Across the Stream/Chapter 12
CHAPTER XII
Archie was walking back to the house in Grosvenor Square from Oakland Crescent, on the afternoon of Helena's wedding. Owing to the acute suspense of the European situation, the plans of the newly married couple had been changed, and, instead of setting off at once in the yacht for a month in the Norwegian fjords, they had gone to a house of Lord Harlow's in Surrey to await developments in the crisis or some kind of settlement. It was still uncertain whether England would be drawn into the war, though opinion generally regarded that as inevitable, and in this case no doubt Lord Harlow, an ex-Guardsman, would rejoin his regiment. Archie's mother, after the departure of the bridal couple, had also left town for Lacebury, taking with her Jessie and Colonel Vautier for a few days' visit; but Archie had decided to stop another night in London.
There had been the usual crowds and chatterings and excitement, the front pew kept for a princess, the signing of names in the vestry, the red carpets and wedding-marches, and the whole ceremony had filled Archie with the greatest amusement. But the subsequent proceedings had not amused him so much, and Helena's departure, looking prettier than ever, with her husband, had annoyed and exasperated him. He did not like to think of them together, and, though only a couple of nights ago he and Martin had found good cause for whispers and laughter over this, it was not so diverting when it actually occurred as it had promised to be. Part of that midnight séance which he could not at first remember had found its way into his conscious mind, and he knew that had been talked about, and had ascertained, with considerable relief, that Jessie had not been able to hear it. But now there was a savage bitterness in his mind about it; Helena seemed to have played him false again. She ought to have refused to marry the Bradshaw at the last moment, and it was an ineffectual balm to know she did not care for him. Perhaps, as Jessie had once said (though withdrawing it afterwards), she cared for nobody, but now Archie believed that she cared for him. It maddened him to think that she was the Bradshaw's "ABC," and in those circumstances he had judged it better to remain in town for the night, and distract his mind and soothe his longings with the amusement and aids to forgetfulness which London was so ready to offer to a young man who was looking for adventures.
But London proved disappointing: it did not seem to be thinking of its amusements at all. Archie called to see a friend who last week had shown himself an eager and admirable companion, but, found him to-day disinclined for another night of similar diversions, for he could neither think nor talk about anything else than the imminence of war. Archie felt himself quite incapable of taking any active interest in that; it weighed nothing in the balance compared with the stern duty of seeking enjoyment and forgetting about Helena. What if England did go to war with Germany? Certainly he hoped she would not; she had made no more than a friendly understanding with her Allies—indeed they were not even Allies, they were but well-disposed nations—but, even if she did, what then? There was an English fleet, was there not, which cost an immense amount of money to render invincible; but it was invincible. Why, then, should he bother about it, since he was not a sailor? It was further supposed that Germany had an invincible army; and there you were! And if England had no army at all to speak of, it was quite clear she could no more fight Germany on land than Germany could fight her by sea. So what on earth prevented a little dinner at a restaurant and an hour at a music-hall and a little supper somewhere and anything that turned up? Something always turned up, and was usually amusing for an hour or two. But his friend thought otherwise, and kept diving out into the street to get some fresh edition of an evening paper hot from the press and crammed with fresh inventions, and Archie left this insane patriot in disgust at his excitement over so detached an affair as a European war. He tried a second friend with no better success; there was a certain excuse for him, as he was a subaltern in the Guards. But for the first friend there was none, as he was only in an office in the city.
There were still four or five hours to get through before it would be reasonable to think about dinner, after which, even if he started alone, the hours would take care of themselves very pleasantly; but he had to fill the interval somehow. There were some proofs of his book waiting for him at home, and, hoping to get interested in this first-born public child of his brain, he sat down with a view to correcting them. But he found himself reading the pages as if there was nothing intelligible printed on them. True, if he forced himself to attend, he could see that grammatical sentences succeeded each other; but they conveyed no further impression. There was a lot about the sea, but why on earth had he taken the trouble to write it? He could remember writing it; he could call up an image of himself sitting in the garden at Silorno, eagerly writing, conscientiously erasing, walking up and down in the attempt to frame a phrase that should exactly reproduce some mood of his mind. But what had inspired those strivings and despairs and exultations?
Here was the record of them, and it seemed now to be about nothing. "The rain in the night had washed the white soil into the rim of the sea, and it was clouded like absinthe." He could well remember the search for, and the finding of that particular simile. He and Harry had been into Genoa a week before, and, out of curiosity, had ordered absinthe at a café. The drink, qua drink, was mildly unpleasant, resembling aniseed, but it had been worth while having it, merely to have got that perfectly fitting simile. The effect, too, had been rather remarkable; it produced a sort of heady lightness and sense of wellbeing; colours seemed strangely vivid and intensified, and …
Archie got up from his meaningless proofs. It was absinthe that would help him to fill up those dull hours till dinner-time, and he remembered having seen in some little French restaurant in Soho the stuff he wanted. Very likely you could get it anywhere, but he wanted it from that particular place, for there had come in one evening, when he dined there, a most melancholy-looking person who had ordered it and sat and sipped. Somehow the man's face had made an impression on him, so unhappy was it. He remembered also his face half an hour afterwards, when he began his dinner, and no serener, more contented countenance could have been imagined.… So he must have his absinthe from that restaurant; clearly they had a very good brand of it there.
As he drove out alone that evening to dine, he heard the newsvenders shouting out the English ultimatum to Germany, and saw the placards in the streets. The shouting sounded wonderfully musical, and below the roar of the street traffic was a muffled harmony as of pealing bells. The drab colours of London were shot with prismatic hues; never had the streets appeared so beautiful. There was even beauty in the fact of the outbreak of war, for England was going to war for the sake of liberty, which was a fine, a noble adventure. And how lovely the English girls and boys were, who crowded the pavements! they were like beds of exquisite flowers. For himself, he was going back to dine at the French restaurant in Soho, for that would be in the nature of supporting our new Allies. Afterwards there were the streets and the music-halls, and all the mysteries of the short summer night. Then dawn would break, rose-coloured dawn, with her finger on her lips, and sweet, silent mouth, a little ashamed of her sister, night, but sympathetic at heart. Dawn was always a little prudish, a little Quakerish.
The days of a divine August went by, and the line of German invasion swept forward like a tide that knows no ebb over all Belgium and North-East France. The British Expeditionary Force started, and was swept back like the flotsam on the seashore. The call came for the raising of an army, and east and west, north and south, the recruiting offices were like choked waterways, and still the flood of men, in whose hearts the fact of England had awoke, poured in. Hospitals were gorged with the returning wounded; women by the hundred and by the thousand volunteered as nurses, and went to hospitals to be trained. The whole of comfortable England, intent hitherto on its sports, its leisure, its general superiority to the rest of the world, suddenly became aware that an immense and vital danger threatened it. A chorus of objurgation arose from the brazen-throated press, each organ striving to shout the loudest, at the unpreparedness of the country, and much valuable energy was spent in headlines and recriminations. There was a shortage of guns, a shortage of ammunition, a shortage of everything which constitutes the sinews of war. The only thing of which there was not a shortage was of those who threw aside all other considerations, such as income and secure living and life itself, and gave themselves to assist, in what manner they could, the cause for which England had gone to war.
To Archie this all seemed a very hysterical and uncomfortable attack of nerves. In several ways it affected him personally, for William, than whom there was no more reliable servant, was among the first to leave his well-paid situation and present himself at a recruiting office. Archie hated that: there would be the nuisance of getting a new servant, who did not know where precisely he ought to put Archie's tooth-powder, and how to arrange his clothes. William had announced the fact too, in the suddenest of manners; he brought it out as he brought in Archie's morning tea.
"And if you can spare me at once, my lord," he said, "I had better go on Saturday."
Archie felt peculiarly devilish that morning; it rained, and the absinthe that should have arrived last night had not come.
"I think it's very inconsiderate of you, William," he said. "But I suppose you expect to get on well, and draw higher pay than you get here. So I shall have to raise your wages. All right; I'll give you a pound a month more, and don't let me hear any more about it."
He knew perfectly well that this was not William's reason, but it amused him to suggest it. He wanted to see how William would take it. The fact that he knew that the man was devoted to him made the point.
William busied himself with razors and tooth-brushes, replying nothing.
"Can't you hear what I say?" asked Archie, pouring himself out his tea.
William faced round.
"Yes, Master Archie," he said. "I heard. But I knew you didn't mean that. You know how I've served you and worked for you all these years. You would scorn to think that of me, I should say."
Archie had noticed the "Master Archie" instead of "my lord"; both William and Blessington often forgot that he was "my lord," and it always used to please him that to the sense of love he was still a young boy. And, in spite of his irritation and peevish morning temper, it touched some part of him that still loved below the corruption that was spreading over him like some jungle-growing lichen. But he had to force his way through that to reply.
"You must do as you think right, William," he said.
William had finished the arrangements of his dressing, and stood for a moment by his bedside with Archie's evening clothes bundled on to his arm.
"Yes, Master Archie," he said. "And you'll be joining up too before long, won't you? I should dearly love to be your soldier-servant, sir, if you could manage it."
All Archie's ill-humour returned at that unfortunate suggestion.
"Perhaps you had better not be impertinent," he said. "That'll do."
William's face fell.
"I had no thought of impertinence, my lord," he said. "I only thought"
"I told you that would do," said Archie.
Three days afterwards William left. He came to say good-bye to Archie, who did not look up from the paper he was reading. Archie was suffering inconvenience from his departure, and this was the best way of making William feel it. But when the door had shut again, and William was gone, he felt a sudden horror of the thing that seemed to be himself, and he ran out, and called William back. All these days he had not had a word or kindly gesture for him.…
"Good-bye, William," he said. "I wish you all good luck. I've treated you like a beast these last days, and I'm awfully sorry. You're the best fellow a man could have, and you must try to forget the horrid way I've behaved."
William stood with his hand in Archie's for a moment.
"You're always my Master Archie, sir," he said.
Well, there was an end of William: before he had got back to his paper again Archie wondered what had possessed him to throw a kind word to a dog like that, who had left him at three days' notice to join this ridiculous military conspiracy. William did not care how much he inconvenienced Archie, who had always treated him more like a subordinate friend than a servant. He had helped William in a hundred ways: had given him old clothes, had constantly asked after his mother, had left his letters about for William to read if he chose. It seemed rank treachery.…
Others were treacherous too; his mother, for instance, was immediately going up to town, to take charge of the house in Grosvenor Square, which was to be turned into a hospital for wounded officers. She was to become a sort of housekeeper, so Archie figured it, and merely superintend domestic arrangements. She would have nothing to do with the nursing and the surgery, which had a certain fascination.… He could picture a sort of pleasure in seeing a man's leg cut off, or in standing by while doctors pulled bandages off festering wounds. To feel well and strong while others were suffering had an intelligible interest: to witness decay and corruption and pain was a point that appealed to him now. But Lady Tintagel was going to do nothing of the sort: she was just going to be a housekeeper. It was very selfish of her; Archie would certainly want, from time to time, to go up to town and spend a night or two there, and now he would have to go to a hotel or a club, instead of profiting by the spacious privacy of his father's house. Charity begins at home; and his mother had started charity on most extraneous lines. Jessie had followed this lead, "the lead of so-called trumps," as Archie framed a private phrase. She would start by being not even a housekeeper, but a sort of kitchen-maid at the same hospital. She had an insane desire to work, to do something that cost her something, instead of engaging a kitchen-maid, and paying her wages to go to some hospital or other. There was a craze for "personal service," instead of getting other people to do work for you, if you felt work had to be done. People wanted to "do their bit," to employ an odious expression which was beginning to obtain currency. The nation was going to be mobilized; hand and heart had to serve some vague national idea. Occasionally, as on the night when war was declared, Archie saw an æsthetic beauty in the notion of upholding rights and liberties; but he had not then reckoned with the fact that personal inconvenience might result from that quixotic revolution. Quixotism was fine in theory, but it was a dream, not to be encouraged in waking hours, when far more important and realizable commodities, like whisky and absinthe, engaged the true attention.
But, whoever else was treacherous, his father at least was loyal, and showed no sign of becoming a butler or a footman, to correspond with his wife and Jessie. Occasionally some grave report concerning the German advance through Belgium used to reach his brain, and he would walk up and down his room in the evening with a martial tread, and a glance at a sword that hung above his writing-table, and wish he was younger and able to "have a go" at those invading locusts. But invariably this mood, which was always short, was succeeded by another, not bellicose but domestic.
"This damned war is going to break up home-life in England," he would say, "and I've no doubt that was what the Germans aimed at. And they're succeeding too. Look at this house: there's your mother going to leave us, and there's Helena's husband expecting every day to be sent to France, and there's Jessie leaving her father to wash up dishes. What's going to become of our English homes if that goes on?—for, mark you, they are the root of our national life. It's digging up the trees' roots to break up English homes. You and I, Archie, are the only ones who are staunch to our homes. Pass me that bottle, will you?"
"May I help myself on the way?" said Archie.
"Yes, of course, my dear boy. I say, it was a funny state of things when you and I used to have our evening drinks alone, instead of enjoying them and chatting over them together. Your man, William, too, he's gone and enlisted, hasn't he? The old bulwarks of England are going fast: the homes are being broken up, and the very servants come and go as they choose. An establishment was an establishment in the old days: it all stood and fell together, if you see what I mean. But I wish I was young enough to have a go at the Boches."
"I'm thinking of going," Archie would say, merely in order to enjoy his father's reply.
"Well, in my opinion, you'll be doing a very wrong thing, then," said Lord Tintagel. "I hope you won't seriously think of that. I tell you your duty is here, with your poor old father. When I'm gone you may do what you please, and I daresay you won't have very long to wait. But, while I'm here, I hope you'll remember that they say in church 'Honour thy father and thy mother.' You can't go behind the commandments, or the psalms, whichever it is."
But these sessions in Lord Tintagel's room of an evening, with the liquid in the decanter sinking steadily like a well in time of drought, were becoming rather tedious to Archie. Since his discovery of absinthe they had even become rather gross, and he congratulated himself on having seen the sordidness of mere swilling. That sort of thing was only fit for coarse, rough tastes; it seemed to him to lack all delicacy and æsthetic value, and he often left his father, who congratulated him on his abstemiousness after no more than a friendly glass of good fellowship, and went upstairs to his room to enjoy subtler and more refined sensations. Indeed, his chief interest in that half-hour or so in his father's room was derived from the sight of his father's heavy potations, the struggle of his maundering thoughts to emerge into language, much as a tilted half-moon struggles to pierce the flying clouds on some tempestuous night. The sight of his father's deterioration and gradual wreck somehow fascinated him; there was decay and corruption there, and those no longer aroused in him that horror with which in dream he had observed the emergence of the writhing worms from the white statue of Helena. Such things were no longer disgusting and repulsive: they claimed kinship with something in his soul that was very potent. Once Martin had alluded to that vision as a warning, and he had not taken that warning, in consequence of which he had passed an utterly miserable month after Helena's rejection of him. Now values had altogether changed: decay no longer revolted him. But, with a hypocrisy that had become characteristic of him, he told himself that the sight of his father's nightly intoxication was a lesson to himself. He must observe that degrading spectacle, and learn from it what the result of too much whisky was. And then he retired to his bedroom to think it over as he sipped the clouded aroma of his absinthe.
Jessie came down for another week-end before she took her kitchen-maid situation, and brought the news that a fresh draft of Lord Harlow's regiment was ordered to the front, and that he would leave for France within the next day or two.
Archie felt a wild desire to laugh, to skip, to show his intense appreciation of these tidings. But he remembered that Jessie was not his confidante to that extent, and checked his exuberant inclination.
"Poor Helena!" he said, with an accent of great sincerity. "She must be broken-hearted. Why, they've only been married a fortnight, if as much."
It was excellently said, and Jessie felt she would have shown herself an infidel, with regard to the general decency of the human race, if she had not accepted those words with the sincerity with which they surely must have been uttered. She resolutely put away from her all those misgivings that had assailed her when first she knew of Archie's changed attitude towards her sister.
"You have been a brick about Helena," she said. "I want to tell you that. Your forgiveness of the way she treated you seems to me beyond all praise."
"Oh, nonsense," said he lightly. "Besides, it was so dreadfully uncomfortable being always angry and miserable. Martin showed me that. But about Helena: how is she bearing it?"
It was now Jessie's turn to be obliged to cloak her meaning.
"Very calmly and bravely," she said.
"She would," said Archie enthusiastically. "One always felt there was a steel will behind all Helena's gentleness. What will she do, do you think? Would she perhaps like to come down here? There isn't much to offer her, but then London in August doesn't offer much either."
Suddenly all Jessie's mistrust stirred and erected itself. She could not believe that this scheme, which would throw Helena and Archie completely together, could be made with the apparent innocence with which it was put forward. How was it possible that Archie, who so few weeks ago was in such depths of misery and bitterness, could honourably suggest so dangerous a plan? It could not be Archie who suggested it: it came from that smiling white presence which she had seen in his room not many nights ago. And it was just that which she could not say to him.
"It's nice of you to think of that," she said.
"Not a bit: it would be nice for me, not nice of me. And besides," he added, with an amazing cynicism, "it would be my way of 'doing my bit,' which everybody is talking about, if I could make things cheerfuller for pretty women like poor Helena, whose husband has gone out to fight."
The moment he had said it he was sorry. But for the moment he had forgotten he was speaking to Jessie: the sentence had come out of his mouth as if he was but talking to himself. Also it introduced the suggestion of his own forbearance to enlist.
There was a rather awkward silence, and he felt irritated with Jessie for not changing the subject which he had so incautiously brought forward. But that was like her. She had no tact in such matters, refusing to be insincere, when insincerity was so simple a matter. His irritation grew on him, and at the same time he wanted to know what Jessie thought of his remaining inertly here, while all his contemporaries were enlisting. Why he wanted to know he did not define: the motive perhaps belonged to the time when Jessie had been so good a friend, and perhaps he knew that she was so still.
"Or do you think that I ought to behave like William, and serve my country?" he asked.
Jessie sat with eyes downcast for a moment. Then she raised them and looked him in the face, with all her affection and sincerity alight in them.
"Do you really want to know what I think, Archie?" she asked.
"Certainly I do."
"Well, I can't understand your not doing it," she said. "At the same time, I think it is a matter about which you must decide for yourself."
The sincerity of his manner equalled hers. He never spoke with more apparent frankness.
"Shall I tell you why I don't?" he said. "It's this. Do you remember one night our finding that my father was breaking the contract he made with me about drinking? Do you remember how sordid and horrible the discovery was?"
Jessie remembered quite well how Archie had laughed at it.
"I remember the evening," she said.
"Well, we've renewed our contract," said he, "and I'm the only person in the world who can keep my father to it. If I left him he would drink himself to death. Where, then, do you think my duty lies, Jessie? Isn't it clearly for me to save my father? Can there be a more obvious duty than that? Do you think I have a very delightful life down here, all alone with him? Wouldn't it be vastly easier for me to join my friends and go out alongside of them? I know my conduct lays me open to misconception, but I must be thick-skinned over that. But I hope you won't misjudge me. Besides, my father has said that he forbids me to go. Of course I could leave him; he doesn't lock me up. But I can't see how I should be right in leaving him. I'm the one anchor he has left."
He paused a moment, thinking over, with that stupendous swiftness of brain that was the result of Martin's inspiration, all he had said, and remembered his light cynicism with regard to his "bit."
"I know I rather shocked you just now," he said, "when I spoke of its being 'my bit' to console pretty women whose husbands had gone out. But sometimes one has to be flippant to conceal one's real thoughts on a serious subject, for I did not foresee then that we should talk it out. So there's the end of that jest."
So that had been a jest, not to be taken seriously. But it was a grimmer affair for Jessie not to be able to take seriously Archie's seriousness. For a moment the frankness of his manner had convinced her, but very soon her conviction collapsed like a house of cards as he went on speaking. The horribleness of the discovery of his father's drinking, for instance, when what she remembered was Archie's laughter! If he could say that, what credence could possibly be placed in the picture he had drawn of himself as his father's last hope? Or what in the image of himself as one who must silently bear cruel misconception? She could believe none of it.…
Yet it was not the Archie whom she loved with all the sweetness and strength of her nature who spoke, but the Thing that was possessing him and filling his soul from the reservoir of some immense abyss of pure evil. She felt sure she did not misjudge him; true and infinitely tragic was her comprehension.
"It is entirely for you to decide, Archie," she said. "I think I fully appreciate the worth of your reasons."
Indeed, she knew not what else to say, though the bitter doubleness of her words cut her to the heart. But, if she could help Archie at all, she must at all costs retain such confidence as he gave her, must not give him the chance of quarrelling with her.
To her great relief, he seemed to accept the literal value of her words, and took her arm. And this time she felt in her soul that there was sincerity in his speech.
"You are a good friend, Jessie," he said. "Don't give me up, will you?"
"I couldn't," she said quietly.
They were strolling together by the edge of the lake in the hour of sunset, and Jessie, though sick at heart and tortured by the weight of her forebodings, and the tempest of fire and blood which had burst on Europe, yet tried to open her heart to the sweet spell of the tranquil evening. Somewhere behind the cloud of evil which had so suddenly taken shape in that host of barbarians who already had overrun Belgium, and which, no less, was invading the spirit of the boy she loved with the uttermost fibre of her being, there shone the eternal serenity of Omnipotent Mercy. But He dealt through human means; it was through those who had left love and home and ease behind them to perish in France that that torrent would be stayed, and through her, though in ways she could not conjecture, would come the delivery of her beloved. And in the rose-flecked sky, the leafy towers of the elms, the bosom of the lake, that Power also dwelt, no less than in the hearts that yearned for its presence and its manifestation. As in a glass darkly she beheld its reflection, which nothing could ever shatter. Of that she must never lose sight, nor cease to keep her inward eye fixed on the gleam, which some day would signal to her.
About a week later Archie was spending a delectable morning at the bathing-place. Never had there been so superb an imitation of Italian weather in England as this year, and day after day went by in unclouded brightness and strong, fresh heat. In those delightful conditions it had been perfectly easy for him to take his mind completely away from the war, and the misconceptions which he was possibly suffering under. He gave every morning but the briefest glance to the paper, for there was a tiresome uniformity about the news, and a monotonous regularity about the daily map, which marked the progress of the German line across North-East France. He gave hardly more thought to Helena, who seemed to think it more appropriate to stay in London with her father, just for the present, but had written the most characteristic of letters, saying how sweet Archie's sympathy was to her, and how acute her anxiety concerning her husband. Certainly at the moment this was the right attitude to take, and Archie really did not much care whether she was here with him or not, for he had found his way into the Paradise that forms the portico of the palace where the absinthe-drinker dwells, and not yet had he penetrated into the halls of Hell that lie beyond.
His pleasure in the fact of being alive, in the colours of morning and evening, in the touch of cool waters, in the whispering of wind among the firs, were quickened to an inconceivable degree; it was impossible to want anything except the privilege of enjoying this amazing thrill of existence. And with it there had returned to him the need of expressing himself in writing; a new aspect of the world had been revealed to him, and without struggle, but with an even-flowing pen he set himself to record it, in veiled phrases and descriptions through which, as in chinks of light seen at the edges of drawn blinds, there came hints and suggestions of the fresh world that had dawned on him. Where before it was the clear stainlessness of the sea, the purifying breath of great winds that had been his theme, now instead the satyr crouched in the bushes, the snake lay coiled in the heather. It was from the slime and mud and from among blind crawling things that the water-lily sprang, and where before the enchantment of life moved him, he felt now only the call of putrefaction and decay. The lethal side of the created world had become exquisite in his eyes, and the beauty of it was derived from its everlasting corruption, not from the eternal upspringing of life. Lust, not love, was the force that kept it young, and renewed it so that the harvest of its decay should never ceased to be reaped. His mind had become a mirror that distorted into grotesque and evil shapes every image of beauty that was reflected in it, and rejoiced in them; it seemed to him that all nature, as well as all human motive, was based upon this exquisite secret that he had discovered. But it would never do to state it with what he considered the bald realism of those ludicrous sea-pieces he had written at Silorno; he must wrap his message up in a sort of mystic subtlety so that only those who had implanted in them the true instinct should be able to fill their souls with the perfume of his flowers. Others might guess and wonder and be puzzled, and perhaps see so far as to put down his book with disgust that was still half incredulous; but only the initiated would be able to grasp wholly the message that lurked in his hints and allusions. His style, underneath this new inspiration, had developed into an instrument of marvellous beauty, and often, when he had written a page or two, he would read it out aloud to himself, in wonder at that exquisite diction, and all the time he felt that he was reading aloud to Martin, and that Martin had dictated to him.
He was employed thus on this particular morning down at the bathing-place. He had already had a long swim, and, without dressing, lay down on the short turf and got out his writing-pad, when his new servant, who had taken William's place, came down with a telegram for him. He was a very good-looking boy, quick in movement and swift to smile, and already Archie wondered how he could have regretted the departure of plain middle-aged William. Only last evening Archie, idly glancing through a field-glass, had seen the boy far off in the meadow beyond the lake in company with an extremely pretty housemaid whom he had often noticed about the passages. The two had sat there some time talking, and then Archie saw the boy look quickly round, and kiss her. He liked that immensely; thut was the way youth should behave. He almost hoped that it was Thomas who had taken from his table one of those new ten-shilling notes that he had missed. He mustn't do it too often, for that would be a bore; but Archie liked to think the boy had taken it, and. perhaps converted it into a decoration for the pretty housemaid. Anyhow, Thomas, with his handsome face and his kissings in the meadow, and his possible pilferings, was an attractive boy, and clearly developing along the right lines.
The boy hesitated a moment, seeing Archie dripping and naked.
"I beg your pardon, my lord," he said, "but there came a telegram for you, and I thought I had better bring it down."
"Certainly, but why beg my pardon?" said Archie. "Don't be prudish. I daresay you've got arms and legs as well as me, haven't you?"
Thomas grinned with that odd shy look that Archie had noticed before.
"Yes, my lord," he said.
"Then what is there to be ashamed of?"
Archie opened the telegram and read it, and suddenly bit his lip to prevent his laughing
"Is there an answer, my lord?" asked the boy. "I brought a form down in case."
"Well done. Yes, there is an answer."
Archie hesitated a moment before directing the form to Helena. Then he wrote:
"Deepest sympathy with the terrible news. Command me in all ways. Your devoted Archie."
"Send that at once, will you?" he said.
When the boy had gone Archie read the telegram again, which was from Jessie, and told him that Lord Harlow had been killed at the front. Then he smothered his face in his bent elbow, and lay shaking with laughter.