"No, I didn"t think anything so definite as that, but I had an intuition to ask him to come away with me, and I was afraid he"d think it rather cheek and, oh, Mrs. Ross, what on earth good am I? I believe I"ve got the gift of understanding people, and yet I"m afraid to use it. Shall I ever learn?"
Michael looked at Mrs. Ross in despair. He was exasperated by his own futility. He went on to rail at himself.
"The only gift I have got! And then my detestable self-consciousness wrecks the first decent chance I"ve had to turn it to account."
They talked for some time. At first Mrs. Ross consoled him, insisting that imagination affected by what had happened later was playing him false. Then she seemed to be trying to state an opinion which she found it difficult to state. She spoke to Michael of qualities which in the future with one quality added would show his way in the world clear and straight before him. He was puzzled to guess at what career she was hinting.
"My dear Michael, I would not tell you for anything," she affirmed.
"Why not?"
"Why not? Why, because with all the ingenuous proclamations of your willingness to do anything that you"re positive you can do better than anything else, I"m quite, quite sure you"re still the rather perverse Michael of old, and as I sit here talking to you I remember the time when I told you as a little boy that you would have been a Roundhead in the time of the Great Rebellion. How angry you were with me! So what I think you"re going to do--I almost said when you"re grown up--but I mean when you leave Oxford, I shall have to tell you after you have made up your own mind. I shall have to give myself merely the pleasure of saying, "I knew it.""
"I suppose really I know what you think I shall do," said Michael slowly. "But you"re wrong--at least, I think you"re wrong. I lack the mainspring of the parson"s life. Talk to me about Kenneth instead of myself. How"s he getting on?"
"Oh, he"s splendid at five years old, but I want to give him something more than I ever managed to give you."
"Naturally," said Michael, smiling. "He"s your son."
"Michael, would you be surprised if I told you that I thought of...."
Mrs. Ross broke off abruptly. "No, I won"t tell you yet."
"You"re full of unrevealed mysteries," said Michael.
"Yes, it"s bedtime for me. Good night."
Two mornings later Michael had a letter from his mother in London. He wondered why he should be vaguely surprised by her hurried return.
Surely Prescott"s death could not have been a reason to bring her home.
173 CHEYNE WALK,
S.W.
My dearest Michael,
I"m so dreadfully upset about poor d.i.c.k Prescott. I have so few old friends, so very few, that I can"t afford to lose him. His devotion to your father was perfectly wonderful. He gave up everything to us. He remained in society just enough to be of use to your father, but he was nearly always with us. I think he was fond of me, but he worshiped him. Perhaps I was wrong in trying to encourage the idea of marrying Stella. But I console myself by saying that that had nothing to do with this idea of his to take his own life. You see, when your father died, he found himself alone. I"ve been so selfishly interested in reentering life. He had no wish to do so.
Michael, I can"t write anything more about it. Perhaps, dearest boy, you wouldn"t mind giving up some of your time with the Carthews, and will come back earlier to be with me in London for a little time.
Your loving
Mother.
P.S.--I hope the funeral was properly done.
Michael realized with a start the loneliness of his mother, and in his mood of self-reproachfulness attacked himself for having neglected her ever since the interests of Oxford had arisen to occupy his own life so satisfyingly. He told Mrs. Ross of the letter, and she agreed with him in thinking he ought to go back to London at once. Michael had only time for a very short talk with old Mrs. Carthew before the chaise would arrive.
"There has been a fate upon this visit," said the old lady. "And I"m sorry for it. I"d promised myself a great many talks with you. Besides, you"ll miss Alan now, and he"ll be disappointed, and as for Nancy, she"ll be miserable."
"But I must go," Michael said.
"Of course you must go," said Mrs. Carthew, thumping with her stick on the gravel path. "You must always think first of your mother."
"You told me that before on this very path a long time ago," said Michael thoughtfully. "I didn"t understand so well why at the time. Now, of course," he added shyly, "I understand everything. I used to wonder what the mystery could be. I used to imagine all sorts of the most extraordinary things. Prisons and lunatic asylums among others."
Mrs. Carthew chuckled to herself.
"It"s surprising you didn"t imagine a great deal more than you did.
How"s Oxford?"
"Ripping," said Michael. "And so was your advice about Oxford. I"ve never forgotten. It was absolutely right."
"I always am absolutely right," said Mrs. Carthew.
The wheels of the chaise were audible; and Michael must go at once.
"If I"m alive in two years, when you go down," said Mrs. Carthew, "I"d like to give you some advice about the world. I"m even more infallible about the world. Although I married a sailor, I"m a practical and worldly old woman."
Michael said good-bye to all the family standing by the gate of Cobble Place, to Mrs. Ross with the young Kenneth now in knickerbockers by her side and soon, thought Michael, a subject fit for speculation; to delightful May and Joan; to the smiling Carthew cook; all waving to him in the sunlight with the trim cotoneaster behind them.
It gave Michael a consciousness of a new and most affectionate intimacy to find his mother alone in the house in Cheyne Walk. It was scarcely yet September, and the desolation of London all around seemed the more sharply to intagliate upon his senses the fineness of his mother"s figure set in the frame of that sedate house. They had tea together in her own room, and it struck him with a sudden surprise to see her once again in black. The room with its rose du Barri and clouded pastels sustained her beauty and to her somber attire lent a deeper poignancy; or perhaps it was something apart from the influence of the room, this so incontestable pathos, and was rather the effect of the imprisonment of her elusiveness by a chain whose power Michael had not suspected.
Always, for nearly as many years as he could remember, when he had kissed her she had seemed to evade the statement of any positive and ordinary affection. Her personality had fluttered for a moment to his embrace and fled more than swiftly. In one moment as Michael kissed her now, the years were swept away, and he was sitting up for an extra half hour at the seaside, while she with her face flushed by another August sunset was leaning over him. The river became the sea, and the noise of the people on the Embankment were the people walking on the promenade below. In one moment as Michael kissed her now, her embrace gave to him what it had not given during all the years between--a consciousness that he depended upon her life.
"Dearest boy," she murmured, "how good of you to come back so quickly from the Carthews!"
"But I would much rather be with you," said Michael.
Indeed, as he sat beside her holding her hand, he wondered to himself how he had been able to afford to miss so many opportunities of sitting like this, and immediately afterward wondered at himself for being able to sit like this without any secret dread that he was making himself absurd by too much demonstrativeness. After all, it was very easy to show emotion even to one"s mother without being ridiculous.
"Poor d.i.c.ky Prescott," she said, and tears quickly blurred her great gray eyes and hung quivering on the shadowy lashes beneath. Michael held her hand closer when he saw she was beginning to cry. He felt no awe of her grief, as he had when she told him of his father"s death. This simpler sorrow brought her so much nearer to him. She was speaking of Prescott"s death as she might have spoken of the loss of a cherished possession, a dog perhaps or some familiar piece of jewelry.
"I shall never get used to not having him to advise me. Besides, he was the only person to whom I could talk about Charles--about your father.
d.i.c.ky was so bound up with all my life. So long as he was alive, I had some of the past with me."
Michael nodded with comprehending gravity of a.s.sent.
"Darling boy, I don"t mean that you and darling Stella are not of course much more deeply precious to me. You are. But I can"t help thinking of that poor dear man, and the way he and Charles used to walk up and down the quarter-deck, and I remember once Charles lent him a stud. It"s the silly little sentimental memories like that which are so terribly upsetting when they"re suddenly taken away."
Now she broke down altogether, and Michael with his arms about her, held her while she wept.
"Dearest mother, when you cry I seem to hold you very safely," he whispered. "I don"t feel you"ll ever again be able to escape."
She had ceased from her sobbing with a sudden shiver and catch of the breath and looked at him with frightened eyes.
"Michael, he once said that to me ... before you were born. Before ...
on a hillside it was ... how terribly well I remember."
Michael did not want her to speak of his father. He felt too helpless in the presence of that memory. The death of Prescott was another matter, a trivial and pathetic thing. Quickly he brought his mother back to that, until she was tired with the flowing of many tears.
Michael spent the rest of the Long Vacation with his mother in London, and gradually he made himself a companion to her. They went to theaters together, because it gave her a sentimental pleasure to think how much poor d.i.c.ky Prescott would have enjoyed this piece once upon a time.