Dance of the Years (31 page)

Old as he was James felt a chill as boys do in love.

“No,” he said angrily in his mind, to the other half of it which was Phœbe's. “No, I did right. Look what happened. I did right. Jinny's a good girl, a dear girl.”

“Yes,” said Phœbe. “Yes, indeed, James. We might have had her as a daughter.”

“Most unlikely, in fact impossible,” said James.

“We should not have had fools, darling, anyway,” said Phœbe.

She was not speaking from the grave, of course, but only in James's mind, where one of her at least had been living more or less quietly ever since they parted.

“Darling, suppose that the part of Deborah which is not like you were like me.”

James put Phœbe and the suggestion out of his mind, or at least he attempted to do so. The idea was indelicate, profitless and irritating. All the same he could not help picturing Deborah half Phœbe; Deborah with Phœbe's feel for the meaning of the moment; Deborah with her kittenishness intelligence; Deborah gay.

There was no question but that she would be less trouble to him
then, and more delight; but—and here he knew he was on mysterious ground—would she be better, would she be safer, would she carry his own survival so well? Jinny had given Deborah something strange, something quite outside James's experience. He did not know what it was, but it was something that made her very firm on her ground, indefatigable and unconquerable.

“Are you asleep, dear Papa?” enquired Deborah at this point.

“Only partially,” said James with unconscious Sultanry. “Go on.”

Debby continued obediently. “An interesting echo of the inauguration of the Luther Memorial,” she began, and again the sweeping sentences took up their soporific rhythm.

“No child of yours would do that for me,” said James to the Phœbe in his head.

“I hope not, poor wretches,” she said laughing, adding as her voice changed, “only James, James …”

He let his head fall on his chest and closed his eyes.

“Oh my girl, I know, I know,” he said. “Be still.”

He listened to a sentence or so of the ‘interesting echo' and let his mind wander back to the year when he had heard from an acquaintance, Toole, as a matter of fact, that Phœbe had died. It had upset him. It was the year of Jinny's second child and there had been rain and tears and fruitlessness everywhere.

He had gone down to Bedfordshire to see Phœbe's grave, a silly pilgrimage if ever there was one, and had put up his horse at the village inn and walked up the hill to the churchyard in the rain. There he had been infuriated to find her beneath a brand new black marble catafalque, picked out with gold and very magnificent. Old Sir Robin had outlived her, just as he, James, was going to outlive poor Jinny if he did not hurry. The sight of Phœbe's name amid the pomp, the little lawn chained round, the carefully tended flowers, the gravel and the gilt, removed her from him and rubbed it in that she was not his property. He would have come away robbed had she not stirred in his mind and laid a cheek against his, so familiarly, that he could almost feel it.

“There should have been a little mound, James,” she said declaiming. “A pauper's patch trimmed out with flowers for you my love to pick and mingle with your tears.” And then in her own laughter: “That would have been proper, James, you'd have liked that.”

“Nonsense,” he had said to her then, highly ruffled. “Nonsense.”

“Oh liar,” said Phœbe, “wicked old liar, James. Come away!”

In the end they had both been amused, and the ostler at the inn had thought how strange it was that the dark gentleman should walk up
alone to the churchyard with a face as long as a fiddle, and come back grinning like a ploughboy at a fair. James remembered his expression to this day as he sat with half an ear on Debby, and he smiled again.

A minute or two later when she looked up he really was asleep.

When Jinny knew that she was going to die so young, she accepted the fact without an emotional upheaval, although her life was very happy. She knew the next thing to look forward to as she once had looked forward to the spring holiday, or Christmas, would be dying. She accepted that as one accepts to-morrow; mysterious, not unhopeful, sure to come. Hers was the serenity which is as like apathy as life is like death.

Her old friend, the Rector from down the road, used to say with that affectionate sadness at innocence which became so common among the more intelligent churchmen later, that he envied her her faith, and in that he was sincere. It was a difficult time just then for the faithful who happemed to be also intellectual, and his own doubts and apprehensions were many. Privately he often wondered what exactly dear little Mrs. Galantry did believe, and how much of it his own excellent brain would be compelled to question if he knew her secret.

So he never quizzed her too closely and never learnt. Actually, Jinny's faith, like everything else about her, was simple. It depended on accurate feeling first, and direct thinking afterwards. She was entirely human herself and knew exactly what that condition entailed; that was the humility she brought to her reading, and after that she believed what she was told.

She believed in a Son of Man who was also the Son of God; in a Divine Jesus, whose Mother yet made Him turn the water into wine so that a party should not be spoiled; and in a Man who was God who loved and teased and built His Church upon the chuckle-headed Saint Peter, because of them all he was the silliest, the most impetuous, the most like lesser men. She believed implicitly that this Being would not let her down and that she would not really die any more than He had done. In fact, Jinny put her faith in the humanity of God; that
was her secret and her strength. She realized that as long as she remained true she would get by. With the nettle would come the dock leaf, with the terror would come the courage.

To her family her approaching death was tragedy but not annihilating disaster. Death in comparative youth was not unusual in those days, it was a familiar thing, a commonplace; every family expected a death or two and knew how to meet them.

In the last few months before she died she used to lie in the long chair by the window in the drawing-room most of the time, although until she was very weak she could sometimes play the piano. James used to like to hear her from his room next door; he seldom came in to her, but he used to sit in his own room and listen.

Debby was a most faithful, if somewhat unskilled nurse to her mother, but the waiting Jinny's most constant companion at this period was William's only son, little Jeff. Jinny's own youngsters were at boarding school, for James was a great believer in sending his children out from under his feet. But Jeff was staying with his grandparents because Julia was having yet another of her girl babies. Debby looked after him, and he adored her, but most of his day he spent with Jinny. The two had much in common. Jeff looked like William in spite of his curls, which Julia insisted on him keeping until he was far too old for them, but his expression was Jinny's own. He was so good and quiet that the servants were always wondering if he was going to live, and he loved best to draw on scraps of paper. When James gave him a box of very good crayons he was delighted, and with these he showed the astonished James something he had never noticed before, which was that there was colour in shadows. Most of it was dark colour to be sure, but there was plenty of it.

Jeff pointed out to his grandfather the blue under the piano, and the red and green in the dark hole when a door opened in the house across the street. James saw Jeff's discovery as a sign of artistic talent. It was something new in the family and he wondered regretfully if it came from Julia. He made up his mind that the boy was to be a Royal Academician and to paint red horses coming through gateways, and he was disappointed when William told him stiffly that the child was intended for the Ministry.

James thought it a great pity, and spent quite a time thinking sadly of the artist in Jeffrey which was doomed to be sacrificed. However, in that he was altogether wrong as it happened; there was not much of the true artist in little Jeff and his discovery of the colour in the shadows was made with the help of that attribute which he had had from William, the curious gift of seeing how a thing was done. He simply saw how the shadows were made, that was all, and as to being sacrificed—there was a lot nobody knew about Jeffrey at that time.

Jinny and Jeffrey had more than their expressions in common. For one thing, they both had an enormous respect for sin. The thing that most worried Jeffrey in his childhood was the enormous possibility he saw in life of sinning by mistake. Nobody but Jinny seemed to appreciate the full anxiety this caused him, but she did, and she sympathized. Often they sinned together, inasmuch as they both said things they thought were true only to find out afterwards that they were lies, and they both got laughed at when they explained. The laughter exasperated Jeffrey, who saw it as unreasonable. But Jinny did not mind.

Jeff was going to be far more clever than Jinny; she realized that, and told Debby that she did so hope his brains would not make life too difficult for him, which in a way they did, of course. He was passionate, too, as God knew she had been, and he had his mother's jealousy.

Jinny loved him, yet practically the last thing she did before she died was to do him harm. She pointed out to Jeffrey that jealousy was a peculiarly degrading thing, a cancer in one's heart instead of in one's stomach. Jeff was at the age of the clear eye, and he saw the similarity at once. His jealousy became a physical thing to him, shameful too, like an insanitary habit. But to diagnose is not to cure, and so with him jealousy became a hidden evil, torturing in its secrecy.

The days passed slowly for Jinny. William came often to see her, but his visits were brief. He was very much the man of affairs now, and enjoyed himself because he was working. He had a natural gift for the commodity,
The Converted World
, was selling, and when he walked down the road a full foot taller than most people, his hat glistening and his honey beard catching every feminine eye, he felt he was specially blessed. It was a full-time job though, and he was inclined to rush in, kiss his mother, and be off again.

Jinny did not worry about this. She knew that if the secret she wanted to tell him was to be told, the opportunity would surely come. When it came she could choose whether to speak or be silent, but the chance to do either would inevitably be given her. The road would turn that way.

Inexorably the time of her going approached. When it came to dying, when the actual moment came close, it was not easy for her, despite her faith and its serenity. Her contemporaries, who were for ever knocking together stucco effigies of granite truths in their great haste, were constantly saying “Thy Will be done” about death, and for those who were not too nearly concerned the attitude was not only serviceable but easy. Stucco sufficed that little strain. For Jinny, who was within a hair's breadth of dying, it was not so simple even for the granite. Over and over again she was forced to leave the
floodlit adult half of the Bible for the primitive aid of the ancient poets. It was the lively animal in her who was dying, and its cry of fear was in her dry, hot mouth more than once in the long nights.

“
… Rebuke me not in Thine anger,
Neither chasteneth me in Thy hot displeasure.
Have mercy on me, for I am weak.
Heal me; for my bones are sore vexed.
My soul is also vexed.
”

And again, its agony her agony, its desperation her own:

“
… How long?
Return. Deliver my soul:
O save me for Thy Mercy's sake!
”

Jinny never had to worry about a sign from her God, signs came in every hour of her life, but she was very weak and in great discomfort when at last the opportunity was presented to her, as she had assumed it would be, and she was alone with William in the autumn dusk one Sunday while the others were downstairs. She was in her bedroom, and the brass knobs at the foot of the bed caught the last of the light.

William was sitting by the window, and she could just see him there, looking like a woodcut of himself. Jinny prayed briefly that this might be the right step in her last figure, and then began her statement abruptly, telling William baldly about Frank.

She was so concerned to impress upon her son how much he owed to James that she used no art at all in telling the story, and for a moment he did not understand her. It is only by accident that anyone ever conveys the truth without art, and this was not a lucky occasion. When she had been speaking for some time William got up and crossed towards the bed.

“Mother, you don't mean this, do you?” he demanded.

“Yes, I do, Will.” Jinny sounded faint but resolute. “It was so very good of James. Always remember that. It was so very good of him.”

William was scandalized but curious; alarmed but excited. He asked startled questions. Jinny answered him. She told the story as she had seen it, and at that distance it was still her love she best remembered; nothing had harmed it, in spite of everything it was very sweet to her still.

William had known passion himself, but not innocence with it, and he was shocked. It was probably that emotional jolt which finally convinced him.

Jinny told him no more than the truth, but even while she was telling it to him he was translating it into the language of his own
mind and giving it his own complexion, tricking it out in a sophistication it had never had. Jinny had never known James's real reason for fathering Edwin Castor's grandson, and she had always attributed it to kindness, which was the thing she best understood. William rejected this explanation and chose his own god to have received the sacrifice. He assumed at once and without question that James had done it for money. It made everything very clear to him.

Once before the story had been subjected to the same sort of misconstruction. Edwin Castor had heard it from Alfred Timson, and had translated it to meet his own view, and now his grandson coming upon it from the other end, altered it yet again.