Justin Cloud and Robin Gedge got their commissions on the same day. But while Robin appeared in Brackenhurst every few weeks, bronzed and broadened, to bewail his stagnancy, Justin, by luck o’war, or, as Robin jealously declared, by pulling wires, was out in France and having parcels sent to him before Brackenhurst had set up its first Belgian Committee. Laura, going in to tea with Mrs. Cloud on her way home from the Supply DepÔt in the vicarage barn, would sometimes see the parcels being done up; but she was never asked to help. That was the only difference that Mrs. Cloud ever made in her treatment of Laura. But for that circumstance Laura would have said that she knew nothing of that summer morning in another life. She seldom spoke of Justin, but when she did, it was as gently and openly as usual. Yet that she should not know all that had happened seemed incredible.... Justin told his mother everything ... and surely, if she knew——Did she know?...

The uncertainty made Mrs. Cloud’s unfailing kindness hard to bear.

But it was typical of the girl and the woman alike that they never dreamed of approaching the subject in their almost daily intercourse. If either had been less occupied it is probable that their common anxiety might have loosened at least Laura’s tongue. But Mrs. Cloud was at the head of every good work in the village and Laura, as the year wore to an end, had her hands full at home. For Gran’papa, testily intolerant of cinnamon or sympathy, packing off his daughter to her depÔt, submitting grudgingly to his granddaughter’s ministrations, Gran’papa, denying it with every difficult breath, fell ill. “Nothing serious, I hope, Miss Valentine?” “No—only a cold. Every one catches cold in winter time. Gran’papa has a cold.”

But the wet bitter weather of that first winter of war was a harvester who reaped in the camps and training grounds on behalf of death himself, more bloodily busy elsewhere—a harvester whose sickle was chill and his reaping hook pneumonia—a busy harvester who yet had time to go gleaning in the bare homes of the land for such bent and broken straws as had been left behind.

Looking back, looking down the civilian death lists for which nobody has had time these three long years, you see how abnormally the old and the half-old suffered. Death after death in the ’sixties and early ’seventies—’Quite suddenly’—’After a short illness’—it comes over and over again. You think of them as old limpets, wrenched from their rocks of ages, flung, too old to learn to cling again, into the sea of this war. And then, fastening on their shocked feebleness—the cold.

In Brackenhurst alone there were more deaths in that first autumn than in all the two years before.

Old Mrs. Whittle was the first to succumb—old Mrs. Whittle, the Valentines’ half bed-ridden pensioner who lived in one room at the top of rickety stairs, which Wilfred and James had never been induced to climb when they went with Laura and Nurse on Sunday afternoons to carry Mrs. Whittle beef-tea and sixpences. It always struck Laura as so unfair that because of their easy blubberings they should be allowed to wait at the foot of those witch-cottage stairs, while she, as frightened as they of the bright eyes and the hoarse whisper and the movements in the crimson shawl, always found herself following Nurse without a protest into the tiny, rank room. Yet, though she did not know it, it had not been Nurse, but her own innate fear of causing pain, that had forced her steps. More insistent than the fear of Mrs. Whittle had been the fear of hurting Mrs. Whittle’s feelings. She had stolidly endured the dim airlessness, the fire that spat startlingly, the bedclothes-smell, and sometimes—setting her teeth—a kiss from Mrs. Whittle, rather then hurt the feelings of Mrs. Whittle who had rheumatics.

“Bless everybody, and Justin, and give Mother my dear love, and make Mrs. Whittle quite well,” had run, in the dim years, her nightly petition.

Laura hated pain.

And now Mrs. Whittle was dead, needing neither sixpences nor Sunday visits any more from a grown-up Laura.

Old Jackson, digging her water-logged grave, in an absent son’s stead, shivered and coughed in the keen wind and followed her in a week. Two children from Laura’s Sunday-school fell sick of neglected colds and the listless, pining mother, in her dyed mourning, let Laura and the doctor do as they pleased. The long lists lengthened in the church porch and for a month there had been no news of Justin, not even the second-hand, meagre comfort, the ‘I am quite well’ of a field-postcard, filtering through to her by way of Mrs. Cloud. She had been glad to have her hands full. It helped to help people.... And the news got worse and worse.

And then Gran’papa had caught cold.

Aunt Adela was inclined to blame Papa. Papa had insisted on going—at his age!—all the way to the station last Sunday, to get a paper for Laura—he, who so strongly disapproved of Sunday papers. And all because Laura, at lunch, before she hurried off to those wretched children, had said something about wishing for a Sunday delivery! Papa was very difficult to manage. She had spoken to Laura seriously about it on her return. Between them they might, another time, circumvent easily enough an obstinate old man—for his own good, of course. But Laura, who was a peculiar girl in some ways, had merely stared at her aunt with those blank, black eyes, had merely said with a ridiculous catch in her voice—

“Do you mean to say that Gran’papa——” And then, breaking off in that irritating way of hers, had gone up without another word to Papa’s room. Had stayed there till supper-time—had not even come down to say how do you do to the rector—had spent every spare minute of her time there since. Well—she would catch Papa’s cold for a certainty, and then she would see!

But Laura did not catch Gran’papa’s cold. It was not one of his usual colds, the angry, vigorous, resentful colds of his healthy old age, but a feverish indisposition, a certain fading and shrinking of body that accompanied a glittering, fitful, mental activity. The change in him was so marked, so swift, that at the end of the week Laura looked back to the Gran’papa of last Sunday as to a memory, as to a stranger.

He would not go to bed, but sat crouched over the fire in the armchair that Laura had never before realized was so much too big for Gran’papa. She, when she could, sat with him, eternally knitting socks for the army that must always be to her but a multiplication of Justin, thinking of him and herself, and now, with new, bewildered thoughts, of Gran’papa.

She had been touched, almost beyond her strength, by that thought of his for her—by the sight of the paper in Gran’papa’s shaking hand, handed to her with a gesture that he could not, even then, prevent from being gingerly. The knowledge that he had guessed something, that he had been aware of the anxiety that showed itself in her feverish lust for news, that he, behind his reserves and absorptions, had watched her, felt for her—made her want to cry. She could be Spartan, but of necessity, not from choice. There was nothing of the Emily BrontË in her nature: she took as generously as she gave. She had strength and pride, but though she did without it, she never pretended that sympathy would not have been sweet. In those days, though she did not know it, though she had nearly forgotten her, she wanted her mother.

Gran’papa’s look at her as she came to him that Sunday, his silence, his awkward thrust of the rag he abhorred into her hand, did more than touch her—it strengthened her. She, to whom kith and kin had never meant much, had felt for the first time the comfort of the blood-tie, of the clan-love that is independent of all accidents of personality or desert. Gran’papa might not love Laura, but she realized at last how faithfully he loved his granddaughter.

She had taken the paper and thanked him, and settling herself opposite him in her grandmother’s chair, had sat quietly reading the aching headlines. And in the silence that followed she had felt, through all her urgent anxiety, how the icy crust under which the quiet river of their mutual affection had always flowed imprisoned, was melting at last. They made no demonstration. It was not in his nature, even in its strength, and now he was old, enfeebled; while she had been so drilled by the necessities of her life with Justin that she wore repression, like a dress, laced over her natural impulsiveness; nevertheless they had eased each other. For the first time in her life she was not on her best behaviour with him: her little ways, the occasional mannerisms, he passed over in silence, or perhaps, because she was at her entire ease, they occurred no longer.

She nursed him, in as far as he would allow it, in her busy aunt’s stead; for his cold ran no normal course: a spell of sunshine did not brisken him: he coughed and faded.

After a paroxysm—it was distressing to see him—he would lie exhausted in his chair, and sometimes wander a little or, rather, break into speech that was but drifting and idle thought. And Laura, listening, half guiltily, as one eavesdropping, marvelled how little she knew, and yet she had thought she knew, Gran’papa.

He talked to her, of his schooldays, of his youth, of mild adventures before he married. But they all led in the end, she noticed, to Grandmamma, whom she remembered vaguely as a sweet voice and a smile, in a pale-brown camel’s-hair shawl.

He would speak of her, watching Laura’s face and her beautiful, busy hands.

“You don’t remember your grandmamma, of course?”

“You are very like your grandmamma.”

“You are very like my wife.”

And once he called her “Anne.”

Yet another side to Gran’papa! Laura, as she dusted the drawing-room, would find herself pausing thoughtfully, wasting long minutes, before the faded crayon on the bamboo easel. The youthful, slim-waisted man, with the ringlets and Roman nose and serious eyes, who reminded her of David Copperfield and the Duke of Wellington, was, not nominally but really, Gran’papa: that was the strange part of it. Gran’papa, behind his shell of white hair, and trembling hands, and hectorings, and fidgetiness, was—not a habit, not an institution—but a man.... There was a closer tie between them than the accident of kinship: they were knit by the common experience of their common humanity.... He was a man and she was a woman.... He knew—incredible that Gran’papa should know—all that she knew.... He had loved ‘Anne,’ who was her little old dead grandmother.... She remembered hints of Aunt Adela—scraps of stories about a courtship that had not been all plain sailing.... He, Gran’papa upstairs, knew then what pain meant—knew as well as Laura the sickness of uncertainty ... the unnerving hopes and fears ... knew how like a stone one’s heart could lie in one’s breast.

She remembered again—it had been so forgotten—the day Grandmamma died. Gran’papa had sat all the morning in the dining-room, instead of in his room, which made it strange enough. Gran’papa—cold, aloof Gran’papa—had been stranger still. He had sat bowed over the fire, with his big silk handkerchief in his hand. With a sort of horror Laura had watched him, had seen that he was crying. He had looked up at her then and had said—she remembered his voice and his words—“Forty years—forty years—” over and over again. And then kindly, as if he knew she were frightened—“You’ve never seen a man cry, have you, child?” And Aunt Adela had said “Papa!” in a queer, warning voice.

That was all she remembered. But the words would not leave her as she rubbed the shining chair legs and pounded ostentatiously up and down the key-board, to assure Aunt Adela, if Aunt Adela should be on the alert, that she was dusting properly.

“A man”—not “Your grandfather.”... “A man”.... “My wife”....

So Gran’papa thought of himself as a man still.... He was a man.... The years they had passed on earth, eighteen or eighty, could alter their bodies, but not their souls.... Gran’papa’s soul—if she win through this barrier of his old and dying body to it—was as young as hers.... And hers as old as his.... A soul hadn’t any age ... or reckoned its age, not by years, but by wisdom, more or less, that its years had taught it.... And so—why shouldn’t they talk to each other? Gran’papa might help her.... She might ease Gran’papa.... For so long he had had no one to whom to tell his thoughts....

She would come up thoughtfully after her housework to spend the hour before lunch with him, to listen or to share his silence and to talk to him sometimes in her turn, jerkily, by fits and starts. She never knew how much he heard.

And then one day, quite suddenly, he took out his big pocket-book and showed her, wrapped in tissue, a strand of hair, a long coil that shone like old gold in the winter sunshine.

“She had beautiful hair,” said Gran’papa.

Laura let it shower through her fingers. It was as soft and fine as her own. But Grandmamma’s hair—she could just remember—had been silver, not gold.... Queer.... Life was queer....

She watched him coil and fold and put away again the golden hair.

“Was Grandmamma—? Did Grandmamma—? Did you and Grandmamma—ever get angry with each other?” she asked him abruptly.

Gran’papa was staring at the fire. She knew by the turn of his head that he had heard her, but he made no answer.

They were silent for a time, each seeing what they chose in the red and black grotesques of the coal.

“She had the gentlest face,” said Gran’papa at last, his lips scarcely moving. “Serene. Patient. But I have known her—firm.”

Laura nodded softly.

“He is, too——”

There was a shadow of a smile on Gran’papa’s face, the smile we keep for our thoughts and our ghosts.

“It never lasted long,” said Gran’papa. “Only once—before I married her.” He was silent again.

“It lasts—with Justin,” said Laura. And then—“Gran’papa—Justin is angry with me. We are not engaged any more.”

“It was my fault, I do believe,” said Gran’papa to the fire.

“Oh, it was my fault,” said Laura. “I think I was mad.”

She sat silent. Her thoughts were a bitter sea. Its winds and waves tossed her hither and thither.

Her words came again mechanically, as if she did not know that she was speaking, like a child learning lessons it its sleep.

“If I could only tell him! If I could only make him see! I mayn’t even write to him. He’s fighting. Any minute may kill him. Mrs. Cloud and Rhoda and Lucy—they all write to him. And I mayn’t.”

“Anne wrote to me,” said Gran’papa.

“He’d sneer. He’d tear it up. He’d say ‘What’s up now? She might have the decency to leave me alone.’ Can’t you hear him saying it? He doesn’t want me. Why should he, for that matter?” Her fingers locked and relaxed and interlocked again. “If I could only make him understand,” said Laura. “If he dies——”

“Anne died,” said Gran’papa.

“Gran’papa,” Laura touched his sleeve, “it’s such misery.”

“Anne wrote to me,” repeated Gran’papa.

She moved restlessly.

“I can’t. I’ve no right any more.”

She stared across at him, questioning him with tired young eyes.

“Gran’papa—why is it? Why have we got to be so awfully unhappy?”

He muttered and smiled to himself, half hearing.

“The time—out of joint—that’s it—out of joint. In my young days—April showers in April—May flowers in May. Anne didn’t want a vote.”

“There was the Crimea. I suppose there were women—just the same—widows—and lovers——”

He drummed on the arm of his chair.

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Do you ever read Shakespeare, my dear? I advise all young people——The young people have turned the world upside down.” He shivered. “It’s cold.”

She got up quietly and shut the window, and sat down again pulling her chair a little nearer to him.

“Rain and soft weather and a little sun,” he rambled. “Winter? We used to skate. But now-a-days——” He cleared his throat. His eye brightened. He was the old Gran’papa, declaiming—

His voice faded. He peered at her.

“You should go for a walk. White cheeks! White cheeks!” Then—“What’s the date?”

“Tuesday, Gran’papa.”

“Tut—the month?”

“December.”

“Ah, it fits—it always fits—

Read him! Read him! There’s a man! And died at fifty—thirty years too young to know old Hyem’s ways. But he knew!” He chuckled. “I’d like to have met him,” said Gran’papa condescendingly.

He stared across at his granddaughter, lost in her own thoughts. His expression changed. He leaned forward, touching her hot, locked hands with his cold, papery fingers.

“These things pass,” said Gran’papa.

He shivered again and glanced over his shoulder.

“Very cold. The window——”

Laura roused herself.

“It’s shut, Gran’papa. But I’ll make up the fire.” She bent blindly over the dim hearth.

But Gran’papa, with a fretful sigh, got up shakily out of his chair. He was sure the window was open. Then he remembered his birds, clustering on the roof of the drawing-room below, and that he had not fed them. His fingers rattled on the pane as he threw up the sash. Very cold.... The wind slid in like a snake, striking at Gran’papa, but though he shivered he threw out the crumbs and stood watching the instant, twittering turmoil, with a glance now and then at the empty cage, that swung, grazing his skull-cap, overhead. He missed his bird.... Its notes ... particularly fine ... a strain of bullfinch ... inclined to be shrill, of course ... but a wonderful ear ... indeed he had had to cover the cage when he played on his fiddle for any length of time.... It had been—Gran’papa smiled—jealous, positively jealous, of his fiddle.... He thought he might get out his fiddle. He must not let his fingers get stiff....

What was that?...

He turned sharply, holding up his finger. Absurd, of course, but he had thought, for a moment, that he heard at his ear the quick ruffling of feathers, the pretty, questioning twitter, that had always been the prelude to full-throated, indignant song.... The cage——

The cage of course was empty.

Some bird outside.... He had left the window open.... He tried, in a childish pet against the birds who had tricked his ear, to push down the sash again, but it was stiff and heavy—suddenly too stiff and heavy for Gran’papa.

He called peevishly——

“Laura!”

But she was adjusting the fire-irons and did not hear.

He left it open and turned back again into the room. He was fumbling with his fiddle-case when Laura straightened herself, and with a smile and a show of blackened fingers, slipped out of the room.

“Come back,” muttered Gran’papa.

She meant to come back when she had washed her hands; but Aunt Adela waylaid her, discovered her using the basin in her room—inconsiderate—making fresh work—when there was the bathroom! Laura, undeniably in the wrong, had, by all unwritten rules, necessarily to pay forfeit to Aunt Adela, to attend without protest to a criticism of her untidy room, to hang up skirts under Aunt Adela’s eye, to dust a mantelpiece and re-adjust ornaments to the high-pitched ripple of Aunt Adela’s voice, and to respond cheerfully in the infrequent pauses.

“Yes, Auntie. Oh, of course. Yes—I think you’re right.”

That, she thought, was all Aunt Adela wanted.... She hated having her room overhauled.... But, after all, what did it matter—what did anything matter now-a-days, with Justin away at the front ... fighting?...

She wondered if he had liked his parcel....

She wondered if he were still alive....

“What did you say, Auntie? Oh, I see. Oh—perfectly disgraceful—I should give her notice——”

She pushed back her hair. Her back ached. She felt very tired. She wanted to get back to Gran’papa. She could hear the thin scrape of his bow, and the fiddle’s stray uncertain notes as he tuned it. And then, suddenly, swiftly, joyously, it broke into the thrice-familiar tune—

She knew the words by heart, in the unintelligent fashion in which one knows the words of a song. But today they caught her ear, rang in her mind to the staccato of the fiddle, significant, suggestive.

She had often wondered that it should be such a favourite tune with Gran’papa. Today she knew why. The music, like strong sunlight shining on a palimpsest, revealed beneath her mind’s modernity an older picture, faint and faded, of a shadowy, gallant young Gran’papa, quarrelling deliciously, a fiddle under his chin, with a slim girl who was called Anne (like Anne, the ‘elegant little woman’ in Persuasion) and sat at a pianoforte fingering out the accompaniment of an old song. She had a sweet voice and wore a dress of lavender print, but her smooth golden hair, as the impression faded again, was not golden at all, but red, a dull, beautiful red, matching exactly, as Laura was aware, with the beech leaves under which she sat as she bickered with Justin and made it up again, one spring, not sixty springs, ago.

“Laura—you’ve shut your new skirt in the cupboard door! You never look.”

“Sorry, Auntie.”

“Well, as I was saying—I went down to the kitchen directly after breakfast and I said——”

Gran’papa had been playing that day too. They could see him at his window, sawing vigorously, from where they sat.... Justin had made one of his comical remarks about it.... It seemed such ages ago, now—that spring.... It had been the last of the happy times.... It was soon after that, that things began to go wrong ... badly wrong.... Her thoughts roamed achingly over all the trivial, tragical wrong that she and Justin had done each other in the eternity that was not two years—not two years.... Gran’papa had sixty years to retrace. Her thoughts hovered over Gran’papa awhile and then back again to Justin. He was hard.... She didn’t think she could be so cruel to her worst enemy as Justin was to her.... Not a word.... Not a message.... And not to want a word!... Yet he was essentially a kindly man. It was a queer lack of imagination, she supposed.... She supposed he never thought of her at all.... It was just—over—for him.... It never occurred to him that she loved him still ... that she lived in hell.... But it wasn’t that he wouldn’t have cared if he could have understood, she told herself in sudden passionate defence of him. He couldn’t help it—it was the way he was made....

Well—she had known all that.... That was why she had done what she had done. She had staked all she had ... failed ... so she must pay.... Yet such a price for birds’ eggs! Birds’ eggs! Her mouth twisted sardonically. If it had happened to any one else—how Justin would have laughed ... how they would have talked it over! She could hear him, laying down the law about it.... She missed that most of all—that dear, absurd solemnity of his as he laid down the law to her.... She stood, remembering, hardening her eyes and her heart against the tears she despised. How she missed him ... how unspeakably she missed him....

What a fool she had been.... What was the use of scruples.... Why hadn’t she kept what she had?... She might have been married to him at that moment.... Even if he didn’t love her—half a loaf was better than no bread.... Who was she to have imagined herself his keeper?... He knew his own mind.... He had asked her to marry him....

squeaked the violin.

“Did you ever hear of such a thing? Well—I said to her, quite quietly, you know, but with dignity—I said to her: ‘I think, Ellen, the time has come to make a change.’ Simply that. It was quite enough. She apologized at once.”

Laura murmured congratulations. She wished Aunt Adela would be merciful enough to stop talking, or at any rate needing answers.... It was so difficult to think of the right answers with that insistent tune ringing in one’s ears....

It wavered and sank to a sigh as she listened against her will—

It slackened and jarred as Gran’papa’s hand—she knew that pathetic, involuntary relaxation of his stiff fingers—mumbled the strings. But the half learnt words ran on in her head, perverted into absurd appositeness—

But it was Justin who had gone to France.... They were killing three hundred men a day in France—in the trenches ... where Justin was....

For long minutes her terrible phantasy made it all very clear to her, while the tune jangled on again to its happy ending—

and stopped.

She waited for the last line, impatiently, as for release, as for the breaking of a spell; but there came no sound—only a sudden silence that was louder than any sound. She roused at it, pitifully chiding herself for the selfishness of her misery and, regardless of Aunt Adela, bundled the rest of her clothes into the wardrobe and hurried out of the room.

Poor old Gran’papa ... to leave him so long alone.... A string or something must have snapped.... She must run down and see, and get him a new one ... the dresser drawers were so heavy for him to pull out....

She ran down the stairs in her swift, noiseless fashion and tapped at his door, and tapped again, and then, with a sudden catching of breath, opened it.

She had been right: something had snapped indeed. A cord—a silver cord had been loosed; but it was not the G string of the little old fiddle.