“There’s g-games and afternoon s-school,” sobbed Jacqueline.
“We’ll go to Miss Billing and get permission,” said Peronelle, and gripping Jacqueline by the hand she marched her out of the cloakroom and down the passage to the head mistress’s study.
Leaving her sister leaning against the wall, Peronelle, with the most perfunctory of knocks, flung open the door and entered the august presence.
“I’m taking Jacqueline home,” she announced.
“Oh, indeed?” Miss Billing twinkled behind her glasses—she adored Peronelle. “Whose permission have you asked?”
“I’m asking yours now,” said Peronelle, “thank you very much, Miss Billing. Good-bye.”
“May I know the reason for my permission?” asked Miss Billing mildly.
For answer Peronelle fled into the passage and reappeared dragging Jacqueline.
“Look at that now,” she said, “you can see for yourself I must take her to mother.”
Miss Billing was really distressed at the appearance of Jacqueline.
“My dear,” she cried, “what’s the matter?” She drew Jacqueline to her and fondled her but Jacqueline was dumb as a post.
“It’s no good you asking her,” said Peronelle, “she won’t tell me. She never will; I must take her to mother.”
“She must go to the sick room and lie down first,” said Miss Billing firmly.
“No, she mustn’t,” said Peronelle with equal firmness. “Something’s happened at school to make her miserable and she won’t be happy again till I’ve taken her right away from school.”
Miss Billing had great faith in Peronelle’s judgment. “Very well,” she said.
“You’ll tell Michelle we’ve gone,” commanded Peronelle as she removed Jacqueline.
“Certainly, dear,” said Miss Billing meekly.
The two girls took the same route home that Colin had taken a month ago—through the deep honeysuckle-scented lanes, past the cottage gardens with their dahlia clumps like bonfires in the sun, past the farms with their green ponds waiting for the dancing feet of the water fairies, and past the foxgloves down into the water-lane. Here, by the well, they paused.
“Let’s sit down and rest,” said Peronelle.
All the way home, with her arm round Jacqueline, she had been scolding gently, but now she fell silent through sheer bewilderment. If Jacqueline wouldn’t tell her anything what could she do? Other people told her things, then why not Jacqueline? Was there something in the tie of blood that made it difficult for one to help one’s own relations? Was one, perhaps, too near to them to be helpful? Was it necessary always to stand back a bit from things before one could see them clearly? She pondered a little sadly over this as they sat in the lovely deep grass beside the well.
Jacqueline, meanwhile, was struggling with a frightful longing to tell everything to Peronelle. Peronelle was so sweet, so warm, so comforting. But no, Peronelle would be so horrified if she knew what she had done that she would never speak to her again, and if she lost Peronelle’s love she would be completely lost. She could never tell anyone who loved her because then they wouldn’t love her any more.
Gradually the water-lane calmed them both. Peronelle was too practical and Jacqueline too self-absorbed to feel, as Colin had done, that there was something unearthly in the water-lane, but the nearness of a world other than their own had the effect of lifting them a little out of their slough of despond.
“Sophie says that there are always fairies in the water-lane,” said Peronelle, dabbling her fingers in the cool water.
“There aren’t any anywhere,” said Jacqueline, miserably, “they are only make-believes. All the nice things are make-believes.”
Peronelle had spoken idly, but the despairing note in Jacqueline’s voice roused her. She always challenged anything in the least depressing.
“How do you know there aren’t any fairies?” she demanded. “I expect there are heaps and heaps. I expect the world’s brimful of worlds, world within world, that we don’t know anything about. I think it’s lovely to think that. If you think of the water-lane just packed with fairies, and all of them happy, you don’t feel so unhappy yourself.”
“Why not?” demanded Jacqueline gloomily.
“Because, silly, the bigger one thing is the smaller it makes another thing. The more you pile on the happiness heap the smaller the unhappiness heap looks in comparison.”
“It may look smaller but it doesn’t feel smaller,” Jacqueline complained.
“Oh, come along to mother,” said Peronelle.
When they had turned up into the second lane that led to Bon Repos a queer feeling of abeyance that had fallen on the water-lane when their unperceiving spirits entered it was lifted. It was once again filled with the soundless passing of Things that were not seen.
When they reached Bon Repos Rachell, André and Ranulph were having tea in the kitchen. At the sight of her mother Jacqueline’s fountain of tears, which had mercifully been sealed up during the walk home, began to play again.
“Darling!” cried Rachell. She sank down on the “jonquière” and gathered Jacqueline into her arms. André, terribly distressed, stood by them stroking Jacqueline’s wet cheek with his finger. Ranulph departed tactfully into the courtyard. Peronelle, worn out, sat down at the table and began to eat bread and butter. She was ravenous, simply ravenous; being sorry for people always made her dreadfully hungry.
“Darling! Darling! Tell me what’s the matter. Tell mother all about it!” implored Rachell, but Jacqueline only sobbed and sobbed. André, stroking feverishly, felt near tears himself.
Peronelle took instant charge of the situation.
“Mother, take her upstairs and put her to bed,” she said thickly through bread and butter. “She’s been sick and her nose bled, but there’s more in it than that. She won’t say, though, so it’s no good your asking her. When she’s in bed father can tell her stories till she goes to sleep. As you go upstairs tell Uncle Ranulph he can come in again.”
Rachell obediently departed, carrying Jacqueline and calling out to Ranulph as she passed. . . . Jacqueline sobbed all the way upstairs.
“Drought appears to have broken up,” said Ranulph pleasantly as he returned and helped himself to cake.
“There’s never drought for long with Jacqueline,” said Peronelle. “Pass me the jam, please.”
André thought they were both rather heartless. He drank cup after cup of tea but he couldn’t eat anything. . . . Why did one bring children into the world?
Presently Rachell came down again.
“I’ve given her some milk and she’s quiet now,” she said, “but I can’t get anything out of her. You go, André, you’re better at comforting the children than I am.”
“Father, tell her stories,” prompted Peronelle, “tell her the one about the giant who had to carry his heart about in a paper bag. She likes that one.”
André obediently departed.
“I’ll call Sophie to clear away, I’m going to do my home lessons,” said Peronelle. “Uncle Ranulph, take mother into the garden and turn her thoughts.”
Sophie cleared away with the promptitude of a slave obeying her sultan, and Ranulph unquestioningly took Rachell into the garden.
V
Four Red Admirals, three Tortoiseshells and a Painted Lady were sunning their wings on the Michaelmas daisies. Rachell and Ranulph surveyed them in silence.
“I wonder why butterflies always choose the Michaelmas daisies to sit on?” said Rachell at last.
“Mauve is the proper setting for their colours,” said Ranulph, “you’d hardly notice them on the dahlias. Natural things have a genius for finding their right environment. Not so humans. The longer I live the more idiotic I find the human race compared to, say, butterflies.” He paused. “Jacqueline is hardly in her right environment in t
hat blasted school.”
“And I am idiotic to send her there?” inquired Rachell.
“Idiotic.”
“I was to have my thoughts turned,” she reminded him.
“You don’t want your thoughts turned,” said Ranulph, “you want me to help you over this problem of Jacqueline.”
“I suppose I do,” said Rachell slowly. It struck her suddenly that she was often turning to Ranulph for advice about the children. . . . It was almost as though there were some tie between him and the children. . . . He loved them, of course. . . . Hard though he tried to hide it she had discovered that much about him.
“It’s idiocy to send a child like Jacqueline to a school like St. Mary’s,” said Ranulph, “you ought to have more sense. She’s not the brains to profit by what they teach her there. Send her to the Convent.” He spoke roughly, almost rudely, as André would never have spoken to her, but somehow she did not resent it.
“Why the Convent?” she asked.
“A child like that needs religion.”
“I wonder why you say that,” said Rachell, “you’re not a religious man.”
“No, but I’m aware of the psychological value of religion to a nature like Jacqueline’s.”
“The nuns at the Convent are very simple women,” said Rachell, “I don’t think their teaching is very up to date.”
“I’ve already told you that Jacqueline has not got it in her to profit by up-to-date teaching. What she needs is to have religious truths applied very simply to her own torments.”
Rachell gazed at him. “Torments.” What a word to apply to a child’s little troubles!
“Yes, torments,” said Ranulph, as though reading her thoughts. “When we grow old we are apt to forget the torments of childhood.”
“They have scripture lessons at school,” said Rachell, “and I—I teach the children too.”
“You’ve not sufficient simplicity to teach a child religion,” said Ranulph rudely, “and as for school—all I ever learnt of religion there was that Abraham had six wives.”
“He didn’t. Aren’t you thinking of Henry the Eighth?”
“I daresay. It’s all one,” said Ranulph gloomily.
“I must see what André says,” said Rachell, “I am always guided by André.”
“Indeed?” said Ranulph. There was an edge of irony in his voice, and Rachell flushed.
“But, of course, I always ask my husband’s advice,” she said, indignantly.
“I didn’t say that you didn’t ask it,” said Ranulph.
They walked slowly down the garden till they came to the rampart of earth and stones and twisted trees that separated it from the cliff. There was a little gate here and they passed through it and picked their way over the hussocks of rough grass and wild thyme till they came to the cliff’s edge. The sea lay sleek and shining under the long sun-rays that caressed it, and its murmur was infinitely still and peaceful. Rachell went back in memory to her days at the Convent. On just such quiet afternoons had she sat in the sun-drenched Convent parlour and listened to the sea as her lace bobbins tapped and danced on the pillow. The sea had worn just that sleek look on the day when Soeur Ursule read her the story of St. Christopher carrying the baby Christ across the water. She remembered she had looked out of the window half expecting to see St. Christopher struggling through the water gasping and straining under the great weight of the Christ who carried the sorrows of the world. . . . How to carry sorrow. . . . Could the nuns teach that to Jacqueline?
“Yes, I’ll send Jacqueline to the Convent,” she said suddenly.
“Subject, of course, to the approval of André,” suggested Ranulph in a voice like silk.
“Of course,” snapped Rachell. His little dig had broken a lovely moment that she had recaptured out of the past, and she felt annoyed with him. . . . Sometimes she was not quite sure that she liked him. . . . At other times she felt frighteningly attracted by him. . . . Often she wondered was he—a good man? . . . Had she done right to bring him to Bon Repos? . . . Looking back that queer clairvoyance that she had had about him seemed to her rather silly. . . . If he were—a bad man, might he not do some harm to the children?
With that uncanny gift he had for reading her thoughts he answered her.
“You must often wonder who and what I am,” he said, “I’d like you to know that whatever I am, I could never, under any circumstances, do anything that could possibly hurt your children.”
“Thank you,” she said.
The mellow light of autumn, as evening drew on, seemed closing round them. The horizon lines were growing much softer and the colours of sea and earth and sky were less distinct, were melting each into the other. It was as though the walls of the world were slowly contracting and isolating the two of them in a great loneliness. . . . They felt very close to each other.
Rachell was conscious of a great struggle going on in the man beside her. . . . He wanted to tell her about himself and he found it amazingly difficult to begin. She had realized from the very first that he was a solitary, a man who prided himself upon his freedom from all ties and who had always been resolute to avoid them. She had realized also that as the weeks had gone by his resolution had been broken down. . . . The children had got him. . . . His capitulation had been all the greater because of his former pride. . . . But he would not own it yet. . . . She tried to help him out a little.
“Let’s sit down,” she said, “it’s so lovely here. The others won’t want me yet. . . . That story of the giant who kept his heart in a paper bag takes an age to tell and the children will never let André miss out one detail.”
They sat down. Ranulph sat with his arms round his crossed knees, a little away from her, looking out to sea.
“It would be a good thing for André if he kept his heart in a paper bag and mislaid it occasionally,” he said.
“You mean that André feels things too much?” said Rachell.
“André is a good man and the good men suffer—more fools they.”
“You think it wise not to be good?” she asked smiling.
“I don’t know. Life is a question of choice and one has experience only of the path one has chosen. You choose either martyrdom or hell and which is wisest who’s to say?”
“Tell me what you mean.” Rachell was almost afraid to encourage him. She knew it would ease him to speak out but she was terrified lest a slip on her part should shut him into himself again. But he went on.
“There’s something within man—call it what you like—a core of personality—a flame—an indwelling spirit—to be true to it is to suffer a continual martyrdom of discipline and to be false to it is to burn in hell.”
“And you chose the second course?”
“I have kept to it consistently from the start.”
“How did you start?”
“I started with the laudable desire for freedom—kicked over the traces like many a young devil before me, and went to Australia.”
“The young never understand freedom,” said Rachell, “they always confuse it with chaos.” Her thoughts surged agonizedly towards Colin—his passion for freedom always terrified her.
“Chaos exactly describes what I found in Australia,” said Ranulph bitterly.
“What did you do in Australia?”
“Took to gold mining. There’s no necessity to tell you about that. An exact inventory of all the furniture in hell wouldn’t interest you. . . . Strangely enough I made money.”
“And then?”
“Ever since then I’ve travelled out East trying to scorch out the really extraordinary bitterness that had silted down to the bottom of me.”
“You couldn’t?”
“No. It was a raging fire and yet at the same time it was solid metal. . . . It is a regrettable fact that what you have done never leaves you.”
Rachell asked the question that burns on the tongue of every woman inquiring into a man’s past.
“Did you ever marry?”
“Yes—in Australia. It seemed the easiest way to get my house cared for for nothing.”
She recoiled at his tone and yet asked on.
“Did you—leave her?”
“Yes, I couldn’t stand the shackles and she was a vile woman. . . . After I left her she was murdered,” he added.
Rachell felt as though she had looked suddenly into the pit.
“Yes, it wasn’t a nice place,” he said, and then, after a long pause, “and now you know a bit about me. . . . Would you like me to leave Bon Repos?”
“No,” she said.
They both got up, Rachell a little shakily. They looked at each other.
“So often during these last weeks I’ve turned to you for advice,” she said, “and you’ve always given me good advice.”
“Does that surprise you?”
“Yes. I thought it took a good man to give good advice.”
“Sometimes those shut out from a garden can see the way about the paths more clearly through the bars of the gate than those inside,” he said. “I daresay, if you asked him, you would find that Apollyon could direct you quite correctly through the lanes of heaven.”
They were standing very close together and he gave her what she was always afterwards to call “his look of a fallen angel. . . .”
She turned and fled.
So ended Jacqueline’s last day at St. Mary’s.
Chapter 4
I
THE mellow September weather ended abruptly in days of wind and storming rain. It deluged. The gurgling of the water in the gutters and the swish as the javelins of the rain splintered into miniature rivers against the window-panes almost drowned the noise of the sou’wester out at sea. The courtyard and the farmyard seemed awash with water, and André and Ranulph, wading about in tarpaulins, seemed to the anxious eyes of the children in imminent danger of drowning.
“Look at it! There must be going to be another flood,” said Peronelle, her face pressed so close to the kitchen window that the tip of her nose appeared to have turned into a flat white linen button. “Do you think Bon Repos will float like the ark?”