Youth Will be Served

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Chapter I

WHEN we first see Clarence he is looking in the glass.

Some one had placed the baby on the floor in front of a long mirror, and had bidden him admire himself. (It was probably the adoring housemaid, while she brushed over the carpet, and looked after her charge for a minute during which nurse had gone to prepare milky food.) This Clarence was earnestly doing, becoming rapidly fascinated by his own white frock and blue bows, and the rings of faint gold on his small, oval head.

"Ijove the baby!" said the housemaid. "Love the pretty baby in the glass!"

Clarence stretched out his hands to his image, and purred. He had a delightful way of expressii^ himself at fifteen months, that was neither gurgling nor crowing — ^he simply purred. It seemed to him that what the glass reflected was better than woolly lambs or boxes of bricks.

Then the door opened abruptly and the housemaid rose precipitately from her knees at the entrance of Clarence's mother, and made a movement as if to pick up the baby and exit with him and her dustpan together.

ZI

"You can leave him," said Mrs. Joyce discontentedly. "I suppose I can be trusted, as well as you. Where's nurse?"

"Gone down to the kitchen, m'm, to see about his milk !" said Jane. She walked to the door reluctantly, as if a trifle distrustful of leaving that precious bundle of white muslin and blue ribbons in the care of anyone so young and inexperienced as Gillian Joyce. And, indeed, it did seem as if the situation required an older and more seasoned head than Gillian's, even for the short space that nurse was in the kitchen, seriously engaged in boiling milk. The baby had been so delicate, and was only now beginning to show signs of the pure colors of health that make English children look like flowers — ^pink and white, and gold and blue ; and Gillian herself still betrayed the listlessness of her own ill-health, and the long struggle to recoup after Clarence's birth in Africa. A pretty couple to look after each other!

"Go along!" said Gillian, with an impatient nod. '*You can tell nurse where he is if you are anxious !"

The little satire sent the housemaid flying, for there is nothing her class dislikes as much as irony. But she did run down the passage to the kitchen after all, and told nurse all about it. "You'd better be quick, Mrs. Bloxham ! Missus has sent me off, and has got Baby — ^precious lamb!"

"What's he doing?" said Nurse Bloxham sharply, stirring the milk to hasten it.

"Sitting on the floor like a little angel, loving himself in the glass. I sez to 'im, TLove the pretty baby !' I sez, and he stretches out his little 'ands to it and looks the sweetest, weeniest "

Left alone with her child Gillian cast a passing glance at him, playing with his reflection, and, without disturbing him, she walked over to the window and stood looking down into the street, swinging the blind-cord and tassel against the glass with a monotonous thud. She was a tall slip of a girl, and her recent illness had made her seem still taller and slimmer. Her cheek-bones were too defined, and her skin too transparent for her age, which was just nineteen. And, as the baby on the floor was fifteen months old already, it follows that Gillian Joyce had been married before her seventeenth birthday.

The room in which Clarence was admiring himself, and his mother looking out of the window, was the dining-room of a rather ugly flat in Earl's Court. Mrs. Joyce's sister-in-law had taken it furnished for her before her arrival in England, as it was considered undesirable that the young wife should go to a hotel in her state of health. This lady had also engaged a cook and housemaid, and an eminently experienced and satisfactory nurse for the baby, and had established her brother's family there without any trouble or initiative on their part. There was nothing for Gillian and Qarence to do, therefore, but get well, and this the latter at least had set himself cheerfully to accomplish. With his mother it threatened to be a longer process.

Mrs. Joyce stood for some minutes longer at the window, the blind-cord keeping monotonous time to her thoughts. It was May, but not a pretty May as seen in the Earl's Court Road. The flat was not an expensive one either in furnishing or situation, for Lieutenant-Colonel Joyce (it was only a brevet) was like most Service people and found it hard to support two establishments — ^his own in Africa, where he was serving with his regiment, and his wife's in England. Gillian herself would come into money when she was twenty-one, but two years seems a long way ahead, and, in the meantime, she found herself looking out of a dull window into a dull street where the dingy red houses and the middle-class shops made dull contrast. Everjrthing was dull, from the gray sky with an east wind in it to her own young body and mind, still torpid with illness and overweighted with maternity. Then there came a soft flop behind her and a little gurgle, and she turned round to see that her son had overbalanced himself and was lying on his back vaguely sparring in the air with his inadequate hands and feet.

Clarence at least was not dull. He took what had happened to him as a new sort of game, and, though he had lost his pretty likeness in the glass, he enjoyed rolling on his back on the carpet — ^a process discouraged by nurse lest he should rick himself. Gillian smiled for the first time, her discontented mouth lifting at the comers to a gradual laugh, and, crossing the room with a long striding step, she dropped down beside the child and began to play with him, slipping a long, slim finger into his curled-up hands with a certain hesitation, as of one unaccustomed and slightly fearful. Clarence gripped the finger and hauled himself up with it, kicking wildly, and Gillian pulled him nearly to a sitting posture and then dropped him back again, to his ecstasy, watching him with the wondering, speculative eyes of another child, little older than himself. Indeed, Gillian Joyce was just then very like a child who has been given too complicated a mechanical toy, and can make nothing of its intrica-' cies.

She was still lying on the floor, her head resting on one hand, the other swinging the baby to and fro half absently, when the door was opened again to admit a visitor.

"Mrs. Radford," said the housemaid, adding, for she worshiped children, "and Master Fenton!"

Mrs. Radford was a tall woman of thirty, and Master Fenton was a tall boy of four, who was just old enough to be shy. He clung to his mother's hand and hid his face in her skirts when Gillian scrambled up from the floor and came to greet them.

"Hallo, Pamela! I am glad to see you!" she said eagerly. "What's the matter, Tony? Won't you speak to me ?"

"Let him alone!" said Mrs. Radford laughing. "He'll come round in a few minutes." She sat down in one of the two easy-chairs the room afforded and took no notice of her boy, who retreated behind the chair back and peeped at Mrs. Joyce from that vantage point with round startled eyes. "I meant to come and see you long since," said Mrs. Radford, "but we've been very busy ourselves, settling into rooms at Chelsea. Jim has got a billet at the Admiralty for six months at least, and it was no good staying down at Bath."

"Oh, are you going to be in town, then ?" said Gillian, and there was new hope and pleasure in her hazel eyes. She liked her sister-in-law, Pamela Radford, and the idea of having her within hail instead of at the end of a two-or-three hours' journey filled her with some vague comfort that she did not know she had lacked. Gillian was dependent by habit, not by nature. A husband twenty years older than herself, and constantly on guard over her, had caused her self-reliance to remain dormant instead of developing it

"Yes, and quite near you. You can take the Tnis from the King's Road and get to us in twenty-five minutes."

The year being 1894, traffic moved more slowly than it does to-day. The fastest vehicle was a hansom, for the Underground Railway was not electrified, and tubes did not exist in London. But Gillian, knowing no better, thought the transit marvelously quick.

"I haven't really had a good talk with you since you've been home," said Mrs. Radford, loosening her cloak and throwing it back. "How cold it is to-day I There's a nipping east wind. Do you feel it mudi, after Africa?"

"I like it. The heat nearly killed me. I was up at Ceres for three or four months, and even there it was never really fresh.'*

"And how did you leave John ? I thought him looking wonderfully fit two years ago when he took you out, in spite of that awful time he must have had in Mahaleland!"

"Oh, John's all right — ^he always is. He says the climate suits him — I wish it had me I" said Gillian, flushing with faint humiliation. "I felt such a fool to be always ill when the other women were going about and doing things."

"Poor dearl it wasn't your fault," said Mrs. Radford, with quick s)rmpathy. "I'm sure John was only too distressed on your account. You should have seen his letters home ! He blamed himself for ever letting you go out when the regiment was so far up country, or for not sending you home before baby's birth."

"Yes, but the other women seemed to do all right. And they could help their husbands and entertain for them! I was only a drag on John." The girl-wife turned her head away quickly, but not before Mrs. Radford had seen the tears in the wistful brown eyes. Gillian was at her sweetest when her face softened like that, for it balanced the immaturity that gave her long limbs and thin face an almost boyish appearance. Mrs. Radford leaned over her and put her strong arm round the girl's slight shoulders. She found Gillian as irresistible at times as her brother did.

"My dear little girl, you mustn't think of that for a moment !" she said earnestly. "Don't you know that John would rather have you as a helpless invalid than the strongest and most successful hostess in Africa? And, besides, it's only just for a time. You had a bad experience, but you'll get over it. And it's not as if he were a callow subaltern!" she added laughing. "John's looked after himself and his own household for a good many years, you know."

She almost wished she had not said it the next instant. It reminded her so sharply of the difference between her brother's weather-beaten face and gray head and the extreme youth of the girl leaning against her shoulder. Certainly John brought other advantages to weigh against that exquisite gift of youth — the eclat that hangs about the name of a man successful in his profession, the comparatively recent achievements in the Mahaleland Expedition, when he so distinguished himself with the Field Force that he gained his promotion to the brevet rank of a lieutenant-colonel. Those in military circles were beginning to speak of John Joyce as a man to be watched, and certain to make a name for himself, give him the chance of war ; and yet for all her pride in him, which was almost a family tradition, Pamela could not rid herself of the uncomfortable reminder that John was over forty, and that his wife was nineteen I Gillian, however, heard only the comfort of that knowledge and missed the contrast. She shook the tears from her eyes like a child and looked up more hopefully.

"Yes, of course, there is that," she said. "I felt I was really better out of the way when I came home, though I did miss John dreadfully, and the Kaffir nurses. I don't know what I should have done without my own old Kaffir woman. She petted me like another baby. And I couldn't have looked after Clarence myself."

"Were you ill all the time?"

"Except just at first. It seems to me to have been one long nightmare of trying to do things, and getting up for a time, and always breaking down and having to go to bed. And I did want to enjoy myself like other people 1"

"It does seem a shame! and, of course, you might have had a very good time with John's position."

"There was always something going on — ^and I couldn't go. The men were awfully good to me — I chummed with them all. John said he never saw another senior officer's wife who was taken so straight into the heart of the mess like a comrade !"

Mrs. Radford smiled a little tenderly at the open face. It was one of Gillian's characteristics that men as well as women felt the honesty of her as they might have done of a very young man. Perhaps she was best described as the right kind of public schoolboy.

There came a substantial knock at the door, and nurse entered, with a glance at the dock to be sure that it was the right hour for the baby's next meal. Clarence had left the glass when his mother left him, and had crawled under the table, where he found a footstool. He was busy trying to cram the tab or handle of the stool into his mouth when nurse found him, and hastily picked him up in her comfortable arms, with a glance of amused resignation at Mrs. Joyce.

^'Oh, was he doing anything bad for him?" said Gillian in dismay. "I forgot to look. He always is trying to kill himself if he is left with me!" she added desperately to her sister-in-law.

Babies always are," said Mrs. Radford calmly. The footstool won't hurt him — ^he only sucked the tab. Where's Fenton ? Oh, nurse, may he come with you for a bit ? He'll be quite good."

"Yes, indeed, m'm— of course !" said nurse, gathering Clarence on one arm and holding out her hand to the other child. "Come along, dear !" she said encouragingly. "There's a box of bricks in the nursery, and such a big woolly lamb!"

Fenton trotted off beside her with the instinctive confidence of his years, and Mrs. Joyce looked after them half enviously.

"What a jolly little chap he is !" she said. "I shall it (t be so glad when Clarence can talk, and doesn't look as if he would break."

"My dear Gill, he won't break — ^he's only rather delicate at present Surely you're not afraid of your own baby?"

"I am, rather. He's so small. And I don't know anything about babies."

"Did you never have to do anything for him?"

"Never. I was too ill. The Kaffir nurses did everjrthing. I tried to nurse him at first, but I had fever, and John said it was madness for both of us, and so he was weaned. I'm afraid that is what makes him so puny."

"Have you given him his bath yet?"

"Once or twice," said Mrs. Joyce, looking rather ashamed of herself. "But the nurses always treated it like a good joke, and stood by to help me — Bloxham does too."

"Bloxham is perfectly experienced, of course — ^that is why I engaged her for you."

"She's too experienced!" said Gillian rebelliously. "She's afraid to let me look after him at all. When I ask for him he's always being fed or put to sleep or taken out. I ought to have him at night, oughtn't I?"

"No; I don't think you would get strong again if you did. You want your night's rest."

"That's just it — ^when I've been playing with him for a little while Bloxham always sends me to lie down, or to read, or to take a drive — as if she were my nurse, too ! 'I'll do that for him, m'm — don't you worry. Now you go and have your tea, and try to eat a good one!' That's Bloxham."

"Bloxham's a good nurse for you botji at present/* said Mrs. Radford gently. "You know, Gill, we arc bound to get you strong again, and you mustn't overdo it."

"I never do anything — I've nothing to fill the days. If I had to work for my child, or to attend to him entirely, he'd be enough for me. But I can't do anything for him. I daresay I should hate it if I could !" she added honestly.

"I am sure you would !" said Mrs. Radford laughing. "I had Fenton on my hands once for a fortnight and he nearly wore me out. I'd sooner have a dozen dogs to look after than one child. I grew so thin that Jim said I was never to do it again. It's only the restlessness of your youth that makes you feel so stranded, Gill. When you are strong enough to go about again and enjoy yourself, you will take your turn with baby and find the duties quite enough for you with the pleasures."

"I did go out last night — ^but I didn't enjoy myself at all!" said Gillian. "I went to the Ritchie Stems' — ^they asked me to dinner."

"Blanche is a beautiful hostess," said Mrs. Radford, with a puzzled smile in her blue eyes — eyes very like her brother's, and the counterpart of Qarence's. "You ought to have enjoyed yourself. Who was there?"

"A Mr. and Mrs. Montague — she was a girl named Sybil Morris, and at school with me — and Lional Sinister."

"Lai Sinister! So you've met him at last. What did you think of him?"

I don't know. He only just spoke to me at the beginning and the end. He took Sybil in to dinner and talked to her all the evening."

"How ill-bred of him!" said Mrs. Radford, with some amusement. "I wonder Blanche did not make him feel his enormity with one of those curious looks out of her sea-colored eyes ! Perhaps she did, and he is now writhing. What is this Mrs. Montague like?**

"She is very dark and handsome — ^her people are Jews, I think. She was always the handsomest and cleverest girl at school. I liked her, and I didn't like

her ^" She pulled herself up short, and reddened

to the roots of her brown hair. Mrs. Radford shrewdly suspected that she had remembered certain things against the too-successful Sybil which it would be mean to repeat — for that was like Gillian.

"Jews are nearly always clever," she said quietly, in the pause. "So she talked to H! That was a pity, for I wanted you to get to know him."

"Yes ; I was sorry. But Sybil cut me out." Gillian laughed a little ruefully. "She is only two years older than I am, but she looks as if she had been married for years. She's so mature and selfpossessed."

"Probably she will stop like that, however, until long past middle age. Women of her t)rpe mature early, but they do not alter if they wear well. What is her husband ?"

"A little man on 'Change, or an agent for something—an awful little bounder. They are living in Westminster, and she asked me to go and see her."

"Oh, are they? H has rooms in Westminster to be near the House. What dicf you think of him, Gillian? You know in a sense he was John's heir — ^he was bound to come in for whatever money there was if John had not married, owing to Uncle Ralph's peculiar will. It left me and Fenton safely out of it, but H might have had a grudge against you and Clarence if he had been another kind of man."

"I know— and I think it's awfully nice of him. I say, Pamela, why do you call him *H' ?"

Mrs. Radford laughed. ''A malignant fate cursed him with the name of Lional Sinister," she said, ''and we called him 'H' because we never meant to drop him! It is only John and I who do it, and I do not think he would allow anyone else the privilege. You see, we have always been very fond of him," she added almost apologetically. ''We know what really lies under that imperturbable exterior."

"He wrote me a jolly letter after Clarence was bom — said he was looking forward to it as much as we had been. I'm sure he couldn't be as thankful as I was to get it over!" added GilHan, with a flash of mirth in her eyes.

"Why? Did you have such a bad time?"

"Not that so much— only it was all so uncomfortable. I was so thankful to have my body to myself again! — No, the really horrid part was afterward, when I got fever and nearly died."

Mrs. Radford shivered a little. "Don't let's think of it," she said cheerfully, for, like all unimaginative people, she thought it was not healthy to dwell on the unexplainable. "You must come and dine with us one night and meet H again," she said. "And I won't ask Mrs. Montague!" she added laughing.

"He will only be bored with me!" said Gillian quickly, her sensitive brows contracting. She was anxious to know and be friends with this cousin of her husband's, not only because she felt that he had behaved generously about Clarence, but because he had been a great favorite of the Colonel's. They were first cousins once removed, and, though the younger man was only some twelve years junior to the elder, he had seemed to rank with a later generation, and the position between them had been that of uncle and nephew rather than of contemporaries. Colonel John had undoubtedly been very fond of his younger kinsman, and the frequent introduction of his name had at last made Gillian feel as if he were an old friend to her also, some one who belonged in her life. She had been eager and expectant on hearing that he was to be at the Ritchie Stems', and had wondered how they would get on, and planned a letter to her husband telling him of the meeting. And then the shyness of her immaturity, and the other woman's natural assertion, had proved her undoing, and she had sunk into the background like a nonentity, and it seemed to her that they had better not have met at all. It had been a disappointment, all the keener because Gillian's youth made the present moment of intense importance. Had she been older, even as old as her sister-in-law, she would have said: "The next time we meet things may be different," but it did not seem to Gillian that there could be a next time. Failure looked so final.

Mrs. Radford stayed to luncheon in the prosaic dining-room, and the conversation changed to frocks and their plans for the Summer. It was not until the meal was over that they strolled into the nursery to see how things were going with the children, and to coax Fenton into his little coat and sailor hat, for Mrs. Radford had to get back to Chelsea to meet some friends that afternoon.

It cannot be said that Clarence had been successful as a host, his ideas of entertaining his guest being to crawl over the floor and knock down the bricks that Fenton had unsteadily piled together. When their respective mothers entered, Fenton, with his face rather red, was ejaculating: "No, baby! No, baby!" and beating Clarence over the head with a brick, nurse's back being turned for the moment. Mrs. Radford rushed to the rescue and took the brick gently away from her indignant son.

"Oh, Tony; how naughty! You are not to do that !" she said, much shocked. But Gillian was struggling with laughter.

"After all, Clarence gets into trouble when he's with other people besides me!" she said, with a grimace at Nurse Bloxham, who had picked up her charge and was petting him. "It can't have hurt him, nurse — he's not crying. I believe his head's like iron!"

"Poor little fellow!" said Mrs. Radford remorsefully, holding Fenton firmly by the hand, out of further mischief. "He's a true son of a soldier, Gillian. You ought to be proud of him!"

Mrs. Joyce looked dubiously at the small fair face in which the indiscriminate features were beginning to grow into some sort of outline. "I'm afraid he's going to have a very long upper lip," she said.

"That means judgment, m'm!" said Nurse Bloxham, jealous for her darling. 'Or obstinacy," said Gillian.

m

Chapter II

HER husband's relations had been rather a trial to Gillian, with the exception of Pamela, whom she had liked from the first. There were so many of them, and they seemed to stretch backward and forward in generations that required to be sorted before one could classify them at all. Gillian had been singularly destitute of relations herself, being the daughter of parents who had both been only children, and, as she had no brothers or sisters, she was dependent upon her school friends for companionship. During her holidays she lived with her guardian, who was an elderly bachelor devoted to sport, or, rather, she ran wild on his place in Yorkshire and learned to iish and shoot and ride as well as the Rector's boys, who were her principal cronies, though SMne years younger than herself.

It was during one of these periods of liberty that she had met Colonel Joyce, home on leave after the Mahaleland Expedition and shooting over her guardian's coverts, and he had married her out of school, the term after she completed a faulty education and left for good. The discrepancy in age seemed so more than overweighted by the disposal of Gillian's future that Major Clutterbuck, her guardian, breathed a sigh of relief and gave way to pious saws about Providence and shorn Isrobs. True, John Joyce had hitherto ranked as his contemporary thoi]gh ten years younger, and to transform him suddenly to his ward's lover seemed a rejuvenating process; but he was as ardent as many a younger man, full of the fire and vigor that had made him a successful soldier of a certain type, and really it did seem providential that Gillian's rudderless existence should be taken in tow and brought into harbor before she had time to drift into storms or dangerous currents.

But, naturally enough, the dismay came from the other side, and it was the Colonel's family who shook their heads and raised their hands in protest. He had, besides hosts of cousins, a widowed aunt still existent, an old lady who lived on Clapham Common for no particular reason save that she had taken her old-fashioned roomy house in days when the Common was actually the country and one went to London by coach. Lady Mary Critchett (she had been a Joyce herself) was over seventy and childless. Her brother's son had been the best loved of her nephews and nieces, and she was equally proud of his career and regretful that he had not made her a great-aunt. When, however, he did take a wife. Lady Mary was the most distressed of the family at his unexpected choice, and the delicacy of the baby and the young wife she could not help regarding as a judgment upon his impetuous folly. She had seen Gillian once before the hurried departure for Africa — ^a horrible occasion on which it seemed to the terrified girl that the world was peopled with cousins and somethings-in-law, so innumerable was the family gathering. Since her return to England young Mrs. Joyce had pleaded ill-health to avoid more than a brief visit to Lady Mary, during which Clarence sat in Nurse Bloxham's lap and purred, and Gillian herself felt restlessly conscious of the vague, musty scent that lingered about the old-fashioned rooms — a, scent that combined jasmine and pot-pourri, the old leather of books and faded tapestries. It gave her a sense of going backward, and weighted her vitality with the serenities of old age.

The Rad fords were unquestionably the most possible of the Colonel's family, from Gillian's point of view, Pamela being ten or twelve years younger than her brother and youthful for thirty. Of Captain Radford Gillian stood in some awe, for he was not typical of the Navy, being by nature a student. Had he started twenty years later than he did he might have shone as a specialist even in his profession, for he brought the same painstaking labor to bear upon a gun as a bacteriologist does upon a microbe; but in 1894 there were still traditions in the Navy that James Radford did not fulfil, and his habit of detail hampered him for broader ideals. Gillian had only met him three times before the occasion on which she dined at Chelsea, and he struck her afresh as. painfully like certain old-fashioned pictures of the Christ, the long-bearded face and vacant eyes being a commonplace ideal of the Nazarene. Gillian had never liked it, even in her nursery days, but she recognized it at once. His wife had a way of calling him the House of Radford, as a facetious nickname, and he seemed to represent his own pedigree with due solemnity. Pamela had a fatal knack of labeling her associates according to their self-revelations. She called Gillian "Gillyflower," and the sweet-scented, freegrowing thing was happily typical.