Katharine Frensham: A Novel

"Do you understand, Alan, my boy?" asked Clifford Thornton.

"No, father, I don't," the boy said in a low voice. "It seems all such a fuss about nothing. Why can't you and mother have it out like any other fellows, and then make it up and be friends? You can't think how easy it is."

"We have been doing that for fifteen years and more—all your lifetime," the man said.

"I never knew it was as bad as that," Alan said.

"We tried to spare you the full knowledge of it," the man answered gently. "But now that you are old enough to know, we are obliged to tell you that we are not, never have been, happy together, and that we do not wish to be together. We spoil each other's lives."

Alan was sitting on the sofa. He stirred a little, and then suddenly, without any warning, burst into tears. Although he admired his mother's personality and bearing, he had never been particularly attached to her; but with that conservative conventionalism characteristic of an English boy, he was mortified, and felt it to be a disgrace that there should be any serious disagreement between his parents.

Clifford Thornton looked at the boy whom he loved and whom he had wounded; and he recognised with a sharp pain of regret that Alan was still too young and too sensitive for the news which had been broken to him. Bitterly the man reproached himself for his selfishness. And yet he had waited for this moment for fifteen long years—more than that; for he and his wife had discovered at the onset that they were out of sympathy, each having an aura hostile to the other. Then the child had come, and these two naturally antipathetic people had thought: "We shall draw nearer to each other because of the child."

But Nature is merciless in many of her ways, and mysterious; and perhaps her greatest and subtlest human mystery is the strife, conscious or unconscious, of one individuality with another individuality. And she gives no balm for it. On the contrary, she gives a sort of morbid remorse, wholly out of proportion to the quality and quantity of mistakes and failings born necessarily of unsuitable companionship.