We'll meet again

We assured them we would as soon as possible, but it would be difficult to get away as we had our work with the invalid soldiers.

Moreover, it would mean taking Tristan and Nanny Crabtree, for I was sure that Dorabella, in her present maternal role, would not agree to leave him; moreover, I believed that, if there was news of Jowan, it would go to Jermyn's first, and I should be wondering if it had come all the time I was absent.

One March day there was a message for Gordon from Bodmin.

Would he come as soon as possible? His mother's condition had changed.

When he returned, I was waiting for him. I went to his study where I found him looking upset and perplexed.

"What happened?" I asked.

He stared ahead and replied: "She... she's changed. She is remembering.”

"You mean... what happened?”

"Not everything... some of it. She is different now. She talks of Tregarland's. It crops up again and again in her rambling conversation. She keeps saying 'Where would it have been without you, Gordon? You saved that place. It should be yours."“

“Did she remember... what she had done?”

"She mentioned Tristan. She looked... haunted.”

I thought of her creeping into the nursery, preparing to kill him because he stood in the way of Gordon's inheriting Tregarland's, and she would have done so if Nanny Crabtree and I had not been ready to prevent it. Tristan... so young, and yet at the center of such dramatic events... fortunately he knew little of them.

Gordon was saying: "I am afraid for her. With the return of sanity, there will come remembrance, when she realizes what she planned to do and would have done, too. Murder! Oh, Violetta, I do not know what will become of her.”

I felt a great urge to comfort him. "This may be a phase through which she is passing," I said. "And she might not remember...”

I thought what a terrible thing it was that we should hope for her return to that clouded world which she inhabited with people who were similarly afflicted.

"You have done everything you can for her," I went on. "She could not have had a better son.”

"And I had a mother who was ready to commit murder for me. I often think how different it could have been. She might have married someone... someone in circumstances like her own; she might have had a happy life. But she met my father and he took her to Tregarland's, to grandeur such as she had never known before. And she wanted a place for me in all that. It was an obsession and it led her to this.”

"It might have been different, yes," I said. "But that is the way life works out. It is the same with all of us. Dorabella and I might never have gone to Germany, never have met Dermot. Life hangs on chance. We might never have known Tregarland's existed.”

"There is one good thing at least which came out of it all," said Gordon. "You came to Tregarland's.”

He took my hand in his and held it. I let it rest there because he was so distraught and seemed to draw comfort from the gesture.

Gordon went to Bodmin the next day. I impatiently waited for his return. I could not help hoping that Matilda had lapsed into her previous state.

The news was surprising. She had been out in the grounds of the Bodmin establishment; she had left her coat indoors and the wind was cold. A little later, she had become feverish, and the doctor had diagnosed pleurisy. She was now quite ill.

"She said little," Gordon told me. "She just smiled at me. She was quiet and the wild look had gone from her eyes. She looked sad. I shall go again tomorrow.”

It was two days later when we heard that Matilda was dead. She had developed pneumonia and there had been little hope after that.

Gordon went to Bodmin and remained there all day. When he came home, he looked more tired and strained than I had ever seen him before.

He said: "She looked peaceful in death... more so than I remembered seeing her. It is over, Violetta. I think I should not mourn too much for her. It is happier so.”

I sat very still, my mind going back once more to that time when she had meant to kill Tristan. And I saw that this was the best thing that could happen to her, for if she had realized what she had done, she could never have been happy. She would have had to live out her life tormented by remorse.

We had to realize that this was a release, not only for Matilda, but for all of us.

Old Mr. Tregarland was very upset when he heard of Matilda's death.

I think he had loved her in his way. He had treated her badly and he knew it. He had to blame himself for his part in the tragedy which grew out of that.

Since Matilda had been taken away, he had changed; he had softened; life was no longer a game to him in which he played with other people's lives for his amusement.