Studies in love and in terror Part 9

As long as tradition endures in the life of the town, Falaise will remember the _Neptune_ funeral procession. Not only was every navy in the world represented, but also every strand of that loosely woven human fabric we civilized peoples call a nation.

Through the long line of soldiers, each man with his arms reversed, walked the official mourners, while from the fortifications there boomed the minute gun.

First the President of the French Republic, with, to his right, the Minister of Marine; and close behind them the stiff, still vigorous, figure of old Admiral de Saint Vilquier. By his side walked the Mayor of Falaise--so mortally pale, so what the French call undone, that the Admiral felt fearful lest his neighbour should be compelled to fall out.

But Jacques de Wissant was not minded to fall out.

The crowd looking on, especially the wives of those substantial citizens of the town who stood at their windows behind half-closed shutters and drawn blinds, stared down at the mayor with pitying concern.

"He has a warm heart though a cold manner," murmured these ladies to one another, "and just now, you know, he is in great anxiety, for his wife--that beautiful Claire with whom he doesn't get on very well--is in Italy, seriously ill of scarlet fever." "Yes, and as soon as this sad ceremony is over, he will leave for the south--I hear that the President has offered him a seat in his saloon as far as Paris."

As the head of the procession at last stopped on the great parade ground where the last honours were to be rendered to the lowly yet ill.u.s.trious dead, Jacques de Wissant straightened himself with an instinctive gesture, and his lips began to move. He was muttering to himself the speech he would soon have to deliver, and which he had that morning, making a great mental effort, committed to memory.

And after the President had had his long, emotional, and flowery say; and when the oldest of French admirals had stepped forward and, in a quavering voice, bidden the dead farewell on behalf of the Navy, it came to the turn of the Mayor of Falaise.

He was there, he said, simply as the mouth-piece of his fellow-townsmen, and they, bowed as they were by deep personal grief, could say but little--they could indeed only murmur their eternal grat.i.tude for the sympathy they had received, and were now receiving, from their countrymen and from the world.

Then Jacques de Wissant gave a brief personal account of each of the ten seamen whom this vast concourse had gathered together to honour. It was noted by the curious in such things that he made no allusion to the two officers, to Commander Dupre and Lieutenant Paritot; doubtless he thought that they, after all, had been amply honoured in the preceding speeches.

But though his care for the lowly heroes proved the Mayor of Falaise a good republican, he showed himself in the popular estimation also a scholar, for he wound up with the old tag--the grand old tag which inspired so many n.o.ble souls in the proudest of ancient empires and civilizations, and which will retain the power of moving and thrilling generations yet unborn in both the Western and the Eastern worlds:

"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."

THE CHILD

I

It was close on eleven o'clock; the July night was airless, and the last of that season's great b.a.l.l.s was taking place in Grosvenor Square.

Mrs. Elwyn's brougham came to a sudden halt in Green Street. Encompa.s.sed behind and before with close, intricate traffic, the carriage swung stiffly on its old-fas.h.i.+oned springs, responding to every movement of the fretted horse.

Hugh Elwyn, sitting by his mother's side, wondered a little impatiently why she remained so faithful to the old brougham which he could remember, or so it seemed to him, all his life. But he did not utter his thoughts aloud; he still went in awe of his mother, and he was proud, in a whimsical way, of her old-fas.h.i.+oned austerity of life, of her narrowness of vision, of her dislike of modern ways and new fas.h.i.+ons.

Mrs. Elwyn after her husband's death had given up the world. This was the first time since her widowhood that she and her son had dined out together; but then the occasion was a very special one--they had been to dinner with the family of Elwyn's fiancee, Winifred Fanshawe.

Hugh Elwyn turned and looked at his mother. As he saw in the half-darkness the outlines of the delicately pure profile, framed in grey bands of hair covering the ears as it had been worn when Mrs. Elwyn was a girl upwards of forty years ago, he felt stirred with an unwonted tenderness, added to the respect with which he habitually regarded her.

Since leaving Cavendish Square they had scarcely spoken the one to the other. The drive home was a short one, for they lived in South Street.

It was tiresome that they should be held up in this way within a hundred yards of their own door.

Suddenly the mother spoke. She put out her frail hand and laid it across her son's strong brown fingers. She gazed earnestly into the good-looking face which was not as radiantly glad as she would have wished to see it--as indeed she had once seen her son's face look, and as she could still very vividly remember her own husband's face had looked during their short formal engagement nearly fifty years ago. "I could not be better pleased, Hugh, if I had myself chosen your future wife."

Elwyn was a little amused as well as touched; he was well aware that his mother, to all intents and purposes, _had_ chosen Winifred. True, she had been but slightly acquainted with the girl before the engagement, but she had "known all about her," and had been on terms of friendly acquaintance with Winifred's grandmother all her long life. Elwyn remembered how his mother had pressed him to accept an invitation to a country house where Winifred Fanshawe was to be. But Mrs. Elwyn had never spoken to her son of her wishes until the day he had come and told her that he intended to ask Winifred to marry him, and then her unselfish joy had moved him and brought them very near to one another.

When Hugh Elwyn was in London--he had been a great wanderer over the earth--he lived with his mother, and they were outwardly on the closest, most intimate terms of affection. But then Mrs. Elwyn never interfered with Hugh, as he understood his friends' mothers so often interfered with them and with their private affairs. This doubtless was why they were, and remained, on such ideal terms together.

Suddenly Mrs. Elwyn again spoke, but she did not turn round and look tenderly at her son as she had done when speaking of his future wife--this time she gazed straight before her: "Is not Winifred a cousin of Mrs. Bellair?"

"Yes, there's some kind of connection between the Fanshawes and the Bellairs."

Hugh Elwyn tried to make his voice unconcerned, but he failed, and he knew that he had failed. His mother's question had disturbed him, and taken him greatly by surprise.

"I wondered whether they are friends?"

"I have never heard Winifred mention her," he said shortly. "Yes, I have--I remember now that she told me the Bellairs had sent her a present the very day after our engagement was in the _Morning Post_."

"Then I suppose you will have to see something of them after your marriage?"

"You mean the Bellairs? Yes--no. I don't think that follows, mother."

"Do you see anything of them now?"

"No"--he again hesitated, and again ate his word--"that is--yes. I met them some weeks ago. But I don't think we are likely to see much of them after our marriage."

He would have given the world to feel that his voice was betraying nothing of the discomfort he was feeling.

"I hope not, Hugh. Mrs. Bellair would not be a suitable friend for Winifred--or--or for any young married woman."

"Mother!" Elwyn only uttered the one word, but anger, shame, and self-reproach were struggling in the tone in which he uttered that one word. "You are wrong, indeed, you are quite wrong--I mean about f.a.n.n.y Bellair."

"My dear," she said gently, but her voice quivered, "I do not think I am wrong. Indeed, I know I am right." Neither had ever seen the other so moved. "My dear," again she said the two quiet words that may mean so much or so little, "you know that I never spoke to you of the matter. I tried never even to think of it, and yet, Hugh, it made me very anxious, very unhappy. But to-night, looking at that sweet girl, I felt I must speak."

She waited a moment, and then added in a constrained voice, "I do not judge you, Hugh."

"No!" he cried, "but you judge her! And it's so unfair, mother--so horribly unfair!"

He had turned round; he was forcing his mother to look at his now moody, unhappy face.

Mrs. Elwyn shrank back and closed her lips tightly. Her expression recalled to her son the look which used to come over her face when, as a petted, over cared-for only child, he asked her for something which she believed it would be bad for him to have. From that look there had been, in old days, no appeal. But now he felt that he must say something more.

His manhood demanded it of him.

"Mother," he said earnestly, "as you have spoken to me of the matter, I feel I must have it out with you! Please believe me when I say that you are being unjust--indeed, cruelly so. I was to blame all through--from the very beginning to the very end."

"You must allow me," she said in a low tone, "to be the judge of that, Hugh." She added deprecatingly, "This discussion is painful, and--and very distasteful to me."

Her son leant back, and choked down the words he was about to utter. He knew well that nothing he could say would change or even modify his mother's point of view. But oh! why had she done this? Why had she chosen to-night, of all nights, to rend the veil which had always hung, so decently, between them. He had felt happy to-night--not madly, foolishly happy, as so many men feel at such moments, but reasonably, decorously pleased with his present and his future. He was making a _mariage de convenance_, but there had been another man on the lists, a younger man than himself, and that had added a most pleasing zest to the pursuit. He, aided of course by Winifred Fanshawe's prudent parents, had won--won a very pretty, well-bred, well-behaved girl to wife. What more could a man of forty-one, who had lived every moment of his life, ask of that providence which shapes our ends?

The traffic suddenly parted, and the horse leapt forward.

As they reached their own front door, Mrs. Elwyn again spoke: "Perhaps I ought to add," she said hurriedly, "that I know one thing to Mrs.

Bellair's credit. I am told that she is a most devoted and careful mother to that little boy of hers. I heard to-day that the child is seriously ill, and that she and the child's nurse are doing everything for him."

Mrs. Elwyn's voice had softened, curiously. She had an old-fas.h.i.+oned prejudice against trained nurses.