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Notwithstanding

<h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2> <div class="block2"> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> <div>"O Life, how naked and how hard when known!</div> <div>Life said, As thou hast carved me, such am I."</div> <div class="right">George Meredith.</div> </div></div> </div> Janey lit her bedroom candle with a hand that trembled a little, and in her turn went slowly upstairs. She could hear the clatter of knives and forks in the dining-room, and Harry's vacant laugh, and Nurse's sharp voice. They had come back, then. She went with an effort into her mother's room, and sat down in her accustomed chair by the bed. "It is ten o'clock. Shall I read, mother?" "Certainly." It was the first time they had spoken since she had been ordered out of the room earlier in the day. Janey opened the Prayer Book on the table by the bedside, and read a psalm and a chapter from the Gospel:— "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest for[Pg 113] your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light." Janey closed the book, and said timidly, "May I stay until Nurse comes up?" "Pray do exactly what you like." She did not move. "I am heavy laden," said her mother. "I don't suppose you have ever given it one moment's thought what it must be like to lie like a log as I do." Her daughter dared not answer. "How many months have I lain in this room?" "Eight months." "Ever since I went to Paris last October. I was too ill to go, but I went." Silence. "I am heavy laden, but it seems I must not look to you for help, Janey." Janey's heart sickened within her. When had her mother ever relinquished anything if once her indomitable will were set upon it? She felt within herself no force to withstand a second attack. The nurse came in at that moment, a tall, shrewd, capable woman of five-and-thirty, with a certain remnant of haggard good looks. "May Mr. Harry come in to say good-night, milady?" "Yes." She went to the door and admitted a young man. Harry came and stood beside the bed,[Pg 114] looking sheepishly at his mother. If his face had not been slightly vacant, the mouth ajar, he would have been beautiful. As it was, people turned in the street to see him pass. He was tall, fair, well grown, with a delightful smile. He smiled now at his mother, and she tried hard to smile back at him, her rigid face twitching a little. "Well, my son! Had you a nice day in Ipswich?" "Yes, mamma." "And I hope you were brave at the dentist's, and that he did not hurt you much?" "Oh no, mamma. He did not hurt me at all." "Not at all?" said his mother, surprised. The nurse stepped forward at once. "Mr. Harry did not have his tooth out, milady." "No," said Harry slowly, looking at the nurse as if he were repeating a lesson, "the tooth was not taken out. It was not." "Mr. Milson had been called away," continued the nurse glibly. "Called away," echoed Harry. "Then the expedition was all for nothing?" said Lady Louisa wearily. "Oh no, mamma." The nurse intervened once more, and recounted how she had taken Harry to have his hair cut, and to buy some gloves, and to an entertainment of performing dogs, and to tea[Pg 115] at Frobisher's. They could have been home earlier, but she knew the carriage was ordered to meet the later train. Harry began to imitate the tricks which the dogs had done, but the nurse peremptorily interrupted him. "Her ladyship's tired, and it's past ten o'clock. You must tell her about the dogs to-morrow." "Yes, to-morrow," echoed Harry, and he kissed his mother, and shuffled towards the door. Janey slipped out with him. Lady Louisa did not speak again while the nurse made the arrangements for the night. She was incensed with her. She had been too peremptory with Harry. It was not for her to order him about in that way. Lady Louisa was beginning to distrust this capable, indefatigable woman, on whom she had become absolutely dependent; and when the nurse had left her for the night, and was asleep in the next room with the door open between, she began to turn over in her mind, not for the first time, the idea of parting with her, and letting Janey nurse her entirely once more, as she had done at first. Janey with Anne the housemaid to help her could manage perfectly well, whatever the doctor might say. It was not as if she wanted anything doing for her, lying still as she did day after day. She should never have had a trained nurse if her own wishes had been consulted. But when were they ever consulted? The doctor, who understood[Pg 116] nothing about her illness, had insisted, and Janey had not resisted the idea as she ought to have done. But the whole household could not be run to suit Janey's convenience. She had told her so already more than once. She should tell her so again. Even worms will turn. There were others to be considered besides Janey, who only considered herself. Lady Louisa's mind left her daughter and went back, as if it had received some subtle warning, to the subject of the nurse. She was convinced by the woman's manner of intervening when she had been questioning Harry, that something had been concealed from her about the expedition to Ipswich. She constantly suspected that there was a cabal against her. She was determined to find out what it was, which she could easily do from Harry. And if Nurse had really disobeyed her, and had taken him on the water, which always excited him, or to a theatre, which was strictly forbidden, then she would make use of that act of disobedience as a pretext for dismissing her, and she would certainly not consent to have anyone else in her place. Having settled this point, she closed her eyes and tried to settle herself to sleep. But sleep would not come. The diligent little clock, with its face turned to the strip of light shed by the shaded nightlight, recorded in a soft chime half-hour after half-hour. With forlorn anger, she reflected that every creature[Pg 117] in the house was sleeping—she could hear Nurse's even breathing close at hand—every one except herself, who needed sleep more than anyone to enable her to get through the coming day. It did not strike her that possibly Janey also might be lying open-eyed through the long hours. Lady Louisa's mind wandered like a sullen, miserable tramp over her past life. She told herself that all had gone wrong with her, all had cheated her from first to last. It seems to be the doom of the egoist to crave for things for which he has no real value, on which when acquired he can only trample. Lady Louisa had acquired a good deal and had trampled heavily on her acquisitions, especially on her kindly, easy-tempered husband who had loved her. And how throughout her whole life she had longed to be loved! To thirst voraciously to be loved, to have sufficient acumen to perceive love to be the only real bulwark, as it is, against the blows of fate; the only real refuge, as it is, from grief; the one sure consolation, as it is, in the recurring anguished ache of existence,—to perceive that life is not life without it, and then to find that love when appropriated and torn out of its shrine is no talisman, but only a wearisome, prosaic clog quickly defaced by being dragged in the dust up the thorny path of our egotism! Is there any disappointment so bitter, so devastating as that? Lady Louisa, poor soul, had endured[Pg 118] it. She glanced for a moment at the photograph of her husband on the mantelpiece, with his hair brushed forward over his ears. Even death had not assuaged her long-standing grievance against him. Why had he always secretly preferred his nephew Roger to his own sons? Why did he die just after their eldest son Dick came of age? And why had not he left her Hulver for her life, instead of taking for granted that she would prefer to go back to her own house, Noyes Court, a few miles off? She had told him so, but he might have known she had never meant it. She had not wanted to go back to it. She had not gone back, though all her friends and Janey had especially wished it. She had hastily let it to Mr. Stirling the novelist, to show that she should do exactly as she liked, and had made one of those temporary arrangements that with the old are always for life. She had moved into the Dower House for a year, and had been in it seven years. Her heart swelled with anger as she thought of the conduct of her eldest son after his father's death: and yet could anyone have been a brighter, more delightful child than Dicky? But Dicky had been a source of constant anxiety to her, from the day when he was nearly drowned in the mill-race at Riff to the present hour, when he was lying dying by inches of spinal paralysis at his aunt's house in Paris as the result of a racing accident. What a heartbreaking record his life had been, of one folly,[Pg 119] one insane extravagance after another! And shame had not been wanting. He had not even made a foolish marriage, and left a son whom she and Janey could have taken from its mother and educated; but there was an illegitimate child—a girl—whom Roger had told her about, by a village schoolmistress, an honest woman whom Dick had seduced under promise of marriage. Perhaps, after all, Lady Louisa had some grounds for feeling that everything had gone against her. Dick was dying, and her second son Harry—what of him? She was doggedly convinced that Harry was not "wanting": that "he could help it if he liked." In that case, all that could be said was that he did not like. She stuck to it that his was a case of arrested development, in strenuous opposition to her husband, who had held that Harry's brain was not normal from the awful day when as a baby they first noticed that he always stared at the ceiling. Lady Louisa had fiercely convinced herself, but no one else, that it was the glitter of the old cut-glass chandelier which attracted him. But after a time even she had to own to herself, though never to others, that he had a trick of staring upwards where no chandelier was. Even now, at two-and-twenty, Harry furtively gazed upon the sky, and perhaps vaguely wondered why he could only do so by stealth—why that was one of the innumerable forbidden things among which he had to pick[Pg 120] his way, and for which he was sharply reprimanded by that dread personage his mother. Mr. Manvers on his death-bed had said to Dick in Lady Louisa's presence, "Remember, if you don't have a son, Roger ought to have Hulver. Harry is not fit." She had never forgiven her husband for trying to denude Harry of his birthright. And to-night she felt a faint gleam of consolation in the surrounding dreariness in the thought that he had not been successful. When Dick died, Harry would certainly come in. On her last visit to Paris she had ransacked Dick's rooms at his training-stable. She had gone through all his papers. She had visited his lawyers. She had satisfied herself that he had not made a will. It was all the more important, as Harry would be very rich, that Janey should take entire and personal charge of him, lest he should fall into the hands of some designing woman. That pretty French adventuress, Miss Georges, who had come to live at Riff and whom Janey had made such friends with, was just the kind of person who might entangle him into marrying her. And then if Roger and Janey should eventually marry, Harry could perfectly well live with them. He must be guarded at all costs. Lady Louisa sighed. That seemed on the whole the best plan. She had looked at it all round. But Janey was frustrating it by refusing to do her part. She must fall into line. To-morrow she would send[Pg 121] for her lawyer and alter her will once more, leaving Noyes to Harry, instead of Janey, as she had done by a promise to her husband. Janey had no one but herself to thank for such a decision. She had forced it on her mother by her obstinacy and her colossal selfishness. What had she done that she of all women should have such selfish children? Then Janey would have nothing of her own at all, and then she would be so dependent on Harry that she would have no alternative but to do her duty by him. Lady Louisa sighed again. Her mind was made up. Janey must give way, and the nurse must be got rid of. Those were the two next things to be achieved. Then perhaps she would be suffered to rest in peace. <hr />[Pg 122] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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