The light above the cross roads

Front matter

BY

MRS. VICTOR RICKARD

AUTHOR OF

Chapter I

SIR HENRY JANOVER, K.C.I.E., Governor of the Province of Barapore, sat looking down his long dining-table, idly crumbling his bread with his strong fingers.

The scene before him held none of the charm of nov¬ elty. The great table with its masses of silver and flowers, the shaded lights, the semi-royal livery of the numerous servants, the chatter of the guests which stormed and rose above the music of the band, were all wearily familiar to him. He knew that the formula represented “ pleasure,” and “ pleasure ” is a necessary part of the life of a high official. It also represented entertainment, and Sir Henry made no effort to sup¬ plement the already lavish arrangements made for his guests’ satisfaction, by any personal attempt to ioin in the noise of the many voices. There was no weakness in Sir Henry Janover, his strength had the defiance of a challenge and his pride was reserved and still.

Iron grey hair grew thickly on his well-shaped head, and his eyes were startlingly blue, and cold as glacier ice, his dark blue coat with its velvet collar and gold buttons fitted his broad shoulders faultlessly, and his order showed finely, increasing the air of distinctive¬ ness that actively claimed his right to be intensely him¬ self. He was still a young man, young for the position

i he held, and young in his intense vitality, which re¬ tained the driving power of a storm, in a country where vitality lowers perceptibly with every added year of service.

Just then he was not troubling himself to be polite to Mrs. Jos. Digby, the lady on his right, whose Grecian profile had, it was said, acted upon the judgment and hearts of twelve of his fellow-countrymen at a critical juncture of her life. He was looking down the strip of lace and glass and silver, and considering, with slow, concentrated scrutiny, the woman who sat at the farther end, officially his wife.

Lady Janover was still beautiful, and art and care as¬ sisted her admirably in her effect of permanent success. The fact that she lived upon her emotions and was at the mercy of her own vanity was obvious to the hard eyes that watched her; that young Lord Hartfield, lately arrived in the Station, was rapidly approaching the fatuous stage of open adoration was equally easy to discern.

Sir Henry Janover’s mouth twisted slightly. It was the usual vulgar business. She was laughing and ly¬ ing, he knew, even though the noise of the band and the talk of the forty guests made it impossible for him to hear one word. He had not lived with her for one month, much less the whole of their married life, with¬ out having learnt to weigh her character to an ounce.

A loathing of the whole painted show swept over him suddenly, and he thought of himself as he was when everything was young, and when his dream had not been within measurable distance of being realized. Now he was a ruler in the Promised Land, and the irony of the strange fatality that follows upon the wish fulfilled wrought within him as it has wrought in the hearts of hundreds of men, forcing him to say that it is better never to get beyond Beth Peor’s heights, and that the luckiest adventurer is the man who dies before he enters, and is buried by angels in blessed anonymity.

Sir Henry saw himself tied by a thousand chains to the very greatness of his position, tied to a wife with whom it might be a dreary tragedy, yet precluded by the unwritten law of his order from taking any short cut to freedom from her presence in his house, tied to the very chair he sat on, and obliged to entertain stran¬ gers without the slightest hope of finding among his guests that unexpected angel sent to encourage the hearts of the hospitable. Still, he knew himself to be successful, and there was some essence of joy in that knowledge. Had he stood alone he might even have been happy, but his ambition and his pride would not permit him to stand alone and push the woman he had married entirely out of his life. She was always there.

She lived in the light of her position, glorying openly in its power and using it, when it suited her, for any petty end. It sickened him, as though some one had taken a sword stained in war to kill a black beetle. She used him as a telling weapon when she posed as a neglected wife, she used everything she touched in the same way, and eternally she acted her part to the men who came and went. What she gave he could hardly assess. She seemed to have some vital inspiration animating her to continue successfully, and she blossomed with each victory in a manner that made Henry Janover realize that his wife had made a life study of the art she had practised. Hartfield was years younger than Lady Janover, and taking it seriously; Willie Baring, on her other side, had been through it, and did not trouble to disguise his amuse¬ ment as he talked with slighting familiarity to his hostess.

Sir Henry Janover fiddled again with his bread. [Willie Baring’s conversation was known all over India, and he could guess that he was growing careless, but he remained entirely unmoved. Once upon a time he had been otherwise, but that was long ago, so long ago that he had forgotten when he began not to mind, and ceased to hate her for what she did and had grown to hate her for what she was, and finally, had come to regard her as one might regard some nuisance that could not be abated at a reasonable cost. One power alone Lady Janover exercised over her husband at all times, and that was the power to sicken him, and raise up a latent brutality of speech in him that he neither tried nor desired to conquer. She had chosen to stay in the East, she required to share his position, and, such being the case, Henry Janover was not ex¬ actly the man to make her lot a bed of roses.

Half-way down the table he could see Casson, the Chief Secretary, glance at her, his studied reserve betraying nothing of the thoughts within. Out of all the men and women gathered together under his roof, Henry Janover counted only Casson as his friend ; but, after the manner of men, they never touched upon the private lives of one another, though Casson knew that his Chief was not the man that popular report painted him. Lady Janover had not spared her hus¬ band when she proved her own right to a certain liberty of conduct, and the expression “ numbing pain” was one she often used; and as Janover had never permitted himself the smallest indiscretion that could be twisted into a scandal, the ever useful fiction of a vague and veiled woman somewhere on the border grew and prospered exceedingly.

“ How well Lydia looks tonight,” remarked Mrs. Digby, who felt that if Sir Henry stared down the table any longer people would begin to think she was failing badly, and she had a reputation to con¬ sider.

Janover turned his eyes towards her and, as she expressed it afterwards, made her feel as if she was nailed to the wall.

“ Which of them do you prefer? ” he said slowly.

“ And how you must admire her,” continued Mrs. Digby.

“ My position gives me exceptional chances.”

“ Has Lydia told you our Simla scheme? ”

Sir Henry’s eyelids flickered.

“ I know about the Simla scheme,” he said almost gently, his voice softening into dangerous quiet.

“ Oh, that is splendid,” replied Mrs. Digby with nervous exaggeration of her manner.

Janover moved impatiently. Lydia was still laugh¬ ing at the last witticism of Willie Baring, and the guests were sitting in suspense. In little things such as this she constantly irritated him.

“Simla,” he said again. “Paradise, is it not? Heaven on earth and a ballroom on chains thrown in. Who with a heart could close the doors of such

a Garden of Eden to two such - ” Mrs. Digby rose

quickly, and smiling at her host left him with un¬ disguised relief.

“ Oh, my poor Lydia,” she murmured in the ear of Lady Janover. “ Oh, my poor dear Lvd, I should die of fright if I was left alone in the dark with that terrible Henry of yours.”

Lady Janover bent her chestnut head.

“ Then, Vi, that only shows what a fool you are. Henry would neither eat you nor want to eat you.”

When the women had left the long dining-room Sir Henry was always made to feel conscious of his own power to hold others aloof. He kept men not so much at arm's length as at rapier's length, and it was Casson who came and sat near him, a very marked division gaping between them and the others.

Janover laughed to himself as he saw Hartfield place himself at the farthest point possible from his host. “ Lie’s an honest ass,” he thought contemptu¬ ously, and turning towards Casson he became oblivious to the rest of the company, talking in a slightly low¬ ered voice.

“ I’ve made up my mind, Casson. Marcus goes home with Lady Janover next month.”

“ It’s time he went,” replied Casson emphatically. “ Marcus is eight, and a boy of that age gets out of hand in this country.” He laughed a pleasant easy laugh. “ I saw him pounding Gul Sher today. Go¬ ing for him with his whip he was, and when I inter¬ fered he cursed me with a few well-chosen words he had learnt from a Tommy who was having an argu¬ ment with a friend, so he told me.”

Janover crossed one leg over the other and shaded his eyes with his hand as he went on speaking.

“I’ve sworn to one thing, and that is "that mv mistakes and the mistakes made by others on my behalf, shall not be his. He starts as well as I can start him, and as well as I can start him doesn’t mean Eton and Oxford. I’m damned if it does. He’s got to learn to live, not to play; he’s got to learn that the Empire isn’t a music hall in Leicester Square, and that a man’s work isn’t all polo and shooting. I’ve watched the stuff we turn out, and I wonder how it is we still are what we are, with the training we have behind us.”

“ You know my ideas,” Casson spoke very earnestly. ** My people could do very little for me, but what they did has been of every use. If I hadn’t gone to Germany - ”

“ That is the point,” said Janover restlessly. “ It’s an infernal business, Casson. I’d like the boy to get his schooling in England, but if I want him to be fitted for the big things, how can I send him to a place where the Masters have to be M.C.C. cricketers or International footballers, and God knows what else, and which he will leave, unable to write his own lan¬ guage correctly and totally unable to speak a word of any other. If he has brains enough for the Diplomatic, he must begin with a better training than he could get in England.” He paused for a moment and said very deliberately, “ For many reasons that all dovetail one into another I am determined to send him to Germany.”

“ He is rather young for school.” Casson was thinking as he spoke. “Will Lady Janover stay at home with him for a year or two ? ”

“If she did - ” Janover pulled himself up

abruptly. “ I am inclined to think that Marcus would be better in some ways in a simple family, where he would learn a very different life from the life that induces habits of thrashing orderlies and using words he picks up on the roads. Yes, Casson, I am clear on that point.” He rose as he spoke and the conversation was ended.

It was much later in the evening that Janover stood to say good-night to his guests, and watched Hartfield’s lingering parting with his wife.

“ Don’t go yet, I want to speak to you,” he said, approaching Lady Janover as the vast room emptied and she stood alone at the far end of the polished floor. She was playing with a long pearl chain, and she replied with a stifled yawn that she wished he could [wait until any time that was not now.

“ It is always the same, Henry. You usually begin to insist about something just when I don’t feel like it.”

Janover walked towards the open window and looked out at the tropic night; below him the palm trees whispered in the first light breath of the coming dawn, and the world looked fair and full of peace. When he turned back to the room, Lydia was sitting in a low chair lighting a cigarette.

“ I am waiting, you may observe,” she remarked with studied indifference. “ What have I done now? ”

Janover stood with his hands in his pockets and looked down at her.

“ I told you that I have arranged for you to take Marcus home next month.”

“ And I don’t intend to go.” Lady Janover’s eyes blazed, and the hand that held the lighted cigarette trembled.

“ You propose to go to Simla with Mrs. Digby.”

“ Well, if I do, I don’t see that you can object.”

Janover leaned his arm on a high carved cabinet.

“ I have ceased to object or care what you do,” he replied, without a trace of annoyance in his voice. “ But I have other considerations, Lydia, consider¬ ations that concern Marcus ; and where he is concerned, anything you may wish or desire does not count. You fully understand?”

“ I ought to.” Her voice wras mutinous, “ The child will be perfectly all right up in Simla, as I have already told you, and I have no intention whatever of leaving India just at present.”

“ You will take him to England next month.” Janover’s voice was still level and calm. “ And after that he goes, as I intend, to Germany, when your supervision will be at an end, and you can go to — Simla.”

Lady Janover dropped her cigarette on the floor and placed a small satin-shocl foot upon it.

“ Will you admit that I am to have any say in the bringing up of my own son? ”

“ Your ‘ sav,’ as you put it, has been his dominating factor for eight years.” A touch of heat crept into his eyes and voice. “ To what end? Where has his love gone? You should know something upon that subject, but it is not you he loves; the only person he cares about is Janki the Ayah. Where is his alle¬ giance? Do you command it? I think not; he has given that to the Havildar who rides with him. Whom does he obey? No one and nothing but his own child passions. Good God ! You ask me if you are to have no say in the moulding of your child’s life and I answer )rou Never — Never if I can prevent it; and I can prevent it.”

Lady Janover gave a shrill, ugly laugh.

“ How very melodramatic, Henry. If the child does like the people who are with him, so much the better. As for his little tantrums, school will change all that. Why on earth all our lives should be dis¬ located for a child like Marcus I entirely fail to under¬ stand.”

Janover stared sombrely at her.

“ You would fail,” he said slowly ; “ nevertheless he is going where I intend he shall go.”

“ I hate Germans.” Lady Janover shifted her point of attack. “ It will absolutely ruin him. What sort of friends will he make, I ask you? Germans. What sort of ideas will he get? German ideas. He will come back unbearable and nothing on earth will ever make him fit to look at. Germany is a dreadful country that is full of philosophers and waiters, and if you had ever seen a German officer out of uniform — really, Henry, when you talk of considering the best interests for Marcus, all this is pure nonsense. Of course he goes to Eton.”

Janover leaned forward and his eyes grew threat¬ ening.

“You must go to Simla, must you, Lydia? You must take Hartfield there with you and drag the poor puppet about after you. Meantime Marcus progresses along his own path, until no school on earth would keep him when he is sent there, and no discipline exists that will break him of the curse of his early bringing up here.”

io

Lady Janover drew back in her chair and her hands gripped the arms. When Henry grew like this she knew there was no appeal.

“ I have many things to think of,” he continued in the same tense voice : “ Marcus needs special

chances and special training. How will it be if, deep, somewhere in him, there is a taint that may develop ? ” He had her at his mercy now, and he spoke with cruel lightness. “ Shall we call you a diplomatist, Lydia? If he inherits your facility he may so easily overdo the part. It isn’t so safe for a man, accord¬ ing to our present code of ideas, as it is for a woman.”

“ I will not go.” She had her head down and her face looked old and set.

He paced the room for a few moments and then stood before her. “If I could arrange to let you stay and send the boy home, without public scandal, I would do so. I care so little that I would do so. But since this is not possible, and I have to consider my own prestige in so far as I personally stand for a great deal more than a mere individual, I ask you to submit to the agonies of separation for the hot weather. Six months of sacrifice — surely, Lydia, your maternal heart accepts the justice of the judgment.”

“ I hate you,” she said in a suppressed voice. “ You will live to regret this, Henry. You will live to be sorry that you did this, and I hope you will. 1 hope you will suffer for it.”

Janover yawned idly.

“ The one certainty in life is that one will regret everything sooner or later. Good-night.”

She was crying now, her head on her arms. But

ii her tears always came at the right moment, and, his hands still deep in his pockets, he strolled out of the room.

Upstairs in the nursery, in a dim light, the Ayah bent over a small bed, shrouded by a mosquito cur¬ tain, and as she bent she sang in nasal monotone :

It was the slumber song of the princeling whom she adored, and in his sleep he turned and called her by a word which he had added to his vocabulary during the day, learnt from Willie Baring; but the Ayah only kissed his feet and droned her song in his ears.

Down in the big guest-room his father and mother, whom he called “ They,” were fighting about him, but what did that matter? Ayah and Gul Sher loved him and he beat them, and life was full of entertainment; so after a long day of life and delight Marcus slept like the weary little animal he was.

Chapter II

IN spite of tears, in spite of further protestations. Lady Janover, accompanied by Marcus and his Ayah, made the journey home at the appointed time, and Sir Henry Janover came to see the last of them as they embarked on the big liner lying in Bombay har¬ bour. His eyes softened as he looked down at the boy. They were very much alike, except that Marcus had inherited his mother’s chestnut hair; but the eyes were the same, except for what life had put into those of Sir Henry, and the defiant lift of the chin was there, and in a thousand indescribable ways little Marcus proclaimed the fact that here again was Henry Janover ready to fight his way through in his own generation.

Sir Henry recognized the likeness. This was his anchor, his chief tie to life, and the long task of training and fitting the delicate instrument for high uses was definitely to be given over into unknown hands. The life of the boy was everything to him, and to let the boy have his chance he must divide him from his mother by a huge gap of years. If she loved him she would spoil and warp him, teach him her standpoint, lower his ideals, urge him to follow the ways of the men his father most despised. If she hated the child, as at times he believed she did, in some other way she would cast her shadow to blight and destroy. His own life was bound in with the life of the East, and Sir Henry Janover was well aware that even with his fine constitution he too, like so many others, might find the sudden end come upon him without warning. At best, he could only see the boy now and then, for the possibilities of home leave were rare at his time, and the haunt¬ ing thought that Lydia would tangle the threads of the one destiny he cherished made him resolve def¬ initely to put Marcus beyond her power. Again and again he looked earnestly at the boy, his very soul disturbed in the moment of parting, and the pathos of the smallness and youth of the little Marcus hurt him like a wound.

When they were gone and his wdfe had turned an indifferent shoulder towards him in farewell, Sir Henry watched the ship steam out of the harbour with a strange mixture of feelings. So much was at stake in the future, so much at the mercy of chance, so much must happen in the ultimate moulding of the whole nature of the boy, before they met again and met, of necessity, as strangers. He wondered if he would be able to help him, or if his own temperament would chill and repress his son, when they met later and he had to stand the criticism that is inevitable between one generation and the next.

The sun went down behind the sea, the sudden darkness of the Tropics folded in rapidly, and as Sir Henry walked slowly back towards his hotel, he still thought of the animated child-face, the defiant eyes, and the suggestion of something brave in the upright little figure waving down to him from the towering deck. Life that engulfs so many beginnings and that thwarts so many, and that throws so many aside — what was it going to do with Marcus Janover ?

Marcus had gone over the traveller’s horizon, and his new life lay mapped out for him by the hand of his father.

As for Lady Janover, Sir Henry did not think of her at all ; but, as she was a bad sailor and already sea-sick, she thought of him and added yet another item to the list of his iniquities.

The burden of Lady Janover’s lamentations grew with each stage of the journey, and reached its crash¬ ing climax as she arrived in Hanover one sultry sum¬ mer evening. She saw no beauty in the domes and towers, in the flower-bordered streets, in the clean open vistas that were bathed in the strong bright sunset; her heart was in Simla, and without a heart it is not easy to enjoy anything, at least so long as that troublesome and unruly member drags the thoughts across the distance of half the world.

For a brief space Lydia had enjoyed herself in Paris; but Marcus proved himself an encumbrance there as elsewhere, so she hurried on towards his destination where she could shake free and leave him.

“ It is a hateful country,” she said to Marcus, who gazed through the carriage window as they drove to¬ wards Adelaidestrasse 6, the house of the worthy Herr Pastor Gail and his wife. “ These flowers are like bits of stodgy Berlin wool-work, after the East ; and the women — I suppose your father intends you to be taught to admire the fat stupid Gretchen type.”

“What is a Gretchen?” asked Marcus.

“ A suet pudding,” replied Lady Janover with em¬ phasis. “ However, it has nothing to say to me. Whatever sins I have committed I haven’t had a hand in this particular crime; it is your father’s own pattern and design, and it is to be * made in Ger¬ many.’ ”

Marcus had very little recollection of what hap¬ pened afterwards. He knew that he arrived and that the house was strange, and that there appeared to be a great deal of very much polished furniture inside and tremendously solid curtains, and that there were quite interesting pictures on the tiles of the high stove. He had only a vague impression that his mother and her scent and jewels and silk dress vanished at some unknown moment, and that a very kind woman told him not to cry, and appeared astonished when he asked why she thought he was going to cry.

There were first impressions of his little room up¬ stairs — of its almost intolerable tidiness, and of the pervading smell of camphor and beeswax that was everywhere ; and the red cross-stitch borders along the curtains, and the mats and wool-work that sank and blended into other memories all fragmentary and fluid, and yet in a sense permanent.

Herr Pastor Gail, a large pallid man with a bald head and gold-rimmed glasses, towered out among the first dim figures that reflected themselves on the memory mirror of Marcus Janover. The Plerr Pastor spoke English fluently and well, and was to continue his young pupil’s education in his own tongue conver¬ sationally until such time as a further effort along the weary road of learning was considered advisable. It was owing, in fact, to the Herr Pastor’s proficiency in the English language that he formed an extremely bad impression of the early bringing up of Lady Janover's son, and his manner, which had been polite to the verge of servility to the Gnddige Frau, altered after her departure.

Marcus loathed him with the violent passionate hatred of the very young, from the moment when the fat flabby hand patted his head and made him desire to bite it. Set against his intemperate dislike of the Herr Pastor was another feeling, however, equally strong, which also arose at the first touch of kindly hands and a voice saying in very uncertain English that he must not cry. Frau Pastor Gail, with her sweet placid face and calm eyes, was a type un¬ known to Marcus ; he looked at her long and searchingly, and told her in Plindustani that he thought she was good and that he liked her, and though she laughed and shook her smooth head and said things entirely incomprehensible, he felt she was soothing and soft, and in some unknown fashion like his dear Janki whom he had lost.

There was very little else that remained clearly defined in the first memory of his coming, except that the Pastor, whom Frau Gail spoke of as “ der Hebe Papa,” had made horrible noises of anger when she cuddled the little alien in her arms, and that she had removed him to his own small room on high, under the tiles.

With all the wonderful philosophy of childhood, Marcus realized and accepted the fact that Adelaidestrasse 6 was his home, and that life there was his life, and so he grew insensibly to conform to the standards required of him, outwardly in the case of the Herr Pastor, and inwardly in the case of Frau Gail. It was better not to defy the Herr Pastor, since he was all powerful, but it remained easy to hate him, and Marcus made no secret of his true feelings when he thought about the question in flashes of an¬ tagonism. The Herr Pastor regarded little boys merely as an irritating and troublesome source of income; he taught them because it paid him to teach them, and it did not occur to him to study them as individuals. Marcus attended his classes, and had the greater privilege added of being enfolded in the membership of the Pastor’s own family circle ; so it is possible that he was more conscious of the fact that in Marcus there dwelt a tense and almost crude re¬ ality, free, natural, and spontaneous, that acted upon his teacher, and did not in any way add to his liking for his pupil.

The hours spent in the class-room in the company of some twenty other boys, a few of whom were English like himself, were hours of intense boredom to Marcus. He was hopelessly behind his compan¬ ions, and during the whole of the first year he mutin¬ ously refused to make the smallest effort to learn. The horrible disadvantage of his own ignorance beset him, and the simple English lessons in which the other boys were able to excel, made it almost essential to his own self-respect to decline with mulish persistency to learn anything except colloquial German. It ap¬ peared to Marcus that elementary effort was shame¬ ful for one who had ridden the Havildar’s charger, and beaten his own servants; and the only sweetness that could be extracted from the situation sprang out of the scorn he felt and uttered against the plodding fellow-students, who replied after their kind.