IX
Last belated figure in that grouping round my uncle’s deathbed is my aunt. When it was beyond all hope that my uncle could live I threw aside whatever concealment remained to us and telegraphed directly to her. But she came too late to see him living. She saw him calm and still, strangely unlike his habitual garrulous animation, an unfamiliar inflexibility.
“It isn’t like him,” she whispered, awed by this alien dignity.
I remember her chiefly as she talked and wept upon the bridge below the old castle. We had got rid of some amateurish reporters from Biarritz, and had walked together in the hot morning sunshine down through Port Luzon. There, for a time, we stood leaning on the parapet of the bridge and surveying the distant peeks, the rich blue masses of the Pyrenees. For a long time we said nothing, and then she began talking.
“Life’s a rum go, George!” she began. “Who would have thought, when I used to darn your stockings at old Wimblehurst, that this would be the end of the story? It seems far away now—that little shop, his and my first home. The glow of the bottles, the big coloured bottles! Do you remember how the light shone on the mahogany drawers? The little gilt letters! Ol Amjig, and Snap! I can remember it all—bright and shining—like a Dutch picture. Real! And yesterday. And here we are in a dream. You a man—and me an old woman, George. And poor little Teddy, who used to rush about and talk—making that noise he did—Oh!”
She choked, and the tears flowed unrestrained. She wept, and I was glad to see her weeping. …
She stood leaning over the bridge; her tear-wet handkerchief gripped in her clenched hand.
“Just an hour in the old shop again—and him talking. Before things got done. Before they got hold of him. And fooled him.
“Men oughtn’t to be so tempted with business and things. …
“They didn’t hurt him, George?” she asked suddenly.
For a moment I was puzzled.
“Here, I mean,” she said.
“No,” I lied stoutly, suppressing the memory of that foolish injection needle I had caught the young doctor using.
“I wonder, George, if they’ll let him talk in Heaven. …”
She faced me. “Oh! George, dear, my heart aches, and I don’t know what I say and do. Give me your arm to lean on—it’s good to have you, dear, and lean upon you. … Yes, I know you care for me. That’s why I’m talking. We’ve always loved one another, and never said anything about it, and you understand, and I understand. But my heart’s torn to pieces by this, torn to rags, and things drop out I’ve kept in it. It’s true he wasn’t a husband much for me at the last. But he was my child, George, he was my child and all my children, my silly child, and life has knocked him about for me, and I’ve never had a say in the matter; never a say; it’s puffed him up and smashed him—like an old bag—under my eyes. I was clever enough to see it, and not clever enough to prevent it, and all I could do was to jeer. I’ve had to make what I could of it. Like most people. Like most of us. … But it wasn’t fair, George. It wasn’t fair. Life and Death—great serious things—why couldn’t they leave him alone, and his lies and ways? If we could see the lightness of it—
“Why couldn’t they leave him alone?” she repeated in a whisper as we went towards the inn.
II
Love Among the Wreckage
I
When I came back I found that my share in the escape and death of my uncle had made me for a time a notorious and even popular character. For two weeks I was kept in London “facing the music,” as he would have said, and making things easy for my aunt, and I still marvel at the consideration with which the world treated me. For now it was open and manifest that I and my uncle were no more than specimens of a modern species of brigand, wasting the savings of the public out of the sheer wantonness of enterprise. I think that in a way, his death produced a reaction in my favour and my flight, of which some particulars now appeared stuck in the popular imagination. It seemed a more daring and difficult feat than it was, and I couldn’t very well write to the papers to sustain my private estimate. There can be little doubt that men infinitely prefer the appearance of dash and enterprise to simple honesty. No one believed I was not an arch plotter in his financing. Yet they favoured me. I even got permission from the trustee to occupy my chalet for a fortnight while I cleared up the mass of papers, calculations, notes of work, drawings and the like, that I left in disorder when I started on that impulsive raid upon the Mordet quap heaps.
I was there alone. I got work for Cothope with the Ilchesters, for whom I now build these destroyers. They wanted him at once, and he was short of money, so I let him go and managed very philosophically by myself.
But I found it hard to fix my attention on aeronautics, I had been away from the work for a full half-year and more, a half-year crowded with intense disconcerting things. For a time my brain refused these fine problems of balance and adjustment altogether; it wanted to think about my uncle’s dropping jaw, my aunt’s reluctant tears, about dead negroes and pestilential swamps, about the evident realities of cruelty and pain, about life and death. Moreover, it was weary with the frightful pile of figures and documents at the Hardingham, a task to which this raid to Lady Grove was simply an interlude. And there was Beatrice.
On the second morning, as I sat out upon the veranda recalling memories and striving in
