Sinister Street

Mrs. Fane smiled, and Michael thought he would cherish that smile to the end of his life.

"Well?" said Michael, when Stella and he were sitting alone again.

"Of course I've known for years it was something like this," said Stella.

"I can't think why I never guessed. I ought to have guessed easily,"

Michael said. "But somehow one never thinks of anything like this in connection with one's own mother."

"Or sister," murmured Stella, looking up at a spot on the ceiling.

"I wish I could kick myself for not having said good-bye to him,"

Michael declared. "That comes of talking too much. I talked much too much then. Talking destroys action. What a beast I was. Lily and I look rather small now, don't we?" he went on. "When you think of the amount that mother must have suffered all these years, it just makes Lily and me look like ill.u.s.trations in a book. It's a curious thing that this business about mother and... Lord Saxby ought, I suppose, to make me feel more of a worm than ever, but it doesn't. Ever since the first shock, I've been feeling prouder and prouder. I can't make it out."

Then suddenly Michael flushed.

"I say, I wonder how many of our friends have known all the time? Mrs.

Carthew and Mrs. Ross both know. I feel sure by what they've said. And yet I wonder if Mrs. Ross does know. She's so strict in her notions that... I wonder... and yet I suppose she isn't so strict as I thought she was. Perhaps I was wrong."

"What are you talking about?" Stella asked.

"Oh, something that happened at Cobble Place. It's not important enough to tell you."

"What I'm wondering," said Stella, "is what mother was like when she was my age. She didn't say anything about her family. But I suppose we can ask her some time. I'm really rather glad I'm not 'Lady Stella Fane.' It would be ridiculous for a great pianist to be 'Lady Something.'"

"You wouldn't have been Lady Stella Fane," Michael contradicted. "You would have been Lady Stella Cunningham. Cunningham was the family name.

I remember reading about it all when I was interested in Legitimists."

"What are they?" Stella asked. "The opposite of illegitimate?"

Michael explained the difference, and he was glad that the word 'illegitimate' should first occur like this. The pain of its utterance seemed mitigated somehow by the explanation.

"It's an extraordinary thing," Michael began, "but, do you know, Stella, that all the agony of seeing Lily flirting seems to have died away, and I feel a sort of contempt... for myself, I mean. Flirting sounds such a loathsome word after what we've just listened to. Alan was right, I believe. I shall have to tell Alan about all this. I wonder if it will make any difference to him. But of course it won't. Nothing makes any difference to Alan."

"It's about time I met him," said Stella.

"Why, haven't you?" Michael exclaimed. "Nor you have. Great Scott! I've been so desperately miserable over Lily that I've never asked Alan here once. Oh, I will, though."

"I say, oughtn't we to go up to mother?" said Stella.

"Would she like us to?" Michael wondered.

"Oh, yes, I'm sure she would."

"But I can't express what I feel," Michael complained. "And it will be absurd to go and stand in front of her like two dummies."

"I'll say something," Stella promised; and, "Mother," she said, "come and hear me play to you."

The music-room, with its spare and austere decoration, seemed to Michael a fit place for the quiet contemplation of the tale of love he had lately heard.

Whatever of false shame, of self-consciousness, of shock remained was driven away by Stella's

Then Stella played with healing gentleness, and Michael in the darkness kissed his mother and stole away to bed, not to dream of Lily that night, not to toss enfevered, but quietly to lie awake, devising how to show his mother that he loved her as much now as he had loved her in the dim sunlight of most early childhood.

About ten days later Mrs. Fane came to Michael and Stella with a letter.

"I want to read you something," she said. "Your father's last letter has come."

"_We are in Pretoria now, and I think the war will soon be over.

But of course there's a lot to be done yet. I'm feeling seedy to-night, and I'm rather sighing for England. I wonder if I'm going to be ill. I have a presentiment that things are going wrong with me--at least not wrong, because in a way I would be glad. No, I wouldn't, that reads as if I were afraid to keep going_.

"_I keep thinking of Michael and Stella. Michael must be told soon.

He must forgive me for leaving him no name. I keep thinking of those Siamese stamps he asked for when I last saw him. I wish I'd seen him again before I went. But I dare say you were right. He would have guessed who I was, and he might have gone away resentful_."

Michael looked at his mother, and thanked her implicitly for excusing him. He was glad that his father had not known he had declined to see him.

"_I don't worry so much over Stella. If she really has the stuff in her to make the name you think she will, she does not need any name but her own. But it maddens me to think that Michael is cut out of everything. I can scarcely bear to realize that I am the last. I'm glad he's going to Oxford, and I'm very glad that he chose St.

Mary's. I was only up at Christ Church a year, and St. Mary's was a much smaller college in those days. Now of course it's absolutely one of the best. Whatever Michael wants to do he will be able to do, thank G.o.d. I don't expect, from what you tell me of him, he'll choose the Service. However, he'll do what he likes. When I come back, I must see him and I shall be able to explain what will perhaps strike him at first as the injustice of his position. I dare say he'll think less hardly of me when I've told him all the circ.u.mstances. Poor old chap! I feel that I've been selfish, and yet_....

"_I wonder if I'm going to be ill. I feel rotten. But don't worry.

Only, if by any chance I can't write again, will you give my love to the children, and say I hope they'll not hate the thought of me?

That piano was the best Prescott could get. I hope Stella is pleased with it_."

"Thanks awfully for reading us that," said Michael.

Chapter XX: _Music_

Mrs. Fane, having momentarily lifted the veil that all these years had hidden her personality from Michael and Stella, dropped it very swiftly again. Only the greatest emotion could have given her the courage to make that avowal of her life. During the days that elapsed between the revelation and the reading of Lord Saxby's last letter, she had lived very much apart from her children, so that the spectacle of her solitary grief had been deeply impressed upon their sensibility.

Michael was reminded by her att.i.tude of those long vigils formerly sustained by ladies of n.o.ble birth before they departed into a convent to pray, eternally remote from the world. He himself became endowed with a strange courage by the contemplation of his mother's tragical immobility. He found in her the expression of those most voiceless ideals of austere conduct that until this vision of resignation had always seemed doomed to sink broken-winged to earth. The thought of Lily in this mood became an intrusion, and he told himself that, even if it were possible to seek the sweet unrest of her presence, beneath the sombre spell of this more cla.s.sic sorrow he would have shunned that lovely and romantic girl. Michael's own realization of the circ.u.mstances of his birth occupied a very small part of his thoughts. His mind was fixed upon the aspect of his mother mute and heavy-lidded from the remembrance of that soldier dead in Africa. Michael felt no outrage of fate in these events. He was glad that death should have brought to his father the contentment of his country's honour, that in the grace of reconciliation he should be healed of his thwarted life. Nor could Michael resent that news of death which could enn.o.ble his mother with this placidity of comprehension, this staid and haughty mien of sorrow.

And he was grateful, too, that death should upon his own brow dry the fever dew of pa.s.sion.

But when she had read that last letter, Mrs. Fane strangely resumed her ordinary self. She was always so finely invested with dignity, so exquisitely sheathed, in her repose, Michael scarcely realized that now, after she had read the letter, the vision of her grief was once more veiled against him by that faintly discouraging, tenderly deliberate withdrawal of her personality, and that she was still as seclusive as when from his childhood she had concealed the sight of her love, living in her own rose-misted and impenetrable privacy.

It was Stella who by a sudden request first roused Michael to the realization that his mother was herself again.

"Mother," she said, "what about my first concert? The season is getting late."

"Dearest Stella," Mrs. Fane replied, "I think you can scarcely make your appearance so soon after your father's death."

"But, mother, I'm sure he wouldn't have minded. And after all very few people would know," Stella persisted.

"But I should prefer that you waited for a while," said Mrs. Fane, gently reproachful. "You forget that we are in mourning."

For Michael somehow the conventional expression seemed to disturb the divinity of his mother's carven woe. The world suddenly intervened.