, who, recognizing them as Hal-ites and nurslings of the second generation and not the despised third, yet could not forget that their presence officially stamped the nursery as a schoolroom.

At one moment, Lottie felt that inaction was unbearable, and stole up into Aunt Lavvy’s empty room to see if anything within her scope could be done to sweeten matters and lighten them. She found to her content that the plump little pincushion on the dressing-table was almost void of pins; and, returning to the nursery, waited for Nurse’s temporary absence, to tear off several rows from the long bristling paper in the work-basket. Gleefully, she confided her purpose in Ursula, and then trotted back to prick the pins into the cushion to form a huge and elaborate L.

William, not a nice child, had chosen this day of crisis for a bilious attack, which meant a stay in bed, so that Hal was denied the solace of his “den” to himself, and had to endure a series of stray visits, with William listening, and afterwards making thoughtful remarks with the Bunny bias clearly visible in their roll. Nina came to release her pent up nerves in a storm of “Why did you do it?” and “How could you?” His mother came, sat down on William’s bed, and talked cheerily to Hal about various topics, with frequent pauses in which he felt her dumb push towards an assurance that she did not care “any old way” about that “silly old pound.” And when Bunny entered, and just threw himself down moodily and glowered at William, Hal was so burdened by the atmosphere of criminal’s cell, that he suggested a tramp in the rain. Bunny’s gaze of sheer horror conveyed clearly his reproof—“What—as though nothing had happened?” But he merely said: “You couldn’t get out without meeting somebody or other——” so that Hal shrugged his shoulders, and remained where he was.

“... Shut up, William!” Bunny shouted presently, when William had not uttered a word, and refused to hear the youngster’s righteous expostulations; and knocked over a tooth-glass, breaking it.

A knock at the door, and Stanley Watson came in: “Look here, Hal old chap, you mustn’t think me interfering——”

“Oh Lord——” Bunny dived for the door. He had never agreed with Hal in thinking Stanley humorous; and a fourth statement of the bank clerk’s point of view “which, just because he is not one of the family, we ought, by the law of common justice, to recognize before our own——” was more than his overwrought condition could stand.

Mr. Maxwell, who, alone of the family, could have remained secluded in his study, walked about the drawing-room, laboriously drawing his wife’s attention to the fact that he was not paying any special heed to Aunt Lavvy; grumbling because the Watsons were “all over the dining-room”; and suggesting from time to time that Florrie had better run up and have a look at William, whose illness might be more serious than it visibly appeared....

“I suppose you’re trying to say I’m one to let my sons die and not care!”

Mr. Maxwell chose to regard the fact that she had “taken it like that”—his perfectly innocent remark—as significant of guilty memory. Had he been honest with himself, he would have acknowledged that he had scratched the memory of Ronnie into such an itching and inflamed condition that he simply could think and speak of nothing else, and that his remark about William had indeed been intended for wounding reminder. Like all jovial men, he had an especial talent for this.

“Our William is a particularly robust child. He cannot live less than ninety years. So I’m sure, Tom, that Florrie has no need to worry about him,” said Aunt Lavvy, who, except on the subject of Hal and the bank and Mr. Fennimore’s impending visit, was just as sweet and nice as she had ever been.

The midday dinner-gong sounded brazenly. And William, who felt better, appeared in a dressing-gown to ask if he might come down to dinner.

“I believe the little Busy-Gnomes have been in my room this morning,” Aunt Lavvy smiled at Lottie, who quivered with pleasure up to the very bow at the crest of her head. For a blissful instant it seemed to her, as it had also seemed to Grace and Miss Roberts after “talking it over,” that the problem was solved by dint of single effort.

But when the roast beef and apple-tart were over, and after the two servants had cleared away the plates ready for fruit, and left the room, the master of the house startlingly got up and cleared his throat—“I want to say something to you all....”

He went on to suggest, into a circle of stricken silence, that it was Hal’s duty to publicly apologize to their dear Aunt Lavvy for ...

(Was he going to put it—actually—into words?... No, he couldn’t! he couldn’t! Ursula’s breath was held back by an iron pressure of suspense.)

“——for the injury he has recently done her. Now, my son,” genially not disowning him.

None of them had expected this. The upset had not yet been acknowledged in so many words as existent, except between groups of two or three. Now, in defiance of the sore atmosphere, it was thrown on to the dining-room table.

Mr. Maxwell’s motive was to propitiate. The roast beef had stimulated his imagination; and while showing him more luridly than ever how dreadful would be the results to his own prestige, and to Hal’s future, if Aunt Lavvy told the whole truth to Fennimore, it likewise suggested to him—falsely—that all the dear little lady wanted to appease her was probably a slight testimony to her importance in front of them all.

Hal, victim of the strategical error, had never dreamt he was to be trapped into active ignominy. It seemed to him, as it does to most people at one or another nightmare of their lives, that the moment was so awful that it simply could not really exist, could not lead to another as bad. He heard himself stumble out a rather shaky: “Sorry, Aunt Lavvy, if I ... if I ...” then, fiercely self-despising, managed a gruffer, firmer voice, and stood up straight, pushing back his chair: “I’m sorry if I was a rotter to keep back that quid, Aunt Lavvy.”

“If?” repeated Aunt Lavvy, sadly. “If? Oh, Hal!”

“I didn’t mean ‘if.’ I just meant that I was sorry.” He looked very white, and his forehead was damp with sweat. Even Stanley Watson pitied him in the pillory, and threw off a magnanimous:

“Oh, leave the boy alone now.”

“I’m glad you realize what a serious matter a theft can be, my dear boy,” said Aunt Lavvy, stretching out a plump hand for the fruit-dish, “but I don’t want you to believe, though I’ve forgiven you personally, that either for my own sake or for the sake of the clerk at the Bank, I can do anything else but give Mr. Fennimore a clear, straightforward explanation, this evening, of what has happened. Honor Rose, look at this lovely plum your Aunt Lavvy is getting ready for you.” But intention and time were clearly stated at last.

“Nina, d’you want my handkerchief?” proposed Lottie. “Oh no, you’re laughing—I thought you were crying!”

“She is crying,” William announced, with a certain stolid exuberance.

Nina, in fact, was in hysterics.

[XII]

OUTSIDE the dining-room door, Ursula and Hal became aware of each other—separately fled from the turmoil. They hesitated, self-conscious after what had passed.

“I suppose that sort of thing’s not dangerous? She’ll be all right, won’t she?” Hal jerked his head in the direction of Nina’s sobs.

“Oh Lord, yes. Some girls—not Nina’s kind, though—often get hysterical.”

“Do they?” Perhaps Hal wished that boys did, too. He walked slowly away upstairs. And Ursula, giving him time to disappear, rushed for her room, banged the door behind her and bolted it, all in one swift movement, as though she were desperately in escape from the ugliness she had left in the dining-room: Aunt Lavvy and Miss Roberts and Grace crowding round Nina’s noisy agitation, admonishing her, thrusting forward remedies; Miss Roberts making futile dabs and sprinkles with the water-jug; Stanley trying to catch hold of Nina’s wrists and saying with a stern note of authority the while: “You must be quiet. You must be quiet”—and, aside: “The one way to treat hysterics—if you’d only leave her to me!” Her mother upbraiding her father for having brought about the scene; Lottie’s shrill: “May I fetch your salts, Aunt Lavvy? May I? Let me, or would you rather I didn’t?” Honor Rose frightened, and in tears; Mr. Maxwell’s: “Can’t you keep that kid of yours out of the way, Grace, when she’s not wanted?”... The smell of roast beef.... A sudden clamour and concentration of hatred.

But up here, in her room, was refuge and loneliness and space. Ursula’s grateful love for her room at that moment was so extreme that she longed to express it. It looked chilly and grey with the drops of rain dripping down the window, and falling dankly from the opposite drain-pipe of the next-door house. She suddenly determined that this was the moment for her first fire, her first possession of a fire. She would put it off no longer. From the little cupboard she brought sticks and newspaper and some small lumps of coal. It was a very tiny grate, and quite soon it was alight, with an exciting crackle of wood and spurts of flame.... Ursula crouched down in front of it, in dreamy ecstasy. Her gaze roamed about the familiar objects, so as to become acquainted with them in their new shimmer and glow. She sprang up and twitched the red curtains across the window, shutting out the disappointing wall beyond ... you could so easily dream a perfect view, with the curtains drawn, and the room bewitched by warm flame. In future nights she would lie in bed hearing the red embers creak and flop, and more than ever she would be herself, owning herself, gravely exultant in self-possession.... Perhaps Mother and Father might give her for Christmas a small round clock-creature with a small round face and no hair—but friendly. And then time would be privately hers, too, as well as space. For now she shared time with everybody else who could hear the striking hours from the big clock in the hall.

When the Maxwells stayed on the river near Cookham for one summer holiday, Ursula nosed about until she found a willow tree up a back-water, where the branches swept round her boat like a tent and enclosed it. When they went, as they usually did, to the seaside, she would discover for herself special places on the leeside of a deserted breakwater, or between hedge and tree-trunk in a corner of a field. Wherever she could find an equivalent for the room, she was happy. It was her funny instinct (and certain small animals have it, too) to burrow and squirm her way into some hedged-in space, and curl up with a sigh of content, naming it hers. Her romantic sense of property was, maybe, over-developed from the edged contrast of life in a family where the sense of property barely existed at all, and who only in a crisis, and then but dimly, felt the need for more room. In everything else she was more or less like the other Maxwells.

But—watch Ursula as she claims a privacy even so fleeting as an empty train compartment. Already, as the door slams on her before the platform has been well left behind, the rushing haven is intimately hers. She leans eagerly forward, hands clasped between her knees, and enjoys it—a slim girl in a rather pathetically skimpy navy-blue coat and skirt, which always associates itself with the Ursula type of flapper, a dull, fair rope of hair falling over one shoulder, staid lips, pale as apple-blossom, curved in a slight smile of triumph, brows level above her softly thoughtful eyes.... Ursula!... She is not showy, but she may claim loveliness later on. There is a delicate artistry in the cut of her head and chin and neck, and in the brave square moulding of her eyelids. Ursula.... Not a musical name! She would have liked to be called Naomi or Rosalind or Pamela....

Aunt Lavvy’s cough and rustle on the other side of the locked door—and:

“I shall have to give up my room to her,” thought Ursula, “so that she shan’t tell old Fennimore tonight.” And she knew that the necessity had been stammering up in her ever since, the evening before, Hal had looked at her across the dinner-table.

That was why she had slept uneasily; and why she had squatted so long motionless, and fiercely loving her solitude, in front of her first fire—her last fire.

People can only be bribed by something you are sure they want. And, except Ursula, nobody at the Laburnums could imagine, in this crisis, anything that Aunt Lavvy desperately wanted.

Aunt Lavvy wanted the little room next to her bedroom, for a sitting-room. She wanted to be able to say she had a suite—two rooms adjoining. She had wanted this with tranquil obduracy for several years now. And Ursula, aware of it, had taunted the locked door between, with elvish dances and curtsyings.

At first the idea of bribing Aunt Lavvy with the room had occurred quite simply as an eleventh hour expedient to save Hal. But directly afterwards, Ursula saw her deed spring out in brilliantly illuminated letters, like the advertisements in Piccadilly Circus by night, as a Sacrifice.

And a Sacrifice, of course—if it be big enough—would make all the difference of colour and wind and enchantment to the days following it—days that would be as though they were of running liquid gold.

Ursula was tremendously excited by the prospect of Sacrifice. She had always dreamt how it would touch life with miraculous fingers, touch and transform it. Life that was hitherto all right, but only just all right, and not even vigorously wrong, humdrum and patchy and drab and lacking in power, a picture in muddy paint! Ursula held out her longing arms towards glamour....

Sacrifice! And, after it had happened, everything different!

So the child made up her mind, gambling for splendour.

But it meant giving up the room. Giving up—room.

...That time—she was huddled on the floor again in front of the fire, one arm resting on the armchair’s seat—that time a year ago, when Nina gave a party; and she, with hair recently washed to fall in a loose shimmering cloud down her back, and wearing a new bluish-grey party-frock, graceful folds of pale soft satin, was so flushed and stimulated with the sudden achievement of real prettiness that she behaved as though she were a delicately intoxicated fairy—and laughed and talked as if it were her party, and gave orders, and tossed herself about, and was imperious, and a flirt, and a queen ... until Nina said to her, when everybody had gone: “What was the matter with you, kid? Everybody was laughing at you; and that good-looking man whom Bobbie Mathers brought, told Bobbie you ran after him till he was afraid to stay. How could you make such a fool of yourself?”

The room had seen her through, then; had mercifully hidden her shame and her stung vanity and her hot disgust with herself. Supposing, though, that same evening of blunder were still to come, and no place for her to be alone in after Nina had said: “Everybody was laughing at you....”

For a moment the memory was vivid again, and Ursula clenched her hands against the humiliation. Ambitious to be neither rich nor a genius, and scornful of sentimental slush, she had always hoped for fame as a hostess, a quaintly witty, worldly yet serene personality, who was an influence in a shining spacious atmosphere, where only supple minds and graceful figures were suffered. Her idea of the perfect setting in which to be serene and witty was acres of parquet floor, and one little twisty gold and brocade sofa, and a sort of mellow amber light in it, and miniatures, and low, cool voices, and long, cool necks.

And when she tried—only just tried—to realize her conception of a Social Personality, Nina said....

The good-looking man whom Bobbie Mathers brought, did not figure distinctly in her aftermath of rage and shame. He was merely an indecipherable part of it. Men ... they didn’t count yet. Sometimes Ursula’s imagination played games in which, queerly, she forsook her own part, and became a chivalrous ardent squire to one Ursula, touched up and ennobled, but in the main essentials herself. Narcissus and Narcissa.... It was good to be a male, a swashbuckler; and it seemed quite natural, as such, to fall in love with the demure grey-eyed Ursula.... “But you know your eyes aren’t grey at all, they’ve got green and brown and blue, all mixed in. Once, in a storm off Lagos, I saw the hollow of the waves just that colour a second before they shattered over the deck.... God, I’d like to have had you there with me!”

And Ursula took this, how? But it was impossible to be Ursula as well as Ursula’s lover. So the girl in the scene remained always objective, seen but not felt. She was sweet, but adamant, this Ursula, and elusive with some mysterious want he could not satisfy. The man wondered what it was; and “I wonder, too,” reflected Ursula, puzzled, in her rôle of lover, by the subtleties of her own projection.

Games—but it was good-bye to them now! They would not play themselves elsewhere but alone in the room.

The summons to tea left her still crouching before her bowl of red fire. Tea!—if she as much as opened that door, all the widened feuds and jealousies and passions, pressing against the farther side, would tumble in. The door was a barricade. Who knows how much fresh horror had accumulated beyond it since dinner, or how many irretrievable blows newly dealt, or old injuries exhumed from burial?

Restraint was inside out. It might stop anywhere, or—it might never stop ... since Nina had begun to be hysterical, and Aunt Lavvy proved an enemy, and Bunny was shockable, and Father was beastly to Mother, Mother starting such odd sentences that she nearly finished—but not quite—so that you caught your breath; and Mother hating Aunt Lavvy, and Grace huffy, and Gums and Stanley blacklegging from the Maxwell Union, and Nurse speaking her mind, and the servants a nudging community of gossip, and all the rooms chaotically surrendered for quarrel, and Hal morally in the dock.... Nobody kind, oh, nobody kind, and Mr. Fennimore expected tonight!

The blessing of being out of it! Ursula forgot, for the moment, that if she stuck to her purpose, solitude was already a fugitive with a price upon its head. Revelling in the four quiet walls, she reached out an indolent hand for the crumpled sheet of newspaper in which to pick up more coal. She had no shovel.

It was last Sunday’s paper. She glanced at it, after laying the coal in the shaking hollows of flame. Glanced ... and then was absorbed.

From the cheap print, the lurid relishing headlines, the blurred semi-grotesque photographs of criminals, the whole sinister underworld came swarming up at her. Creatures who lived within reaching grasp of the law, creatures who crawled into the papers.... Subterranean folk, dwelling where gas hissed and cisterns dripped, and half-starved cats slunk through the gutter. And they had faces with swollen lips and large, fierce eyes, and their names were not the names of people one knew, and their clothes were unfamiliar. Their last incoherent letters were printed in neat, straight, passionless lines down the column. Something more complex than just “the poor”; a twilight more sinister, where drunken sexless figures dealt each other blows with, oddly, implements that were meant for homely use, pokers, and rolling-pins and chairs. In this stunted sallow underworld, boys and girls actually killed themselves in sudden rages of love and despair. And the inhabitants were hungrier than ordinary hunger. “Any previous conviction?” asked the magistrate. “Two against the woman Hobbs, Your Worship.”... A world where women were known by their surnames to magistrate and policeman and court missionary.... To Ursula it seemed as though into the room had drifted a raw fog, and beyond it the strident yell of newsboys. Over a barrow of rusty old garments, a row of naphtha lights flapped uneasily ... a lad furtively running was pursued by two policemen.... He was wanted for theft.... As, breathing hard, he padded round the corner, Ursula saw his face ... Hal’s face!

Hal had brought the underworld quite close to the Laburnums. He had done something which might—oh no! no!—which might get into the papers.

Wild with panic, Ursula scrambled to her feet. What time was it? How long had she been squatting there with that horrible beastly paper, reading it and imagining things. It was getting dark. Six—seven o’clock. And Mr. Fennimore came at eight. And Aunt Lavvy was going to tell him, and he might think it his duty—as Stanley would—to tell the police. And Hal....

It wasn’t safe to wait a second longer. What had to be done was urgent. Without even a conscious glance of renunciation at her room, Ursula left it, and knocked at Aunt Lavvy’s door.

“Come in.”

With direct action, panic had vanished. She was confident now, and powerfully gentle, and even, with a tinting of irony, amused. Leaping ten or fifteen years of slow development to the grown-up Ursula she would undoubtedly become.

“Aunt Lavvy, I wondered if you would be a darling”—Aunt Lavvy, with a stiffening of her concealed obstinacies, waited for the plea for Hal—“and visit me in my room. You see, I’ve lit my first fire—you remember my birthday present?—and it seems silly to sit in front of it by oneself, and, well, it would be ever so jolly if you came in for a little while,” with a rush of shy impulsiveness—calculated.

Aunt Lavvy beamed like a cluster of little pink and silver suns.

“Why, what a delightful surprise. The rain is so dreary, I was simply longing for firelight, but I had no idea an invitation was on its way.”

“Then may I borrow one of your cushions?” Ursula was a spectacle of pretty, though rather childish excitement. She pulled Aunt Lavvy by the hand into the next-door room, and arranged her in the one armchair, and poked the smouldering coal to flames, and tugged at the window-curtains anew, and then settled herself with crossed legs, tailor-fashion, on the rag-mat on the opposite side of the hearth. She looked over at Aunt Lavvy with an air of affectionate content.

“It was lonely—till I brought you in,” she said. “I sometimes wish I shared a room with somebody.”

“This one would be too small, of course. But you’ve made it look so nice, Ursula dear.”

“Have I? But you can’t do much with a bed and dressing-table sticking themselves out .... It ought really to be a sitting-room with a bedroom next door.” And Ursula’s gaze at Aunt Lavvy was full and pure and empty of all significance.

Aunt Lavvy reflected for a moment or two ... and understood.

“Let’s pretend, then,” she suggested at last, her plump little mouth bent to a whimsical smile, “that I have been whisked away to Terra del Fuego on a broomstick, so that you are able to have my room for your bedroom, and could do as you liked with this one. How would you plan it?”

Aunt Lavvy might be a sweet-scented malignant little bundle of implacability, but she had to her credit a delightfully light and sensitive touch with the situation. Ursula, to whom clumsiness would have been unbearable in her own inspired mood of fine execution, appreciated the bland twist by which Aunt Lavvy had made it appear that she was to be the one eliminated from tenancy.

“Well—help me, then! I’d have the wallpapers that very deep cream tint that you’re so fond of, Aunt Lavvy——”

“More primrose than cream,” supplied Aunt Lavvy. “And wistaria cretonne curtains, Ursula, and the same on two armchairs, and a lot of cushions, mauve and blue and primrose-yellow. Wouldn’t that be rather quaint and pretty?”

“And a bluey-mauve carpet, also the colour of wistaria.” Ursula threw the same enthusiasm into these furnishings as though she were not intuitively leading Aunt Lavvy on to describe exactly how, again and again, from the farther side of the door, she must have imagined Ursula’s room furnished to her own private desires. The more these desires were allowed to escape and take form, the easier would she fall to the bribe ... presently, when the time came to talk about Hal.

“And your lovely tea-set—Spode, isn’t it? Would you bring that in here, and have shelves put up for it?”

“That wouldn’t be very safe, would it? No, shelves for my books, and my low cupboard with the glass doors could be moved in for the china.” Aunt Lavvy had forgotten that they were arranging the room for Ursula. “A primrose silk shade for the light, I think, and a small round table for potpourri. I wonder if my little davenport would fit slantwise across that corner recess near the window?”

“With a shade to match for the lamp, and a whole lot of mauve and yellow bowls and vases. Oh, there are such lots of flowers that would look too heavenly in here: violas and pansies and blue irises and primroses and larkspur and Michaelmas daisies—anything that isn’t pink or red. Daffodils, of course—and cowslips. And your miniatures hung over the fireplace.... Aunt Lavvy, if you said nothing to Mr. Fennimore tonight, but explained to them at the Bank tomorrow that after all you had found the pound note loose at the bottom of your bag, I’m sure they’d believe you.”

“Will you be quite frank with me, my dear child?” With a sudden tender seriousness, Aunt Lavvy set aside the irrelevancy of rooms and a room. She had her data now! “You really called me in here to plead for poor Hal.”

“I’m not pleading, Aunt Lavvy,” steadily.

“It’s dreadful for me that you should all think me hard and unforgiving. Nina came to me last night——”

“Yes, I know. I suppose she was rude, and blurted things out.”

“She hurt me,” Aunt Lavvy confessed, with a little sigh. “And your mother, too. Ursula”—with a gesture of confidence—“you’re a wise girl, and we’ve always been friends, haven’t we? Do you see how unfair they are? I love Hal—but what am I to do?” She threw out her hands, and her diamond rings twinkled as the firelight burnished them.

Ursula comprehended that she was to plead, and so give Aunt Lavvy an excuse for “coming off her perch”—to borrow a phrase from Bunny. She accepted the cue for a sedate, sensible little sister, rather old-fashioned, a bit of a prig, perhaps.... Her hidden demon was doubled up with laughter!

“Wouldn’t you say that Hal had been punished enough, Aunt Lavvy darling?”

After about ten minutes of parleying along these lines, Aunt Lavvy conceded that Hal’s moral chastisement had indeed been severe. Quite suddenly she gave way, admitting, with the impulsiveness of a contemporary, that she had longed to do so all along.... Her glance strayed to the niche beside the window, still not quite satisfied that it was wide enough for her davenport to stand there.

“And I’ll move for good into Nina’s room,” said Ursula, speaking aloud the last line of their contract.

[XIII]

MR. FENNIMORE came that evening to the Laburnums, and Mr. Fennimore went. Aunt Lavvy did not betray Hal to him, though the Maxwells were taut with apprehension from minute to minute. After he had gone, Ursula privately informed her mother that she was henceforth going to share Nina’s bedroom, and that Aunt Lavvy, in consideration of the gift of an adjoining sitting-room to her present apartment, would gloss the matter over with the Bank tomorrow.

“So Hal’s all right, and I’m moving my things over so’s to sleep with Nina tonight.”

“But, darling,” exclaimed Mrs. Maxwell, almost weeping with relief, “won’t it do in the morning?”

“No, tonight,” insisted Ursula, who had passed from the ageless wisdom of Medea, to a stage of crude and intensely youthful heroics, when it seemed urgent that her sacrifice should begin immediately, without the anti-climax of postponement. Because, beyond surrender of the room, and beyond suffering, lay that diffusion of gold over a grey world which was to be her recognition from the gods. She knew that “Virtue is its own reward,” must not be taken materially, in the sense that an automatic machine promptly doles out chocolate on insertion of a penny—(bent or battered coins not accepted); but—oh, surely she might count on something happening! “People would be different” ... and she, too, would be different, conscious of a deepening of colour, a more vivid meaning, scents sharper and sweeter, all sounds harmonized, everywhere a lightness and a quickening up, less drag and shuffle, the same clean happy intoxication of spirit that can usually be won by actual high speed ... by gallop on horseback over soft turf, or two-reefed sailing, or a race in one of those long lean cars that crouch low to the road.

In fact, Ursula’s modest expectation demanded, in return for one room delivered, to dwell henceforth and continually in that state of jubilant ecstasy which may have come to our one or two really great poets for two or three minutes on completion of their three or four most perfect lines.

She moved into Nina’s room that night. Nina helped her carry her things. And Mrs. Maxwell went to Mr. Maxwell—whom she found in his study, having a distinct row with his only son-in-law—and told him it was all right about Hal. And Stanley told Grace, who told Miss Roberts, who woke up Lottie to tell her. And Mr. Maxwell told Bunny, who told Hal. And everybody at the Laburnums slept better that night, because of the news, except William, who had remained asleep and slept well in spite of it.

The next day, the effect of Ursula’s act on the household was like a window flung open on to an enclosure where there had been a gas-escape. Gradually the fumes noticed the window and crept out and were dissipated.

Aunt Lavvy walked along the pleasant half-country road towards the shops of Buckler’s Cross. And, passing the branch of Platt’s Bank, dropped in, and told the clerk, leaning politely over the polished counter, that she had, after all, been the thief of that pound-note which he had missed on Saturday morning. She used the word “thief” whimsically, and the young man’s amusement proved to her that certainly her name had not suffered from the incident. “At the bottom of my bag. They weren’t pinned together, and it must have been the outside one. I collect so many bills and papers and letters loose in my bag—you men will always blame me for that....” She dimpled at the bank-clerk, and handed him back the pound. And he thought what a delightful little old lady she was, and wished his mother, a large, gaunt and incredulous woman, were more in that style. He apologized for his own carelessness, and hoped she would not punish them by depositing elsewhere. They parted in the attitudes of a Marcus Stone picture. Then Aunt Lavvy went on into the town, and arranged with the local decorators to paper her sitting-room at once, a deep cream with a wistaria frieze. Luckily, they were able to show her a sample of the latter in stock; but for her cretonne and carpet she knew she would have to take a day in London. Impulsively, she determined to go that very afternoon.

Mr. Maxwell and Stanley were, of course, at business. They were still resenting each other when they left the house; but before they reached the station, they had realized the flatness of disputing over a bank-clerk who, as far as the moral point at issue was concerned, no longer existed. But with regard to Mr. Maxwell’s taunt that Stanley, if he wanted his own opinions, ought also to maintain his wife and child in his own home—Stanley left private injunctions with Grace ... and she, too, was out most of the day. She did not tell Miss Roberts where, as she was afraid she had rather let herself go too much to poor Gums the last day or two, and it was not quite a nice thing to do, to grumble about your parents to the governess in their employ.

It was awfully sweet of Aunt Lavvy to put things right with the Bank, without involving Hal. And distinctly clever of Ursula, too, to think of offering her the room. It looked as though Ursula were going to be unselfish, “and that would be so nice for Mother when Nina marries, and I....”

Miss Roberts and Nurse resumed a courteous recognition of each other’s claim to the nursery-schoolroom. Nurse said she was sorry if she’d spoken too plain, and Miss Roberts understood that it was very irritating to come in with the babies and find the only table strong enough for the sewing-machine, littered up with lesson-books.

Nina, when they were dressing the next morning, asked Ursula suddenly and fiercely:

“What did you expect to get out of it?”

“Out of what?” Ursula, with the comb, swept her long hair to a veil in front of her face.

“Giving up your room. Look here, Ursula, squarely, between you and me, you must have meant to get something out of it. What?”

Ursula understood that if she disclaimed all hidden purpose of a benefit in the matter, there would be no other name for her than a prig, from the viewpoint of her sister and brothers. Simple nobility was indeed a completely priggish quality. Ursula felt ashamed. Even Bunny would censure her for it, in his soul. Even Hal, whom she had rescued....

“Well, d’you suppose I was just ‘being good’ for its own sake?” scoffed Ursula, thereby thoroughly deserving to be termed traitor.

Nina nodded, placated. “Tell me, though?”

“It’s my business.”

“Something from Aunt Lavvy? From Dad? From Hal?”

Tiny green imps twinkled for a second in Ursula’s eyes.... Already Nina was mentioning Hal’s name with some of the old reverence. Already Nina was arrogant.... Ursula had not been to school herself, but she had learnt enough from her brothers and sisters not to remind Nina of hysterics, though not enough to refrain from regret that decency should forbid such gentle reminder.

“Don’t be a nuisance, Nina. I’ll say what I like, and shut up when I like.”

“You needn’t think you can be as cheeky as you like, though, in this room. It was mine before you came to share it, so in a way I’ve given up as much as you.”

Ursula turned, not an indignant scarlet as Nina expected, but white. Nina?—why, Nina had never cared about her room except to sleep in it, never minded how many visitors at the Laburnums overlapped her return home from her own visits, was quite content to have the shrine spoken of as the “spare-room” during her absence. Nina never fled to her room during trouble, she’d be just as content if her hockey group photographs and silver cups had their place anywhere else in the house. Oh, Ursula was sure—surer than sure—that the strange listening growing feeling never happened to Nina in solitude.

And now Nina was claiming an equal part in the sacrifice.... Put in that desperately reasonable way, it certainly had the appearance of being a half-and-half affair, but—would it truly look like that to—to whoever attended to haphazard sacrifices which came drifting up from the world? Might Ursula not even say to herself that she, and no one else, responsible by seeing Hal in his lordliness, was also responsible for keeping him so?

For there was no damage done that would not be covered by the new skin even now growing thickly over his rawness.

Nina, with a last sturdy backward brush at her gleaming hair, swung to the door, ready for breakfast. She was careless and spruce and clear-cut as ever. Ursula remembered the days when she had worshipped her for these effects.

“I say, kid, I didn’t mean half of what I said just now, so you needn’t look so wretchedly serious. I rather appreciate having you in here, really. It’s some one to talk to while I’m putting on my stockings. And it really was quite decent of you to fix things up with Aunt Lavvy—though, mind you, I don’t believe she’d have told old Fennimore when it came to it. She was ruffled up the wrong way, but she’s rather an old darling, and frightfully fond of Hal and the rest of us.”

[XIV]

THE weather was not sufficiently self-conscious to clear up at precisely the same instant as the psychological clearing-up; but the day after, the sun flashed out, and the workman sang as he distempered Aunt Lavvy’s sitting-room, and the carrier’s boy whistled as he delivered her carpet and other packages from Whiteley’s furnishing department. And Hal and Nina and Bunny and Ursula and Maisie and Dorothy played their last tennis foursomes on the doctor’s asphalt court, taking turns to be the two out, because on Wednesday the boys were due back at Winborough. Hal was a great deal easier in his mind when he discovered that the blend of Maisie and Michaelmas daisies—though she played a jolly good game, and of course the daisies were all right in their way—yet did not make a second attempt to play any incomprehensible wizard trick with him which had resulted in the bad dream of the week-end just over. He was not quite comfortable yet, though, with his family, and consoled by the prospect of Winborough, where nobody except Bunny knew anything about his downfall; and, a term after that, Oxford, where nobody at all would know. By Jove! Supposing Aunt Lavvy had kept her word, and had spread the whole hateful business all over the place.... It was clever of that kid Ursula to have thought of a way to bribe her. Decent of her, too ... gratefully he served her with a soft ball, which she missed, because she was expecting a hard one.

Hal and Maisie won their set against Ursula and Bunny. Then Hal and Dorothy played Nina and Bunny, and again Hal and his partner won.

“Not one of you is any good at the net,” he pronounced at last. “And you ought to practise your backhand shots, Dorothy.”

Meanwhile, Aunt Lavvy and Florrie Maxwell, sitting by the French windows of the drawing-room, open to the garden, were drifting into leisurely intimate talk ... the children at tennis ... the croquet they had played as girls ... that odd man with the canary-silk waistcoat and the lively eyes who had wanted to marry Aunt Lavvy.... “D’you remember, Florrie, that picnic when I wore the rose-coloured dress which looked so awful near his waistcoat, and he couldn’t understand why I ran away from him all day ...” (and remembering, they giggled, two silly girls together). From the rose-coloured to other dresses ... the present time, and what suited Nina, and what suited Ursula—not Grace, because the Decisive Dress which suited Grace had already been worn—the dress which first attracted her husband’s attention. The “marrying mother” dies hard. “Mr. Barry Noyes once said that Ursula would be the beauty of the family; and really, I don’t think men like fine girls as they used to ...” and Tom’s taste in women ... and Tom ... and—confidence finally unleashed—what Tom had brought up against her about poor little Ronnie!

And Florrie’s unspoken penitence for each hard thought she had ever had of Lavvy, separated the gossip like commas and semi-colons and exclamation marks. Lavvy was so sympathetic.... And how delicious for two women, how invigorating yet soothing—the resemblance to cocoa is accidental!—the ripple backward and forward between them, on those certain subjects in which neither men nor girls nor young married women nor one’s own husband nor anybody but just that other woman, are in the least intelligent.

Tom Maxwell came home on Monday evening to an atmosphere a-quiver with a few memories and traces of the recent heavy storm, but otherwise peaceful, united, and, metaphorically, lit by quiet sunshine. He thought: “When a good row clears the air, it always proves the air needed it!” By Tuesday evening it occurred to him, however, that the air was not clear between himself and Florrie; and he remembered, as one with the difficulty of remembering a grotesque nightmare, that he had been amazingly hectic on the subject of a baby who had died of measles eleven years ago. He marvelled at his agitation, now limp to his proddings as a dead caterpillar. Had he actually charged Florrie with neglecting the kid? Preposterous!

“It isn’t as though things didn’t happen,” blurted out Mr. Maxwell, bending over his trouser-press, to his wife already in bed. “And of course it stands to reason that if one could help them happening, one would. And, say what you like, to rear seven out of eight’s not bad. My mother lost three in a family of five.”

Florrie, understanding all that lay beyond the articulate apology, stretched out her hand towards her back view of him, and replied, after one or two happy gulps, “Lavvy and I had such a nice talk today while the children were out. It would be so dull for me here without her.”

[XV]

AMONG her other purchases in London, Aunt Lavvy had bought Hal a beautiful fountain pen—value about twenty-five shillings—which she gave him on his return to Winborough for the Christmas term. Bunny she tipped ten shillings. But her gift to Hal proved, among a variety of subtle points, that it was not the money loss she had minded in the episode of the pound-note.

[XVI]

URSULA was just big enough to make a sacrifice, but not big enough to carry it off. For the first three or four days afterwards, she was able to behave gallantly enough, expectant of what Wordsworth, who had not, perhaps, a slender grace in titles, called “intimations of immortality”—but then, all at once, her belief snapped, and with it her patience, and she began to moon about the house in the spirit of a restive martyr who, after burning at the stake, has just discovered that the gates of heaven are only “cultured” pearl, and the streets an inferior rolled gold.

Then Aunt Lavvy remarked at breakfast one morning: “My little sitting-room is ready now, and it looks charming, but I’ve just remembered that there’s no key to the door between the two rooms. I must send for Marks to have the lock fitted. Oh dear, and I had hoped I had done with workmen. They’re such friendly dears, and will talk to me about the Government. Haven’t you noticed, Tom, how sound I’ve been in my politics just lately?”

“Is the door locked, then?”

“Oh yes, it has been as long as I can remember. And the key lost.”

Mrs. Maxwell said breezily: “Ursula, it’s a topping day. It’d do you good to jump on your bike and pedal down to the town for Aunt Lavvy, before Miss Roberts is ready to study with you.”

“Nina can go,” suggested Ursula, hating the errand. “She’s bursting with loving-kindness this morning.”

“I’m going up by the eleven-forty to a matinée with Dorothy.”

Mrs. Maxwell teased Ursula merrily for being a “lazy-bones.” Stanley came in with a scientific fact about the stimulant of exercise just before mental concentration, together with statistics proving the large percentage of millionaires who had started their successful careers by living far enough from the station to entail a run for the train every morning. Mr. Maxwell waggishly remarked that, in that case, cooks ought to be bribed to serve the breakfast late; and Ursula said indolently: “Send Honor Rose to the locksmith’s. She’s got your steadfast sense of responsibility, Stan.”

Grace cried: “At her age! Alone into Buckler’s Cross! You must be mad, Ursula. I sometimes let her toddle to the pillar-box at the corner, but——”

“Do let me go to the locksmith’s for you, Aunt Lavvy darling, directly Miss Roberts has finished with me. I’d love to.” The offer was Lottie’s.

“So as to miss your practising? What a brain!”

“Ursula, it’s right-down shabby of you to tease your sister because she’s more obliging than you are.”

Ursula flared up. “It wasn’t Lottie, was it, who gave up her room to Aunt Lavvy when she—when Hal——” She struggled with scalding tears at the back of the throat. Why do they always come hotter for injustice and self-pity than for sorrow?

Her hearers were startled and embarrassed beyond words at the reminder. They wanted to forget that episode, now that they were all united and kind and jovial again. It was indecent of Ursula to have hurled their obligation at them in this violent fashion, especially as there was no reply possible. They had all been grateful and thanked her. She could not exact gratitude twice over. Downcast eyelids and tightly-pressed mouths all round the table.... Of course she was only a child still, a charming undisciplined young colt, but even then——

The fact was that Ursula’s rather-more-than-usually-good deed had created a greater uneasiness among the Maxwells than Hal’s rather-more-than-bad deed which had preceded it. A thoroughly average family is not accustomed to either extension from the normal. Both Hal and Ursula were disturbingly “different.” Hal’s moral lapse had rapidly developed into a problem of consequences, which had been as rapidly wiped out, leaving next to nothing of the original shock. And then he had gone back to school.... Somehow, it was all not so uncomfortably evident as the sight of Ursula round the house, a disconsolate moping Peri emphasizing her yielded Paradise. For if she could be as noble as all that, she might at any moment be equally noble, or nobler. And the rest of them would have to live up to it, or else feel inferior.

So that Hal, who could be forgiven, and who was eager to forget, was easily a more popular figure than Ursula, who had been their rescuer, and now prevented them from forgetting.

“But I shall enjoy a walk to Marks, to see about a new key.” Aunt Lavvy broke the silence. “The hedges are just beginning to turn colour all along the road. It’s my favourite season.”

Ursula had dashed out of the room, they all thought, in tears ... but presently she came back like a gale, and flung a small heavy object on to the breakfast-table.

“There’s your key,” defiantly.

“The key of the door between?” Aunt Lavvy picked it up. “You clever child! Where did you find it?”

“I didn’t find it. I had hidden it—at the bottom of my handkerchief-box.”

“You had hidden it? And why, pray?” demanded her father.

Ursula thrust her hands into the pockets of her jersey, and tilted back her head. She was not crying now—indeed, there was urchin roguery sparkling in her eyes, and the corners of her lips were enigmatic:

“To protect myself from visitors,” she replied sweetly.

“Plain speech is a short cut,” said Tom Maxwell, getting angry with this young daughter, who, from being more or less of a cipher, had dared first to place him under an obligation, and then to taunt his helplessness with insubordination.

“Well, then”—Ursula spoke with even greater sweetness—“to protect myself from our Paying Guest.”

[XVII]

BUT in spite of these impertinences, Aunt Lavvy had the room, and Aunt Lavvy had the laugh of her. Moreover, now that the room was completely ready to sit in, and charming in its lilac and primrose tints as when their imaginations had planned it together, Aunt Lavvy did not sit in it. She sat downstairs with the others. She was more than usually convivial, and fragrant with content when somebody—Mrs. Maxwell or Nina or Lottie or Miss Roberts—asserted playfully that she could not be spared from them to go and sit in solitude.

Tenacious in her desire to own a sitting-room, it now stood empty and unused in that packed house.

Ursula, moping homeless about the stairs and landings of her home, was conscious of that sequestered oblong of space as though it were alive. She infected the rest of the household, who also became conscious of it—and, more than ever, of her. One or the other of them was wont to say to her, guiltily off-hand: “Oh, by the way, Ursula, there’s nobody in the dining-room for half an hour, if you want to be alone. I looked in on my way up,” and “Then I’ll tell Minnie not to disturb you.”... And behold Ursula, mooching disconsolately round the dining-room, a conspicuous captive to the misapprehension that she “liked to be alone sometimes.”

“Look here,” Mr. Maxwell anxiously consulted his wife one evening. “What’s all this trouble about Ursula? I mean, she’s quite comfortable digging-in with Nina, isn’t she? Sisters, and all that. What’s she in such a deuced queer state about ever since——Damn it, it was the girl’s own suggestion to change rooms.”

“Nina’s much easier to understand than Ursula. Nina’s much more like me—hot-tempered and says right out what’s in her mind and then it’s all over.”

For it is a pet illusion with most people that they have exactly this popular sort of temper, and no other.

Her husband drew closer. “Look here, Florrie. Hadn’t you better have a quiet talk with Ursula. A serious talk. You’re the girl’s mother. Get her to confide in you. I dunno—but it doesn’t seem ... natural to me, this fuss about not sleeping alone. Was there anything wrong going on when she——Well, what do you think?”

His suggestion of an interview with Ursula in the spirit of “you’re the girl’s mother” was a parallel to his serious talk with Hal—“After all, I’m your father.”... Thus, twice in the last week or two, parenthood had ceased to be nominal.

“What do you think, Florrie?” He had been nice to her ever since their reconciliation, and especially nice in insisting on her prior right to be consulted and even listened to with deference, on all subjects connected with the children.