Wayward Winds (37 page)

 70 
Unwelcome Letter

When the letter arrived for Amanda at the Halifax home, she had been enjoying a happily pleasant day. The last thing she was thinking of was her family. With scarcely a moment's thought as to what could be its contents, and taking no note of the hand which had penned her name, she saw nothing of the return address. Still talking gaily with Ramsay, she slit the envelope and pulled out the two sheets inside.

Whether she would have opened it at all had she known of its origin or purpose would be impossible to say. As it was, by the time the truth dawned on her, she was several lines into it. By then some unknown force—whether curiosity or anger, perhaps wondering if after all this time her father might have had a change of heart, or merely the inability to lay it aside once she had begun—compelled her to continue.

Ramsay saw the expression on her face turn serious, then ashen. Gently he led her to a chair, eased her back into it even as she read, then left her alone.

The words she read, in her father's hand, were the following:

My dear Amanda,

I pray this finds you healthy and well. Such we pray for you daily, for you are in our thoughts constantly. Even more in our hearts.

Admittedly I made many mistakes as your father, which I regret and for which I have tried to express my apologies. However, I tried always to give you the freedom to think and question and be your
own person. I know it has not seemed that way in your eyes. Yet such was always my goal and my hope as your father.

Except for the objections your mother and I raised at the time of your leaving, we have subsequently kept silent concerning your going to the city to join the Pankhursts with their political fight for women's suffrage, even though we felt the cause a temporal one which would leave you empty and unfulfilled in the end. We have maintained that silence till now. We knew that you had to make such a discovery for yourself, and that no amount of expostulation on our part would change your mind.

As I am occasionally in the city, it cannot have escaped my attention that you have entered certain social circles and become a part of London society generally. This also has been an exercise which, though I am grateful to cousin Martha for the love she obviously has for you, in the end, I have known this will not satisfy the hunger for fulfillment which lies in the soul of every man and woman. Yet I judged it best to maintain my observations from a distance, and to limit my involvement on your behalf to prayer.

Now, however, I have recently become aware of your new boarding situation at the Halifax home, and at last I feel I ought to speak. There are factors concerning your friend Mr. Halifax and his mother, as well as some of their associates, which are of grave concern to me. I do not think I overstate the case to say that I consider you in no small danger in thus affiliating yourself with them in this way. I urge you most strongly to reconsider, and to seek other lodging arrangements.

I know my words may grate against your ears. I hope you will be able to look for the truth in what I say. My dear Amanda, errors and mistakes in judgment can be made. The eyes of experience are often able to perceive rocky shoals ahead more clearly than those of youth. This is a plea that you will listen to the counsel of one who cares for your well-being, and knows something of circumstances and loyalties of which you may be unaware. Please, for your good not my own, listen to my cautions.

These people you have become involved with are simply not what they seem.

You are an adult now. I urge you to stand tall and mature and to exercise sober adult judgment. Recognize that my years, my experience, and the mere fact that I am your father may indeed lend a validity to my words of greater weight than what might be your own perspective on this situation. Whatever you may still think of me for what I have done or not done, for your own sake, please heed my words.

To do this will take great humility and maturity on your part. Such is the most difficult thing a young man or young woman can face. You desire so strongly to manage your own affairs without counsel or
oversight. Yet it is a time more than any other in life when you need wise guidance. I call upon you, therefore, to approach the matter with maturity and wisdom.

No doubt you think you see all things clearly, and consider yourself strong enough not to be swayed. But I repeat, these people are not all they seem. They are more powerful than you have any idea—powerful over minds, over loyalties, even over hearts. You will be a mere pawn in their hands.

Oh, Amanda, my dear, dear daughter—I love you more than you can possibly know. You will know, as do most young people, when you have children of your own. Only then, it seems, does the depth of parental affection break in upon the mind of son or daughter. To fulfill itself, parental love seems required to extend in two generational directions at once.

Your mother and I love you, and pray for you daily. For we know that one day you will—

Amanda threw down the letter in disgust. She would not listen to another word. How dare her father insult her friends, and insult her in the process! She did not need him to preach to her.

She jumped up, face glowing in rage, and stormed from the house.

 71 
Curious Eyes

Hearing the front door slam, Mrs. Halifax entered from an adjoining room.

“Did you and Amanda have an argument?” she asked.

“No—she received a letter from her father,” Ramsay replied.

“Oh . . .”

“That was the result,” Ramsay added, nodding toward the half-crumpled sheets on the floor.

Mrs. Halifax took in the information with interest, then walked to the window where Amanda's back was still visible as she retreated with haste along the sidewalk.

“Go after her, Ramsay. She is in obvious distress.”

Ramsay left the house and followed Amanda. The instant he was gone, his mother hastened from the window, picked up the letter, and quickly began scanning it for any useful information. Her eyes slowed and absorbed the content with great care when she came to the portions which had unmistakably been written concerning her.

A very different reaction than Amanda's rose within her at the words from Sir Charles Rutherford. She could hardly be justified in feeling anger, for the words were true enough.

Her brow creased in dark reflection.

They had underestimated Rutherford. He could prove a more troublesome adversary than they had thought. Yet knowing exactly where he stood was a valuable thing to have learned, as well as just
how volatile remained the relationship with his daughter. Both pieces of information could prove useful.

Carefully she laid the two sheets back precisely as they had fallen from Amanda's hand, then retreated to her boudoir. This development warranted careful thought.

 72 
Shifting Loyalties

The next eighteen months signaled an era of slow internal change for Amanda Rutherford. The transformation in outlook came by such infinitesimal degrees, however, that Amanda herself hardly perceived the shifts that were taking place.

To have called it a period of
growth
would imply that the changes were wholesome and toward the betterment of her character. Unfortunately, it was too soon to know whether such would be the ultimate outcome of her response to those circumstances in which she found herself.

All that could be said at this point was that the mental and spiritual ground was being tilled. The fact that she had not yet resolved the foundational wrongness at the core of her own being, however, kept whatever thinking she did from yet doing her much good. She was still thinking mostly of
herself
, not the best focus for the inward eyes of one seeking maturity of character. Indeed, her reflections during these months distanced her yet further from those places the Holy Hound of heaven must chase her in the end.

Infuriated by her father's letter, rather than heed his warnings she instead did what so many foolish young persons do when confronted by unwelcome counsel—she rushed headlong toward the very dangers wiser eyes than her own were able to recognize.

As her loyalties shifted away from the Pankhursts, she now came all the more to depend on Ramsay Halifax and his mother. At the same
time, however, in her deepest heart Amanda could not quite rid her memory of the article about Ramsay. Once sown, the seed of doubt was difficult to dislodge. The tension of being pulled two ways at once was sobering, making her less apt to commit her feelings one way or the other. On the surface she tried to maintain her gaiety. But deep in her heart she began slowly to retreat into a shell of self-protection.

The mere fact that her father mentioned Cousin Martha in a favorable light, augmented by Geoffrey's hideous display at a moment of her own vulnerability, for a time prejudiced Amanda against further approach to the home of the London Rutherfords on Curzon Street. She did not visit Martha again for several months, nor reply to the numerous invitations that came for her from Cousin Gifford's wife.

Whatever guilt or pangs of conscience she may at one time have felt from such a posture toward one who had shown her such kindness, Amanda now did her best to squelch. The disillusionment of recent events steeled her heart against such feelings. Slowly a coldness became apparent if one looked deeply enough into her eyes. The onetime smile did not spring as quickly to her lips. The exuberance of the child who had once been thrilled by sight of a simple daisy and the excitement of the big city would now look upon the same sight with hardly a flutter of interest. What did daisies and dreams matter anymore . . . what did
anything
matter?

Whether she was growing it would be difficult to say. But she was certainly growing
up
. The hardness of toughened adulthood gradually could be seen in her visage. A few lines gradually etched themselves around the edges of her eyes. Whatever fragments of the innocence of her childhood that might have remained had been dashed to the ground and swept away along with the bits of porcelain on the British Museum floor.

Doubts assailed her about many things, though she kept them to herself. As yet she refused to look squarely at them and inquire what they might be trying to tell her about her values, her outlook, and where she was going in life. She only began to feel a gradual unrightness about things which she could not rationalize with the romanticism that had driven her to London in the first place.

When word of the
Titanic
's sinking reached London in mid-April, Amanda took in the dreadful news with placid expression, turned without a word, walked upstairs to her room, lay down on her bed, and inexplicably cried for the next hour. She could not even have said
why. What unknown place in her heart had been struck, she hadn't an idea. She knew not a soul aboard. No disaster had affected her so before. Now suddenly she found herself devastated, nearly unable to eat for two days.

Another shattering of innocence had intruded unbidden into her life. What was wrong with the world when such things could happen? What did her former ideals amount to in a world where the best ship in the world sunk on its maiden voyage? What was there left to depend on?

Such questions set off a chain of further reactions to the most unrelated of occurrences, causing Amanda to reflect yet the more deeply and personally on the militancy advocated by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. She had wanted to do good, to change the world. She had hated her father for not trying to do so.

Yet what good had
she
done for the past three years? Bombs were being set and houses burned down and businesses ruined and the government disrupted, all in the name of right and truth.

Right, truth
 . . . bombs and arson and destruction! It was all upside down and wrong.

Two months after the
Titanic
, Amanda read a brief notice in one of the papers about a bombing incident reportedly instigated by the W.S.P.U. in which an innocent ten-year-old boy had been blinded and lost his leg. This news was even more devastating than the sinking of the great vessel. This was close, personal. She had been part of the W.S.P.U. She had spoken on its behalf, and thrown her own share of stones.

Again Amanda sought her bed, this time sobbing for two hours.
The poor boy . . . the poor boy!
she cried to herself, over and over. Never in all her life had Amanda Rutherford felt such feelings as on that day. She felt as if she herself had ignited the fuse.

As she lay weeping, the image came back to her of Rune Blakeley's drunken cruelty to his son Stirling that day so many years before in Milverscombe. The vision was followed by shouts of her own voice, lashing out at her mother in cruel accusation. It still made her angry knowing her parents cared nothing for poor Stirling. What good were money and title if you didn't use them? She had been so furious that her mother would do nothing. Yet now the very cause in which she had been involved had
created
even greater suffering in the life of another innocent boy.

How could her own ideals have slipped so far? She had been part of
causing
the very thing she once had hated. She came to London to change the world—what had the city made of her? What kind of way was
this
to help anyone?

When Amanda rose from her bed that afternoon and at last dried her tears, the cold pessimism had penetrated yet deeper. The idealism that had brought her to London was dead. And no more fertile soil than disillusionment exists in which can grow new loyalties, allegiances, and perspectives.

Aware of the tensions and doubts within their houseguest, Mrs. Halifax shrewdly planted subtle seed after subtle seed, to grow and bear fruit in their due season. Amanda never recognized them as such—a stray remark at breakfast, a chance comment to Mrs. Thorndike, which their hostess was careful that Amanda should overhear, certain periodicals and papers left open for Amanda to stumble upon.

Amanda never realized the imperceptible ways in which her former desire to change the world, leavened by disillusionment, now slowly shifted in socialist directions. As she continued to express doubts and frustrations, her points of view and ways of looking at things were skillfully manipulated without her slightest awareness. At the very center of this process continued to sit the division with her parents, which Mrs. Halifax was only too happy to exploit along with the rest. For no disillusionment is so powerful as that in the forming of alternate loyalties, and in making attractive the kinds of new ideas to which Amanda was now exposed. Doubt sows its seeds, mistrust provides the sun, disillusionment sends its rains, and thus do many spiritual weeds flourish in the fertile soil of a discontented soul.

The first time she overheard Amanda speak of the Halifax house as her
home
, Ramsay's mother quietly smiled to herself.

The girl was nearly turned, she thought. All that was left now was for Amanda to begin calling her
Mum
.