For the life of her Baby could not have said why, but she felt as if something had been broken by these last words—broken with a great crash. She put down her glass and turned and stared from her aunt to Major Bethune and back again. Lady Gerardine's eyes were cast down, her hands were moving among the tea-things: it would have been hard to divine if she had even heard. The man was leaning forward, devouring her face with unsparing gaze—a gaze that seemed to be looking for something with brutal intensity.
After a silence, so oppressive that Aspasia could have screamed, Lady Gerardine spoke:
"Is it necessary to ask for my permission?" she said, without lifting her eyelids. "I did not know that people were so particular nowadays." She paused. And then, with a perceptible effort: "Did you know Captain English?" she asked.
"Did I know him?" Raymond Bethune laughed out loud, unmirthfully. "You seem to have forgotten that he and I went through that siege together. I was with him from the day I first joined, practically till the hour of his death."
Rosamond Gerardine gave a faint gasp, as if breath had suddenly failed her; then she looked up sharply and veiled her glance again.
"Ah," she said slowly. "Through the siege—till—I had not known. I beg your pardon."
Once more there was the heavy silence. With round eyes Baby stared: things were passing here to the meaning of which she had no clue, but she felt, as it were, the stress of a tragedy in the air.
Suddenly Lady Gerardine rose.
"I am glad to have met you," said she. He rose too, and she stretched out her hand to him. "Write his life," she went on. "I am sure no one could do it better."
As upon their first greeting, the man bowed ceremoniously, barely touching the fingers proffered. She sighed, sank into her chair again, then turned and smiled determinedly upon her niece with the air of one dismissing the subject. Bethune felt well enough that he too was being dismissed; but he took a step forward and stood looking down upon her.
"I do not think you quite understand," he said. "I cannot do this work without your help, Lady Gerardine."
"My help!"
"I am exceedingly sorry to be so tiresome"—his manner betrayed a curious mixture of patience and irritation—"but you see, that without the papers in your possession my task would be futile. I could not possibly do the work justice."
"The papers in my possession!" She echoed the words as helplessly as before.
"The papers in your possession," he repeated. "His letters to you, the journal he wrote during the siege, his notes, his whole correspondence—I brought them all back and sent them to you myself—afterwards. And you, you did receive them? You were too ill to see me, I was told, but your friends undertook that you should have them."
She was gazing at him, now, with wide eyes growing darker and deeper every moment. The colour rushed up to her face, then faded away, leaving it paler even than before. Her stricken look made him feel like a brute; yet the sheer perversity of her attitude exasperated him. At last:
"You want me to give you these papers?" she exclaimed, with a cry.
He sat down on the chair next her; and, like one endeavouring to make a fractious child hear reason, began to explain his meaning to her.
"I should not presume," he said, "to suggest that you should confide to me writings which can concern only yourself and him. He was a reserved man, and, though he was the best friend, the only friend I ever had, and I perhaps his closest, I should not dream of intruding upon his private life, now—now that he is dead. God forbid! But I want you to help, I want you to give me every necessary extract which concerns his soldier's life—that life which was such an example to all Englishmen—which I feel it should be given to England to know, as freely as it was laid down for her. Why, there is not even a cairn of stones to mark his grave! Mark his grave? Why, even that grave has been denied to us! But we can yet raise a monument to him that our country may know her dead."
His cold somewhat grating voice deepened into a note of such tenderness that Baby wondered in her childish mind. She did not know that a man could so love and mourn a friend. Lady Gerardine had leant back in her chair, her hands clasping the arms. Bethune saw her revolving the question in her mind with such pallid suffering upon her features that he felt torn between anger and a sort of unwilling pity. Her lips moved:
"It is impossible."
He thought he could not have heard aright.
"I beg your pardon?"
"It is impossible."
"Lady Gerardine...!"
"You do not know what you are asking. I cannot!"
"I think it is you who do not understand. The matter is so simple; those letters, that journal——"
"No—no."
"You refuse?" he exclaimed. Indignation was even stronger than surprise.
"You do not know what you are asking!" she repeated. And the cry of passion in her voice again startled both him and Aspasia.
Bethune rose, took up his hat in silence; stood awhile, his steel-pale eyes flaming upon the woman whom his friend had, from all the world, chosen to make his wife.
"I trust you will think it over," said he at length, as soon as he could control himself sufficiently to speak.
He paused again; but Lady Gerardine made no reply. She was still fixing him with that inexplicable gaze that seemed one of terror.
"I shall call again," said he, well-nigh in the tone of a menace; then bowed and turned away. At the door he halted. "But perhaps you did not keep those papers?" he said, upon a sudden scornful thought.
Still she held her peace, and in his heart he knew that this random shaft of his had fallen wide of the mark; that, whatever might be the explanation of her attitude, it was not indifference.
Thoroughly dissatisfied with the result of his interview, with himself, and the whole situation, he strode down the long corridors into the cool echoing hall, where many pillars showed with faint barbaric tints between aisles of gloom.
At the very threshold of the colour and sunshine without, some one overtook him with patter of flying feet, some one nipped him by the sleeve with determined fingers. He looked, and it was Miss Aspasia. Her hazel eyes were rounder than ever; so was her button of a mouth. Her hair seemed to stand out, an aureole of amazement, from her baby face.
"Don't be angry with Aunt Rosamond. Perhaps she will change her mind."
He wheeled round.
"Have you any idea," he asked, "of the reason for her refusal?"
Aspasia shook her head so violently that the halo danced again. She pursed her lips with a long drawn-out:
"No. You see," she added quickly, arresting him, as with head bent in thought he was once more proceeding on his way, "you see, we never speak of Aunt's first husband here. At least she never does. There is no picture of him about, not a sign of anything that has ever belonged to him. As far as she is concerned, it is just as if he had never been."
Raymond Bethune, of the Guides, jerked his head upwards in melancholy and bitter confirmation. In the midst of his own preoccupation and disappointment he could not, however, help being struck with the engaging quality of the face thrust so confidingly close to his. Those yellow hazel eyes had depths of almost infantile candour.
"At least there is a soul that can afford to be transparent," he said to himself. Then aloud, following his first perplexed train of thought: "Perhaps it is because of your uncle, of Sir Arthur?" he suggested. "Lady Gerardine may be afraid of annoying him. Some men are jealous of their wives' first husbands." He smiled, half derisively to himself, half genially upon her.
"The Runkle!" cried Aspasia, with a giggle. "Jealous? Oh no; I don't think so! Why, he is the only creature who ever does speak of Captain English in this place. Poor Runkle, he's so awfully pleased with himself, you know, that I don't think he could be jealous of anything or anybody."
"Why then——" Bethune's brow darkened at this confident removal of the only hypothesis that could put Lady Gerardine's behaviour in a favourable light. "Do you think," he said, regarding the girl reflectively, "that you could use your influence in this matter?"
Again Aspasia's head flew from side to side in violent negation.
"Oh, I could not! Aunt Rosamond, she's a darling, she is more than good to me; I love her, but—it would seem such horrible impertinence. I cannot explain, Major Bethune, but I never feel as if I knew her really, nor as if she wanted me to know her. She always seems to me to be all outside, somehow."
He reflected a moment; then he suddenly held out his hand to her, with that softening of the countenance she had already noted—and noted to approve.
"Will you? I want you to try and help me," said he. It was worded as a request; it was voiced, somehow, as a command.
She was preparing to twirl her curly mop, when she looked up and met his eyes. Then—she never knew how it happened—she said quite the opposite to what she had intended:
"I will try."
And this was a promise. There was no mistake about it. He held her hand for a second in a firm grasp; neither of them wotted, or cared, for the white-clad, dusky-faced retinue that stood like so many statues awaiting the moment to proffer their services. If a liquid eye rolled curiously, however, it was an exception; your Hindoo has a dignified discretion of his own.
* * * * *
"Play me something, Baby."
Lady Gerardine was still lying back in her chair, almost as if she had not moved. Her face had perhaps a whiter pallor than before, but there was no other trace of emotion to be seen. Instead of obeying, Aspasia, with her promise heavy on her heart and all the indiscreet impulsiveness of her years, rushed over and flung herself at her aunt's feet, rubbing a coaxing head against her knees.
Rosamond laid her hand upon the curls. This Baby seized and kissed; then she looked up. Lady Gerardine smiled; it was a smile indulgent but of infinite detachment.
"It is perfectly absurd that I should call you Aunt," began the girl. True child as she was, she could think of no better scheme of attack than this wheedling. "You look as young as I do."
"Young?" echoed the Governor's wife, wearily.
Baby was counting on her fingers: "I was, let me see, just twelve when you married the Runkle, six years ago. So," triumphantly, "you are twenty-seven now. And that is, oh, quite ridiculously young for an aunt!"
Lady Gerardine sighed.
"Dear Aunt Rosamond," said Aspasia, suddenly, turning round to kneel and place her elbows on her aunt's knees while she looked earnestly into her face, "why won't you?"
"Why won't I what, Baby?"
"You know. Let that poor man have those papers. Dear Aunt Rosamond, I don't think it's quite fair."
The girl was trembling at her own temerity. But now the elder woman showed neither anger nor distress; only a marble stillness seemed to come over the living flesh. After a pause she placed her hand gently across Aspasia's mouth.
"Baby, never speak of that again," she said. And there was the most absolute finality in her voice. Then she leaned forward and kissed her niece. The touch of her lips struck Aspasia as deathly cold. "Now play me something."
Aspasia rose, baffled, not without a feeling akin to the irritation that Major Bethune had displayed a little while before. It was like being brought up by a smooth blank wall.
She marched to the piano, opened it, and plunged into a prelude of Bach's, glad to be able to work off some of her pent-up feelings. As she played she set her pointed chin; and, while her fingers flew, her thought wove in and out with the intricate music to a settled resolution:
"I don't care. Other people can be determined too. It is not fair of Aunt Rosamond. And I'll not give it up."
She finished her "Bach" with a triumphant chord.
"Thank you," said Lady Gerardine, "I like your music, Baby. It is so intellectual."