There were certain, quite trivial, little things, nevertheless, which Lily felt that her aunt would despise in her, and the compulsion under which she thought herself to conceal these kept alive in her the old guilty feeling that she was not really like other people and was only pretending to be grown up.
She would rather have been detected by Miss Stellenthorpe in a forgery, than in the infantile practice of eating sweets, so insistent was her certainty that Aunt Clo would be far less contemptuous of the former predilection than of the latter.
Yet they had never discussed the matter, although Aunt Clo, in the midst of reminiscences of a day spent in Paris in company of a wealthy American friend, once said, in her emphatically descriptive style:
"He was so full of petits soins intimes, dear person! There we were in one of those enormous glittering pâtisseries shops, and I couldn't prevent him from loading me with great boxes of pâtes de guimauve, and huge Easter eggs of pink crystallized sugar ... and all the while there was the most heavenly riot of scent and colour in a flower-shop next door. If only one could have exchanged all the bonbons for one single bunch of violets!"
Aunt Clo heaved a sigh of retrospective regret, and not for the world would Lily have owned to her own degraded preference for pâtes de guimauve and pink crystallized sugar above all the bunches of violets that Parma could produce.
Lily reflected impatiently that when she was a child it had been naughty to want sweets, and now that she was grown up, it would be childish. It seemed that there was no time of life at which such a desire could ever be laid claim to honourably. As for Aunt Clo, she often seemed to be quite unaware that such a thing as food existed.
When they went for expeditions, and visited Roman churches and museums, Lily was greatly ashamed of the undoubted fact that her enjoyment was constantly haunted by the fear that Aunt Clo, towards twelve o'clock, would exclaim in a breezy manner:
"Il Palatino, now, my Lily! Shall we take a base advantage of the Germans and Americans, who will all be flocking in search of food, and have the glory of the place to ourselves?"
And Aunt Clo would spring vigorously up the steepest paths, under the hottest sun, and very likely remember nothing more about luncheon at all until it was time to take the tram to the station for their train, when she might observe with one of her most negligent gestures:
"Have we eaten? I forget! But qu'importe, in the midst of this—and this—and this!"
Once they even missed the train that should at least have returned them to Genazzano in time for tea, because Aunt Clo leaped out of the tram just before the station was reached, at the sudden realization that Lily had never been inside the Church of Sta. Maria degli Angeli.
Impervious alike to hunger, thirst, and fatigue, she remained on her feet for nearly an hour in the dim, cool church, pointing out in an impassioned undertone the reasons why certain frescoes were to be admired, and shuddering away from others to which the chief drawback appeared to be that all tourists always looked at them first.
Aunt Clo's knowledge of Art in all its branches seemed to be almost illimitable, and she gave Lily a copy of a thin book of her own, that bore upon the title-page: "Beauty: a Finger-post. By Clotilde Stellenthorpe. Privately printed."
The Finger-post pointed to the great necessity for surrounding oneself with Spaces, and Silences, and occasional Splashes—of light or colour, or sound—and also indicated deleterious features in many hitherto accepted standards. It rather inclined to leave the reader with the impression that Beauty, as a whole, had received a thorough revision at the hands of the author of the book, and would henceforth be found to be within the range of the book's appreciators. There was an underlying suggestion that those outside this circle had not yet reached the stage of development at which Beauty could be of any advantage to them.
Nowadays, Aunt Clo no longer wrote about Beauty. She told Lily that she tried to live it, instead. Everything in the tiny house at Genazzano had been chosen for the sake of either form or colour, and the little bronze mirror that hung, sloping, over Miss Stellenthorpe's writing-table possessed a further qualification.
"I like to go through life le sourire aux lèvres," said Aunt Clo, markedly accentuating the habitual pleasantness of her expression as she spoke. "It is pleasing, refreshing—to look up and meet a smile. What will you, if it happens to be one's own?"
Aunt Clo laughed outright at her own quaint fancy. "When I raise my head from my writing, I see reflected in my little mirror a pair of steady eyes, a face that holds the lines graven by many experiences, some grave, some gay, and a smile—I hope a strong, steadfast, humorous smile. Time was, my Lily, when the face that I saw in the mirror was that of a tragic muse. Thank God, the phase has passed!"
Aunt Clo not infrequently threw out similar sombre indications that her past had held some deep, unspecified cause for woe.
She was very kind to Lily, although frequently deploring in her the traces of her upbringing.
"You must learn to say Yes to Life!" she cried ringingly from time to time, her hand upon her niece's shoulder, her handsome head tilted backwards. "You know your Nietzsche?"
Lily shook her head, feeling much abashed and conscious that Aunt Clo thought her very young indeed.
"Courage!" said Miss Stellenthorpe. "Ah, jeunesse, jeunesse!"
Lily reflected quite irritably that Aunt Clo might just as well have said: "Youth, youth!" and have done with it.
IX
"To-day—I give battle!"
Aunt Clo's voice sounded as though the prospect filled her with mingled elation and concern.
"Can you amuse yourself, my Lily, if I leave you for the day? Books—piano—flowers—birds——" Aunt Clo enumerated the resources of her establishment with large and expressive wavings of her well-shaped hands over the breakfast-table.
"I can write some letters, and you have lent me so many books. I shall have plenty to do."
"Benissimo!"
"Shall you be away all day?" said Lily tentatively. She had already learnt that Miss Stellenthorpe rather welcomed enquiries on subjects of which the importance apparently required an extreme reticence of reply.
A shade of gravity at once fell across her face. "Ah! who can tell? If the mission is to be successful, a day is not too long ... but I am very much afraid. Not fearful, you understand, cara, but—let me say—aware of responsibility—immense responsibility."
Lily felt that she, too, must look serious, in sympathy, and regretfully realized that Aunt Clo was about to rise abstractedly from the table, although her niece greatly desired another breakfast roll. Sometimes, interested in discussion, Aunt Clo would sit over a meal interminably, her elbows on the table, her hands supporting her keen, handsome face. At others, she would rise impatiently, flinging her napkin to the ground, and appearing regardless of the incompleteness of her niece's meal.
Lily had never yet found the necessary courage to remain in her place and continue stolidly to eat. Aunt Clo had a curious faculty for throwing into relief the grossness of material needs.
She now stood at the open window and addressed Lily slowly and sadly.
"Little one, do you know what it is to see a frail, foolish, lovely butterfly dashing itself against a lighted globe? To seek desperately to turn it elsewhere, to set it free into the cool, dark night outside—and yet to see it return again and again in search of its own destruction?"
Lily nodded. She always found it difficult to reply adequately in words when Aunt Clo became, as she often did, metaphorical.
"I go," said Miss Stellenthorpe, her hands extended, palms uppermost, "I go to try and deliver the butterfly from the lamp to-day. I can tell you no more, my Lily."
She left the house with the same mixture of portentous foreboding and exhilaration in her bearing, saying to Lily in farewell, as though her new simile still pleased her:
"Who knows but that I myself may come back with singed wings! Not for nothing has one the privilege of spending oneself upon others!"
"I hope it will be all right," said Lily—inadequately, she felt, as usual.
Aunt Clo also appeared to be conscious of the inadequacy, for she replied very gravely indeed:
"Ah! That is what it can never be. Addio!" She waved her hand above her head and strode away, clad in the blue jersey and the knickerbockers which she never discarded in the day-time, except when proceeding on a sight-seeing expedition to Rome.
Lily turned back into the house, and felt rather guilty because she was relieved by the prospect of spending a whole day in solitude, free from the slight tension of spirit that always assailed her in the lofty atmosphere wherein Aunt Clo seemed usually to exist. She felt still more guilty a little later on, when she went in search of a book.
Aunt Clo had recommended several volumes to her niece from the many, bearing the stamp of the London Library, that lay about the house.
"Pater," had said Aunt Clo. "Incredible that you have not yet made acquaintance with the beloved Pater! Or Fénelon. Do you know Fénelon? Then there is the little 'Cinque-cento' series—light, of course, but full of appeal. Or you may care for old friends, perhaps—I have Froissard, Ruskin, d'Annunzio—but not in a translation, I fear. Take your choice, bambina mia—I make you free of all my most precious companions."
Lily tried hard not to remember Aunt Clo's generous suggestions as she made her way to a small and remote bookcase that she had observed, on the first evening of her arrival at Genazzano, in a corner of the passage. The books were small and old-fashioned looking, and Lily had had no difficulty in discovering that almost all were children's books, that no doubt dated from Aunt Clo's incredible childhood. And Lily liked children's books, just as she liked toys, and sweets, and other babyish diversions, and she was just as profoundly ashamed of the one predilection as of the other.
She had read the volumes pressed upon her by Aunt Clo, and had liked one or two of them, whilst finding the majority strangely wearisome, but all the time there had lurked at the back of her mind a longing recollection of those children's books that were never taken from the shelf.
She knew that she would really enjoy them much more than even the novels conceded to her youthful tastes by Aunt Clo: "Jude the Obscure," "Daisy Miller," and "Sandra Belloni," none of which she had felt herself able to appreciate, or even to understand.
It was all part of that old sense that she was not a real, live person at all, but only a little girl pretending.
The relief of dropping the pretence was undeniable. Lily chose "The Little Duke" because it had pictures, a book called "The Magic Beads" because she liked the name, and a volume of fairy-tales because she always loved fairy-tales. She took them out into the garden.
She was a little bit ashamed of herself, because she felt so happy, knowing that it was childish pleasure in the story-books, and the sunniness of the day and her own feeling of freedom, that made her happy.
She had so often been told that happiness is the attribute of youth that she believed it, although she herself was young and not particularly happy. And as she had also heard youth spoken of contemptuously, or else with amused patronage, Lily had retained an impression that happiness was something slightly to be despised, especially when springing from trivial causes.
She had lunch by herself and kept "The Magic Beads" propped open on the table in front of her, and ate several more of the enormous purple figs than she would have eaten had Aunt Clo, with her superhuman indifference to food, been sitting, very erect and animated, opposite to her.
The afternoon was even lazier and more blissful than the morning had been, the joy of it somehow enhanced as it became more liable to interruption. But Miss Stellenthorpe had not returned by five o'clock. Evidently the butterfly was showing determination, in its pursuit of the flame.
It was nearly six o'clock when Lily heard sounds that caused her to bestow the three small and shabby volumes into her work-bag, which she had guiltily extracted from disuse from the bottom of her trunk for the purpose, and hasten to the little iron gate in welcome.
Aunt Clotilde was not alone, and she looked, if possible, even more exhilarated than she usually looked after some particularly strenuous exertion.
"Ecco! I return with a friend, my Lily!"
Was this the butterfly, or the lamp?
Lily at once rejected the former hypothesis, and felt doubtful even of the latter, as she exchanged greetings with Aunt Clo's friend.
He was a very tall Englishman, in whose long face Lily discovered some freakish resemblance to a good-looking camel, and he had small, tawny eyes that twinkled, and very crisp curly hair, touched with iron-grey. His shoulders were so broad and his carriage so erect that even Aunt Clo seemed unimposing beside him.
Lily did not learn his name at once, since Miss Stellenthorpe had merely waved their introduction with both hands, and since throughout the evening she called the visitor either "Amico," "my very dear Friend," or "Mon cher."
It appeared that Aunt Clo's very dear friend was serving on a Royal Commission for the investigation of something unspecified, that compelled him to sojourn in Rome, now a hot and arid desert.
"But della Torre, you know the young Marchese della Torre, of course? Well, he is actually kind enough to stay on in a corner of the Palazzo della Torre, and make me his guest. What a good fellow he is—I met him once or twice in England, that's all—and now he turns up trumps like this! Isn't he a brick?"
The hearty English colloquialisms positively rang through the little room still vibrant with the cosmopolitan inversions and polished elegancies of Aunt Clo's habitual speech. Aunt Clo, however, was more animated than ever, and commented vivaciously several times upon the good fortune that had brought about the encounter with her friend.
"Would that I could offer you the hospitality of mon toit de chaumière, amico! But alas! even my grey hairs would not protect me from the tongues of ce bon Genazzano. I dare not do it," cried Aunt Clo in humorous despair. "But we meet again, is it not so?"
"I hope so! I should hope so indeed. Won't you and your niece come in one morning, and let us do some sight-seeing together, and then perhaps you will allow me to have the pleasure of giving you lunch at the Grand Hotel?"
He addressed himself to Miss Stellenthorpe, but after her gracious and sprightly acceptance of the invitation, the Englishman's kindly, twinkling gaze turned triumphantly to Lily.
She smiled at him shyly and almost involuntarily, attracted by his eagerness and simplicity, and perhaps by the manifest admiration in his glance. "Why not to-morrow?" he cried. "Do come in to-morrow. What could we go and look at to-morrow?"
"Why not San Pietro?" said Aunt Clo.
"As a matter of fact, I've been there already," said the guest with great simplicity. "But by all means——"
"Amico," said Aunt Clo, with some severity in her voice, "you do not see San Pietro in one visit—nor yet in two, nor perhaps two hundred. Je vous donne rendezvous at the Bronze Door at eleven to-morrow morning. Va bene?"
Lily looked forward to the proposed excursion and hoped that the Marchese would be as agreeable as was his friend.
She learnt from Aunt Clo that the name of the latter was Nicholas Aubray, that she had met him first in Paris, several years ago, and had then personally demonstrated to him the beauties of the Louvre.
"Not altogether a Philistine," said Aunt Clo thoughtfully. "There are possibilities there, my Lily; undoubtedly, possibilities. Ce bon Nicholas! I wonder what he finds in common with Giulio della Torre!"
Lily wondered too, when she met the Marchese della Torre on the following morning. He looked much younger than did Mr. Aubray, was extremely good-looking in an elegant pink-and-bronze style, and was meticulously clad in a beautifully-cut grey suit, with a soft shirt, a pink tie, pink socks, and shining brown boots. Miss Stellenthorpe's acquaintance with him was slight, she had told her niece, but she addressed him as della Torre, in Continental fashion, and extended the back of her hand for him to kiss. The Marchese also kissed Lily's hand, and she fancied that she saw amusement lurking in Nicholas Aubray's long, lean face.
She had expected that Aunt Clo, as usual, would live up to her rôle of connaisseuse in Beauty, and would deliver eloquent and pungently-worded dissertations upon the more eclectic subjects for admiration that surrounded them.
But it speedily became astoundingly evident that Aunt Clo's erudition was out-matched. Lily and Mr. Aubray, obediently waiting to be told what they might admire, found themselves overlooked in the clash of conflicting authorities. The Marchese gracefully countered all Miss Stellenthorpe's artistic and historical allusions with others even more recondite, and appeared to have command of ejaculatory phrases in at least six languages to her three.
"Michelangelo—il maestro!" said Aunt Clo reverently, gazing up at the dome.
"You forget Bramante!" cried the Marchese in tones of courteous anguish. "Aïe! you forget Bramante!"
"Most certainly I do not forget Bramante," said Aunt Clo with dignified annoyance. "But I put the Maestro first."
The Marchese bowed with a gesture that far outdid, in its appreciative humility, the tone of Aunt Clo's tribute, through which an undeniable asperity had pierced.
"E le due San Gallo?" murmured the Marchese.
"Penuzzi!" Aunt Clo retorted with flashing eyes.
"Rosellino," said the Marchese politely, but securing the last word, since Miss Stellenthorpe had nothing ready with which to defeat the recollection of Rosellino.
"Your aunt is a wonderful person," said Nicholas Aubray in lowered tones to Lily. "She knows everything about Art, I suppose?"
"Yes, I suppose she does."
"She and della Torre must revel in one another's company. He's a most artistic fellow, very well read and full of information. I knew they'd have a lot in common."
At the triumph in his tone, Lily turned to look at him. He was evidently not in the least ironical, but full of genuine pride and satisfaction at an encounter which he obviously accepted entirely at its face value.
Lily felt momentarily ashamed of her own secret inclination to detect a concealed and embittered resentment at the other's pretensions on the part of either of the two exponents of Art.
She was half puzzled and half attracted by that characteristic simplicity of Nicholas Aubray's, that, to her more critical perceptions, was later on to account for his curiously limited capacity to judge correctly of his fellow-creatures, and that so oddly counteracted his unmistakable shrewdness of mind.
She found in him a very sympathetic companion, as they wandered together round the interior of the immense building, leaving behind them fragmentary echoes of the sprightly Spanish proverbs with which the Marchese appeared to be countering Aunt Clo's interpolated French exclamations and Latin quotations.
There was a feeling of relaxation in freely pointing out certain obvious glories and universally acknowledged masterpieces, such as Aunt Clo regarded as only to be commented upon by the general public, and Lily felt it to be even more of a relief when Mr. Aubray calmly suggested, at the end of half an hour, that they should go outside and wait for the others.
"You'll get tired, if you stand about for so long in the heat," he observed matter-of-factly, and with a consideration to which she had, at Genazzano, become unused.
They sat down outside in the shade, and instead of abstract and impassioned discourse upon all that Beauty stood for, Lily found herself embarked upon such trivial and comfortable personalities as she could not help welcoming, after the long course of unbroken conversational altitudes upon which her hostess habitually promenaded her.
Nicholas Aubray actually seemed to think that anything about herself was interesting!
She told him about her home and about Bridgecrap, and he laughed whole-heartedly when she confessed that she was no good at games, and seemed to think it of so little account that Lily was encouraged to make a daring confession.
"Sometimes I read children's books—just because I enjoy them. It makes me feel as though I was only pretending to be grown up, you know."
"Oh, you splendid person! I think that's simply ripping!"
"You don't think I ought to be ashamed of it?" cried Lily, delightedly conscious that he did not.
"Good heavens, no! I think it's splendid. Why shouldn't you like children's books? I read fairy-tales myself and enjoy them immensely."
"Do you really?" Lily was enchanted.
"Tell me some more about yourself," begged Nicholas Aubray warmly, and Lily was young enough to respond candidly to the invitation.
"We must make some more of these expeditions," was the conclusion reached by Mr. Aubray, when he and Lily had spent an hour in eager conversation eminently satisfactory to them both.
"I was a good deal bored at having to stay on and on here, excellent fellow though della Torre is, but this meeting with you and your aunt has made all the difference in the world. You'll come with me again, won't you?"
"Oh, I should love to!"
"Hurrah!" He looked quite boyishly delighted, and flung his hat into the air and caught it again.
"Now what about lunch? Food—food! I'm starving!"
He reiterated the announcement with the same unabashed exuberance to Aunt Clo herself, having returned into the Cathedral, to Lily's rather awed astonishment, for the express purpose of summoning her away.
"Come along, come along. We want our meal!"
He was just as vehemently enthusiastic about their excellent and prolonged luncheon at the Grand Hotel as he had been about St. Peter's or in denunciation of Lily's deprecatory confessions of her athletic short-comings.
Aunt Clo's own vitality, to the strength of which she often made carelessly thankful allusion, was as nothing beside that of Nicholas Aubray.
But to-day, Aunt Clo appeared to have fallen rather below her usual standards of high-spirited graciousness and gallantry of intellect.
She even said "Ay di me!" in a rather wearied fashion as she sank into a chair.
"I'm afraid you are quite tired out," solicitously said the Marchese, in his fluent English idiom.
"I am not easily wearied of body," returned Miss Stellenthorpe, smiling sombrely.
"Food—that's what we all want!" Nicholas Aubray declared. "I may not always be hungry, but thank God I'm greedy, as the man said in Punch."
He laughed heartily at the hackneyed jest, and Lily noted with a slight feeling of disappointment that his laugh was perhaps the least attractive thing about him. It came too frequently, although always spontaneously, and was what the French call saccadé in character. Moreover, his laughter at his own indifferent humour, rooted more often in light-heartedness than in wit, was over-prolonged.
An adjournment for rest at the Palazzo della Torre was politely suggested by the Marchese, and Lily rather hoped that the invitation might be accepted, but Miss Stellenthorpe again gravely repudiated any suggestion of fatigue.
"But you make the siesta, surely?" cried the Marchese, astonished.
"Never," said Aunt Clo austerely.
The stately proclamation of her own immunity from the prevalent custom of an afternoon sleep during the hot weather, appeared somehow to restore to Aunt Clo her usual equanimity.
She bade an agreeable farewell to the two men, by whom an expedition to Frascati was proposed for the following week.
"We'll make a picnic of it," cried Nicholas Aubray joyously. "Take plenty of sandwiches and things, and eat them under the trees."
But even Nicholas Aubray's needless insistence upon the grosser aspects of the day's requirements did not, as Lily half feared, cause Miss Stellenthorpe to flinch.
"I'm glad," said she graciously that evening at Genazzano, "very glad to do all in my power pour égayer un peu les choses for Nicholas Aubray. Tell me, my Lily, how did our friend strike you?"
"I liked him very much."
"Liked!" Aunt Clo shrugged away the conventional phrase in her most characteristic fashion.
"How significant that contrast was, n'est-ce pas? The frankly bourgeois enthusiasm of our friend—his naif admiration for the obvious—and then that affectation of preciseness, that pedantic effrontery of young della Torre! It amused me, Lily—it amused me greatly."
Aunt Clo's mouth took on an embittered curve at the recollection.
"Let me recommend you to cultivate that young man rather more, bambina, when next our quartette sallies forth in company. He repays study, I assure you. Besides," added Aunt Clo with some acidity of tone, "I will not conceal from you that a whole day spent in listening to so much youthful arrogance would try my nerves considerably. He is your contemporary, my Lily. I shall leave you to deal with him."
Lily felt vaguely sorry to hear it.
"He is much younger than Mr. Aubray, isn't he?" she asked.
"By at least ten years, I should imagine," said her aunt emphatically. "Nicholas Aubray must be nearing forty. But the heart of a boy still. Ce cher Nicholas! He should have married, as I have often told him. Now della Torre, who could well learn rather more of life in the wider, bigger sense of the word, is actually in search of a wife, as I know. But fools have ever rushed in——"
Aunt Clo ended with raised eyebrows and a sigh, leaving no doubt, in Lily's mind, that her own destined rôle in the Frascati expedition was that of recipient of the Marchese's polished conversation.
Perhaps her efforts were not sufficiently decided.
Perhaps Nicholas Aubray, with a certain joyful obtuseness that he was disconcertingly apt to display when dealing with the human equation, still triumphantly furthered the intercourse of the two fine spirits between whom he had elected to find so rare an affinity. Perhaps, as Lily herself suspected, the Marchese liked a youthful and ignorant hearer less well than one with whom discussion was at least possible, even if unprofitable. At all events, he explained Frascati to Miss Stellenthorpe, and twice informed her that she had been misinformed regarding the remote ancestry of the family of Aldobrandini, while Lily and Nicholas Aubray loitered beneath the trees, and Nicholas told Lily that he lived by himself in London and was often very lonely.
"But to you, I suppose, I seem almost old. Too old to want new friends?" he asked her with a wistful air of desiring contradiction, and at the same time throwing out his broad chest and straightening his always straight shoulders with obviously unconscious vanity.
Lily remembered her father. He was over fifty, and she certainly did not look upon him as being old, if only because she knew that he would have regarded the application of such an adjective from a child to a parent as being both disrespectful and disloyal.
Nicholas Aubray was at least twelve years younger than Philip Stellenthorpe.
She reassured him whole-heartedly and was gratified at the satisfaction in his face, which he displayed with the frankness of a child.
"I thought you and I would be pals, somehow, from the first moment we met. Don't you think it's a great thing to have a pal?"
Lily felt herself to be unreasonable for intensely disliking the word that he had selected.
"That's a word I like—pal!" said Nicholas Aubray, striking one hand into the palm of the other. "Isn't it a splendid, hearty sort of word? That's what I should really like us to be—regular pals."
There was silence between them for the fraction of a moment, and then he added wistfully: "You don't think it's cheek of me to suggest it—you don't think it's absurd, at my age?"
On the instant, his odd, intermittent appeal made itself acutely felt once more.
"I should like it," said Lily, flushing. "I—I think it's an honour for me."
"No, no—it's all the other way round. What a splendid thing life is! Don't you think it's splendid, on a day like this, when one's just struck a bargain like ours? Real pals—that's what you and I are going to be. I can't tell you how much it's going to mean to me. Of course, you've got heaps of friends of your own age already I suppose. Perhaps there's even——"
He paused.
"I haven't any business to ask, I suppose. But since we're to be pals, you won't mind. You know I'm not asking from impertinent curiosity, but from very keen interest in anything that belongs to you." His voice had become very serious.
"Tell me whether there's anybody very special, that you take a—a great interest in, won't you?"
"No, there isn't," said Lily in a low voice. She did not feel humiliated by the unromantic admission, because she was acutely aware that it would somehow intensely gratify her listener.
She heard him exhale a long breath.
"Do you know that's a relief to me! I was somehow certain you were going to say that there was some young spark—and somehow I didn't want there to be."
He burst out laughing.
"There's no fool like an old fool, is there? I want my new-found little pal to myself, you know. I don't want to share her thoughts with some young blood at Oxford or God knows where——"
He went on laughing, in catches, long after Lily felt that her own faint smile had died upon her lips.
X
Lily thought a good deal about her friendship with Nicholas Aubray.
Sometimes she rejoiced almost incredulously in his flashes of sympathetic understanding, and in the frank enjoyment of child-like things that he, unlike her, never thought it necessary to conceal. Sometimes she applied to herself the old term of "disloyal," because an involuntary criticism of his simple vanity, or of his curiously unequal powers of judgment, occasionally flashed across her.
She was flattered and touched by his enthusiastic liking for herself, and presently she began to wonder, rather awestruck, whether he could have fallen in love with her.
When she suddenly found him looking at her in silence with eager, pleading eyes, or when he said: "We'll let the others go on a bit, let's walk slowly," she was reminded of the boy Colin Eastwood, and she then thought that perhaps Nicholas Aubray loved her. When Aunt Clo said, in her thoughtful, appraising way: "My very good friend, Nicholas, is accounted an able man in his own line. He has made a success of his career—oh, undoubtedly!" then Lily felt that only an incredible presumption could ever have led her to imagine that so clever a man and one so much her senior, could ever have thought of her save with the most passing, friendly interest.
His susceptibility to beauty was very evident, and he made it clear that he admired Lily's.
That, of course, was not at all the same thing as falling in love, Lily told herself.
She speculated a great deal more upon the state of Nicholas Aubray's feelings, than upon her own. One of the more solemn counsels which Lily had received from Miss Melody upon leaving Bridgecrap, had concerned the question of falling in love.
"Not too many romantic fancies in that little head, childie," had been Miss Melody's warning. "Remember that you've no mother to guide you, poor child, and keep a watch upon yourself. Not too much novel-reading—aha, Lily, isn't that a weakness?—and no day-dreaming, mind."
Lily had been quite as much annoyed at hearing herself called romantic as the romantic usually are.
"If love should come—as I hope it will, in due course—let it all come quite naturally. Don't think about it beforehand; don't indulge in fancies. Beware of that romantic imagination," Miss Melody had repeated with great significance.
Lily had listened very dutifully, but if she had ever analyzed this submissive spirit, she might have discovered that it was founded upon a curious, calm certainty that Miss Melody knew nothing whatever of what she talked about.
Not that the daughter of Philip and Eleanor Stellenthorpe, well versed in distrusting and suppressing her own instincts, would have made such an admission to herself. She was undeveloped, and had never been allowed the luxury of intellectual honesty.
She had, as yet, arrived at no conscious weighing of her own capacities. Her nearest approach to it took the form of an inward and rather derisive wonder that Miss Melody, who so advocated forethought and preparation in respect of examinations, choice of a career, and the like, should appear to suppose that something which Lily classified to herself as "the most important thing in the world" could be best approached after a course of completely ignoring its existence and tacitly denying its potency.
In defiance of Miss Melody, Lily allowed herself to wonder whether Nicholas meant to ask her to marry him. Her upbringing and her inexperience alike admitted of no other development of affairs than a proposal of marriage, to result in either a refusal and eternal separation, or an acceptance and subsequent wedding.
She saw Nicholas Aubray almost daily.
Lily felt flattered and excited, but her now ingrained incapacity for facing an issue definitely, allowed her to keep entirely upon the surface of even her own thoughts, and when she was seized by a misgiving that she felt no slightest real wish ever to marry Nicholas Aubray, she hastily rebuked herself for the vanity of supposing that he had any intention of asking her to do so, thus suppressing her consciousness of the problem in relative values that confronted her.
It was that policy of suppression upon which her whole education had been based.
Presently Lily became aware that Miss Stellenthorpe was turning a thoughtful and critical eye upon the situation.
Her manner to her niece acquired both a more weighty tenderness, and a slightly humorous air of appraisement.
She tolerated the Marchese della Torre with renewed geniality, and only upon one occasion relegated him to a lengthy tête-à-tête walk with Lily whilst she herself strode far ahead, apparently absorbed in earnest conversation with Nicholas Aubray.
It was on that evening that Aunt Clo, for the first time, spoke with great frankness and intimacy of herself and her own past to Lily.
"You have wondered, little one, why I have never chosen to marry, have you not?" she abruptly demanded, gazing shrewdly at her niece.
Fortunately, Lily felt, the shrewdness was not sufficient to penetrate her own embarrassment and pierce to the true answer of that portentous question.
Lily had always supposed, on the rare occasions when she had given the matter a thought, that Aunt Clo must have remained unmarried because nobody had ever wanted to marry her.
It now became almost overwhelmingly evident that such had not been the case.
"Why should I not say it? I have been greatly desired, and by many. Perhaps, bambina, it may help you, if I let you in where so few have ever yet penetrated—into the story of my heart. As a girl I was, perhaps, not beautiful," Miss Stellenthorpe musingly observed without, however, any great conviction in her tone. "Certainly I had not the exquisite daintiness, the porcelain prettiness, that I see in you, my Lily. But I was a strong, vital, passionate creature, and intensely magnetic—that, above all. Had I a daughter possessed of that magnetism, she should be guarded—most carefully guarded. The gift is not one to be played with. I suppose I was reckless. Chi lo sa? Ah well, the years have brought their own chastening, maybe. Oh, not in my proud, solitary virginity—that has been my own choice."
Aunt Clo upreared her head in a sudden, high-souled gesture.
"No. But—ay di me! How I have been loved! And I—I, in my turn have loved, carina. Once—and once only. I cannot tell you the whole story, little one. Some day, perhaps, when you, too, have lived and loved—though may you never touch the depths that I have plumbed! I had rejected many loves—lesser loves, as they seemed to me. Then came one—there is only one, in a woman's life. Our souls rushed together—une veritable fusion d'âmes. There was one summer——"
Aunt Clo became lost in retrospect, her fine eyes fixed upon some point of the horizon far above Lily's head.
When she spoke again, her voice had flattened dramatically.
"Autumn succeeds to summer, carina, and the deep-hearted, passionate red roses drop their petals one by one.... A cataclysm swept across my life. There was storm—separation, interference from others. I was doubly betrayed. There was a woman who had been my dear, dear friend, in whom I had trusted much. And she failed me, Lily. When the crisis came, she was incapable of meeting the demands that the privilege of friendship must always make, sooner or later. Ah yes—she failed me indeed!"
"Was she—one of the people who interfered?" Lily half fearfully enquired, as Miss Stellenthorpe paused as though for enquiry.
"Indeed, yes! She was ruthless—ruthless to me, and to that other...."
"But did he—how could he let her...?" stammered Lily.
"Ah how! But—," said Miss Stellenthorpe sombrely, "she was his wife."
No revelation could have come with greater unexpectedness upon her breathless listener.
"Oh! Was he married, Aunt Clo?"
Aunt Clo bent a terrible brow upon Lily at the naïve colloquialism of the exclamation.
"Bound by our hideous English laws, he was," she said slowly. "But there are other, higher standards. He and I knew it—we had scaled the mountain-heights—but the little, feeble soul that had called herself my friend remained below, weakly wailing. The little soul that had only strength to hold on, like some small, sharp-toothed rodent! It held on—grasping the shadow between its tiny, poisoned fangs, when it could no longer hold the substance."
Aunt Clo passed a hand slowly across her eyes, as though to banish the vision of so perverted a tenacity.
Then she turned upon Lily a smile of rare, considered sweetness, blended with great sadness. "I have forgiven—long, long ago. One can outlive such bitterness, my Lily, and come out from the vortex stronger, and bigger and braver."
Lily felt a mad desire to enquire whether the unfortunate rodent of Aunt Clo's history had also emerged from it similarly uplifted.
"There was a time," said Aunt Clo, "when I asked myself despairingly—'Does the road wind up-hill all the way?' You know the answer, child. 'Yes—to the very end.' I have accepted that answer now. Acceptance has long ago become part of myself. Not the pallid, passive acceptance of submission, you understand, but some bright, strong, vital thing that soars upwards like a flame——"
Aunt Clo paused again, and her niece kept silence.
"You mustn't call me brave, little one," Miss Stellenthorpe suddenly protested, when both had remained speechless for some while.
Lily showed no sign of defying the prohibition. Her aunt stood up.
"I will leave you. It grows late, and this has cost me something. But don't reproach yourself, bambina—if I can help you but a very little, be sure that I shall never count the cost."
Aunt Clo crossed the room slowly, with an unwonted gesture of supporting herself, as she reached a low table near the door and leant her hand upon it heavily.
She glanced back at Lily, and there was again a slight suggestion of baffled expectancy on her face.
"Buona notte, my child."
With a grave and graceful movement she kissed the tip of her slim, fine fingers and waved them in the direction of her niece.
Then she appeared to detect suddenly the presence of her other hand, still grasping the little table, and drew it away with an air of surprised melancholy.
"Aha!" said Aunt Clo, half playfully, half sadly. "That is the first time, is it not, that you have seen me in need of extraneous support? That is not like me."
She slowly nodded, two or three times, as though considering so new an aspect of herself, and then drew herself up to her full, stately height as she left the room. Lily felt that she herself had been somehow found remiss.
Comment, at least, had been expected of her, and she had been utterly unable to offer any.
She wondered uneasily if it were the measure of her own childishness, that Aunt Clo's story should merely have left her feeling uncomfortably bewildered, and anxiously conscious that her father would have been sincerely shocked by it.
Lily speculated as to what she should do if Nicholas Aubray were suddenly to discover himself as a married man. She indulged in an agreeable vision of his impassionate declaration, her own heart-broken renunciation of him, and their eternal farewell. After a long, long illness she would face life once more—her hair would be prematurely whitened. She, too, would tell some young, untried soul the story of her own experience....
Lily had formulated one or two very beautiful sentences when she became aware that she was thoroughly enjoying herself. The discovery scandalized her sincerely.
These things were serious—they constituted reality, and here she was playing a kind of game with them!
Lily felt profoundly dissatisfied with herself and her own inability to regard as sacred the many things that her upbringing had taught her should be classified under that traditional heading of Philip's. It bewildered her to find that Nicholas himself, although his ardour touched and pleased her in a strange, exciting way, did not awaken in her any of the emotions that she had always associated with the dawn of love.
There was not even the vague, elusive sense of remote and delicate romance that Colin Eastwood had inspired.
But Philip had implied that episode to have been an undignified and childish cheapening of herself—something that, in the belittling phrase of omniscient parenthood, "could not lead to anything," and Lily herself, translating into the cruder and more direct terms of youth, had known that, between her and Colin, there could be nothing so matured and definite as a spoken engagement with definite prospects of marriage.
Consequently, her relations with Colin must have been unreal—those with Nicholas must be real. Thus Lily, faithfully endeavouring to follow the careful rule of thumb laid down for her, and unutterably perplexed at finding it so much at variance with that inner vision to which she believed herself to have no right.
Daughter of Philip and Eleanor Stellenthorpe, and product of their teaching, she found the way of least resistance in allowing herself to shelve the whole question, telling herself that it would certainly be mere folly and vanity to envisage prematurely the possibilities latent in a decision which she might never be called upon to make.
The issues at stake were consequently left to obscure themselves still further while Lily strove to persuade herself of their non-existence, and while the necessity for that decision which she was strenuously unfitting herself to make coherently came nearer to her every day.
The weather had grown crisp and cool long before Nicholas Aubray's affairs in Rome were concluded, and he came out to the villa at Genazzano to announce his approaching return to England.
"I shall be very, very sorry to go," he said emotionally. "If anyone had told me, when I first grumbled at coming to Italy, that six weeks later I should actually want to stay on—I shouldn't have believed it."
He looked at Lily as he spoke.
"Aha!" quoth Aunt Clo. "Italy claims us all. I—but I was long ago enslaved, as you perceive. You will return, my friend."
"I hope so. But good-byes are always sad things, I think. One is always sorry, I mean, to say good-bye to a place in which one has been happy." He was again addressing himself to Lily, surprising her, as he occasionally did, by the earnest warmth with which he could deliver himself of a platitude. She hoped that he did not see Aunt Clo wince as she rose from her place.
"Mes très chers, je vous quitte. One little half-hour. There is an unhappy child whose supreme moment is drawing very near. I have told you of my Carla? They are trying to persuade her that she has sinned—ah, the horrible folly and cruelty of it all!"
Miss Stellenthorpe hastened away, and Nicholas Aubray, after a moment, exclaimed, as he not infrequently did:
"What a splendid person your aunt is! I can't tell you how much I admire her."
"She is very kind," said Lily, trying to atone by the fervour of her voice for a certain blankness that invaded her at this fresh example of Nicholas Aubray's enthusiasm.
"Isn't she—isn't she? She's been a godsend to the peasantry here, I feel sure. She has," said Nicholas significantly, "been very kind to me."
"I know she likes you very much."
Lily spoke hurriedly and almost at random, overwhelmed by sudden nervous shyness.
"She's—she's enjoyed your being here, and all our excursions."
"Did she tell you that we had a long talk the other day?"
"She didn't tell me so specially," said Lily, and added hastily: "You've known her a long time, haven't you?"
"I have never seen as much of her as I should have liked, but I've always thought of her as a most splendid person, whom I should like to know much better. But it's never too late to mend, eh?"
He laughed, in jerks.
Lily seldom felt at ease with Nicholas Aubray when he was amused, although she forced her own smiles, in sympathy with the child-like appeal of the gaze that he was fixing directly upon her.
He grew grave again suddenly, after his wont.
"What about you? Am I to say good-bye to my little pal without anything to look forward to?"
Lily's heart beat with excitement and a sense of flattery, but she also felt overwhelmingly embarrassed, and quite unable to summon up the warm reply with which she would have liked to please him.
"I wonder whether you ever write letters?" said Nicholas, when he had waited in silence for some time.
"I haven't got many people to write to."
"You've got your pal—your old, ancient pal, who perhaps seems to you almost in his dotage——"
He broke off anxiously, and this time Lily's quick perception of his unspoken need of reassurance came to her help.
"I think of you as being of my own age," she exclaimed quickly, "or else just a little bit older, so as to be able to help me about things, and—and advise me sometimes."
"That's very sweet and dear of you to say that. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it——" said Nicholas, with the abrupt huskiness of tone of a man easily moved to emotion.
Suddenly he laid one of his hands very gently over Lily's, with a tentative, almost timid, gesture.
She knew that his sensitiveness would be instantly hurt by the least gesture of withdrawal, even though he was giving her the opportunity of making one.
Tenderness for his feelings, a half-frightened desire to see what would follow, and a certain exultant vanity, kept her motionless.
Subconsciously, there passed through her a regret, of which she failed to catch the significance, that it had always been physically distasteful to her to be touched. She accepted the dislike as being part of an inevitable state of affairs not susceptible to alteration.
"You didn't mind my doing that, did you?" said Nicholas nervously.
He had taken his hand away, after a prolonged, gentle pressure upon hers.
Lily shook her head.
She could not have given with truth either a negative or an affirmative answer, nevertheless she was relieved at Nicholas Aubray's exclamation:
"I'm glad of that! I wouldn't vex you for the whole world, you know. If ever I do anything that you don't like, you must tell me. Sometimes I think I'm too clumsy—and rough and—and elderly, to hope to keep your friendship. And it would make me very sad, if I lost it now."
"No, no—you couldn't!" Lily murmured.
"Well, will you let me hear from you—often—and see you when you're in England again?"
"I hardly ever go to London, though, I'm afraid," said Lily naïvely.
"Perhaps I might be allowed to come to your part of the world, though. I want to get to know your father, and—and everyone and everything that belongs to you. I wonder if you realize that, little pal?"
Lily said: "I think I do," because she felt that that was what he wanted her to say, and then was terrified at the thought of what his rejoinder might be.
"Thank God for that!" cried Nicholas, with a sort of boyish, laughing heartiness.
She was half relieved and half disappointed.
"That's a bargain, then. We'll write to one another."
"Ought I to?" Lily faltered, with a sudden recollection of the obnoxious phrases as to hole-and-corner correspondence, once employed by her father. The remembrance caused her to crimson, and Nicholas Aubray looked at her very kindly.
"I told your aunt, when we had our talk together the other day, how very much I should like to be allowed to hear from you," he said quietly, "and she was good enough to suggest that I might propose it to you. So it only depends upon you, now."
Something chivalrous in the words and manner alike sent a rush of affection and gratitude through Lily's being.
At such moments she felt that nothing was wanting in her liking for Nicholas Aubray.
"I'm so glad you did that," she said impulsively.
"You don't think I could ever take advantage of your youth and kindness to ask you to do anything that you might for an instant regret later on!" he exclaimed. "I'm not such a skunk as that! No. Thank God, you never would do anything of the kind that some of these modern girls seem to go in for.... That was just one of the things that attracted me to you so awfully—if I may say so."
"You don't think I'm old-fashioned and priggish? I often think I'm not like most other girls—I think I was brought up differently."
"All the better!" cried Nicholas vigorously.
"I'm glad you think it's all the better," said Lily. "Sometimes I—I've felt that I hated being unlike other people."
She glanced at him wistfully, half wondering if he would reassure her, if she confessed to that old, hidden feeling of not being a Real Live Person, but only a pretender.
"I only wish there were more people like you," said Nicholas Aubray. "Some day you must tell me all about your bringing-up, and why you think it's made you different. Will you?"
"It's quite dull, I'm afraid. Only about how I was at home, and then at a convent for a very little while and afterwards at school."
"I'm sure I shouldn't find it dull," said Nicholas Aubray, "I should never find anything dull that was about yourself. I want to hear everything."
His look, straight into her eyes, emphasized his words.
"I should like to feel that you were able to make a real safety-valve of me—tell me anything and everything, quite freely."
Lily's liking for him just then was so strong that the required assurance came in a rush of sincerity.
"I don't think I should mind telling you anything, and I've always wanted a friend. So few people seem to understand——"
A certain recollection, awakened by the words, made her pause.
"Of course there are a few things," she said shyly and wistfully, "that I suppose no one ever puts into words, exactly. Things one knows about oneself, that—that nobody else in the world could be expected to understand——"
"I won't ask for those," gently said Nicholas, smiling at her, rather puzzled.
He was naturally unaware that Lily was thinking just then of a battered wax baby-doll lying at the very back of the wardrobe in her bedroom.
XI
When Lily left Italy, it was with the definite certainty that Nicholas Aubray meant to ask her to marry him.
It appeared that he had discussed his intentions openly with Aunt Clo, who spoke of him to Lily on the evening that preceded her departure from Genazzano.
"Developments unlooked for indeed," said Aunt Clo with a whimsical smile. "But tell me—the idea does not displease you, little one?"
She looked at her niece with an air of interested enquiry as she spoke, but went on talking herself before Lily had time to reply.
"May and December, perhaps! Or so it seems to the youthful eyes of May. But there are worse alliances than that—many, many worse. And some natures, of which it seems to me, my Lily, that yours is one, demand less than others. Those are the happy ones!"
Aunt Clo sighed tempestuously and flung a hand across her eyes. It was evident that she did not count herself one of that favoured band amongst whom she assigned place to her niece.
"The temperament that seeks, and gives, passionately, is not one that I could wish you. Qui dit aimer, dit souffrir. Never were words more true! nor, perhaps, had any woman better cause than I to know it."
Miss Stellenthorpe groaned slightly and, having made the inevitable personal application so irresistible in discussing the affairs of others, was able to resume, with her quick, brilliant smile:
"But it is not of myself that I want to speak, mignonne! I ceased, long ago, to look upon myself save as a helper, a soul with experience and tenderness behind it, to stretch out a hand and aid the unknowing, the struggling, the unlearned, the young. For myself—che sarà sarà! But for you, my Lily, what is it to be?"
"I—I don't know," said Lily, very lamely indeed.
Aunt Clo looked more omniscient than ever, as she gazed at her niece.
"So undeveloped a little soul, is it?" she mused tolerantly. "Love would do much for you, little one—perhaps all."
"But I don't feel sure that—that I'm at all in love," Lily faltered foolishly.
Inwardly she was asking herself with bewilderment why it was that she could not speak sincerely about this thing to Aunt Clotilde. Perhaps it was because it was impossible not to feel that Aunt Clotilde was a good deal more interested in her own analytical dissection of the situation than in the people primarily concerned.
At all events, Lily found Miss Stellenthorpe of small assistance to her, and she had been too thoroughly imbued with the doctrine of distrust of her own instincts to consider the possibility of solving her own problems without extraneous advice. She did not want to consult Philip, because he was her father, and she took it for granted that he would therefore take her decision upon himself, with a strong bias in favour of any course least advocated by herself. Theoretically, Lily had been taught that parents sacrificed everything for their children. Practical experience of Philip's and of Eleanor's anxious, tender tyranny and immutable conviction of their own omnipotence no less than omniscience, in all matters concerning their offspring, had quite unconsciously led her to the opposite conclusion.
She thought timidly of consulting her old schoolmistress, Miss Melody. Had not Miss Melody put herself and all her experience at Lily's disposal, and had she not declared that girls who had been once under her charge at school still turned to her for help and counsel that she gladly and proudly gave?
With this species of mental reservation to strengthen her, Lily left Genazzano without making any definite confidence to Aunt Clo.
"I don't really feel as if I knew my own mind, just now," she said apologetically, and not altogether untruly.
"Ah, jeunesse!" smiled Miss Stellenthorpe. "Certainly, child of my heart, you do not love as yet—if you can ask yourself for a moment: Do I love? then it is certain you do not. But it will come—it will come. If not Nicholas, then another. But I think—however, I had best not tell you what I think! Only remember that it is not given to everyone to inspire love in so gallant a gentleman as is Nicholas Aubray. 'Sans peur et sans reproche'—those words often come to my mind when I think of Nicholas!"
"I like him very much," said Lily, more and more feebly, as Aunt Clo's periods overwhelmed her more and more with the sense of her own utter inadequacy.
Aunt Clotilde's smile became more pronounced, and also more deeply imbued with delicate and patronizing scorn.
"Well, well—the little 'like' may develop into a little 'love'—who knows? You need fear nothing tempestuous, nothing overwhelming, my Lily. Yours is not the passionate temperament. Don't look discomfited, child. I mean nothing derogatory—perhaps I envy you, in certain moments of soul weariness—chi lo sa? But I mean nothing unkind—nothing belittling. Only with me, as you know, Truth is a veritable obsession—entire frankness."
Lily was left with the subconscious suspicion that Aunt Clo's obsession for entire frankness was principally indulged in the direction of an unsparing candour with regard to the deficiencies of other people.
She did not resent Miss Stellenthorpe's diagnosis of her niece's emotional capacities as superficial. With all but the very lowest strata of her consciousness, she was inclined to endorse it. It was less trouble, even if rather less flattering to one's vanity, to take for granted the slightness of one's own demands upon life—and happiness—which latter Lily instinctively thought of as synonymous with love.
She replied to Nicholas Aubray's letters, which came often, with friendly, rather self-conscious epistles, answering his frequent, "Tell me about yourself, little pal," with rather laboriously enthusiastic accounts of her reading, her expeditions to Roman churches and ruins, her impressions of life at Genazzano.
Nicholas had said to her: "I've been told that I write rather good letters. I don't know whether I do or not, but anyhow I shall like writing to you, and I shall just put down anything that comes into my head—as though we were talking."
She found the letters he wrote to her delightful productions, full of an indescribable spirit of spontaneity, and was fully aware of the immaturity that characterized her own replies.
There were not many personalities in their correspondence, but Nicholas, towards the end of each letter, told Lily that he missed her companionship—that he looked forward very much to the time when he should see her again. Lily wondered rather tremulously when that time would come, and specially how it would be viewed by her father.
She tormented herself with various derogatory speeches that she put into Philip's mouth.
"My little pet, you mustn't talk nonsense ... little people of your age don't have proposals from grown-up men, you know.... I shall tell this Mr. Aubray that I can't have him writing to you like this ... a hole-and-corner correspondence...."
No! Even one's father could never say that. Nicholas Aubray had been as punctilious as Philip himself, and had obtained Aunt Clo's sanction to the correspondence before embarking upon it.
Lily wondered whether Aunt Clo, first and last, had acted upon her own initiative, without any reference at all to Philip.
If so, he would still be in complete ignorance of the cataclysmic fact that Lily's whole destiny was shortly to be decided. She phrased it thus to herself in an unconscious attempt to safeguard the dignity of the situation, that she felt would be threatened by Philip's habitual treatment of her as a very young and irresponsible child.
Philip's first greeting of her dissolved the fear, and left her with a wondering sense of intense gratification. True to his life-long restrictions, nothing was put into words, but Lily was at no pains to account for the new pride and pleasure in her that was suddenly displayed by her father.
He openly praised her looks, and said once or twice that "Aunt Clo's accounts of her little companion" had given him great pleasure.
His least indirect reference to Lily's new standing as the desired of Nicholas Aubray was made a very few days after her return, as he bade her good-night one evening.
"Good-night, my child. God bless you and give you happiness. I only want you to be very happy, you know. One is young for such a very little while——"
He sighed, but Lily was reflecting, rather humorously, that never before had he hinted at any possible term to the youthfulness upon which he had so often insisted.
Nevertheless, she was touched by his kindness, and by the new pride in her, which she divined in his frequent, half-surreptitious glances at her and occasional wistful smiles.
Very soon she found courage to mention that which she well knew that they both had in mind: the coming of Nicholas Aubray.
"You remember Aunt Clo's friend, that I told you about, Father?" Thus Lily, feeling unaccountably deceitful in so describing Nicholas, although she knew that Philip knew the exact relation in which Nicholas stood, both to Aunt Clo and to herself, and also that he knew her to be quite aware of his knowing.
Such strange and silent interplays of knowledge were uncomfortably frequent in association with Philip Stellenthorpe.
"I mean Mr. Aubray. I think he might rather like to come and—and see us, if you wouldn't mind."
"Not at all," said Philip graciously. "Your friend is quite a distinguished man, my dear child. Did your Aunt Clo speak to you of his career as a barrister?"
"A little."
"Curiously enough, I recently came across a very striking little pamphlet of his on the subject of the Shipping Law. It is a good deal too technical for a woman, but I found it of great interest, and was much struck by the style in which it was written."
Lily was principally conscious of a secret increase of self-esteem because Philip, indirectly, had spoken of her as a woman.
Such small and subtle appeals to vanity gave greater titillation to her spirits than did the anticipation of again meeting Nicholas.
In the interval between their parting at Genazzano and their meeting again, she had viewed the abstract prospect of a possible proposal of marriage from Nicholas with complacency, sometimes even with a thrill of exultation.
She had played, alike, with the ideas of accepting him as lover and future husband, and of refusing him only to find more overwhelming bliss in some dim future with another. In none of her fancies had she ever thought seriously and sincerely, for the reason that she had never been taught to think at all.
When Nicholas Aubray had accepted the invitation and was actually come, his presence alternately brought enjoyment and embarrassment to Lily.
That Philip was pleased with him was evident, and so completely had Lily assimilated the theory that her parent was above criticism, that it did not occur to her to wonder whether the admiration was altogether mutual until Nicholas said to her with rather a rueful smile:
"Your father doesn't very much care for joking, does he?"
"Doesn't he?" said Lily, vaguely surprised.
Philip's occasional jests with his children were of a melancholy and stereotyped kind, but it had not consciously struck Lily that he was deficient in humour.
"I only mean that I was telling him one or two stupid stories after dinner to-night about things I've come across in Court. I daresay I told them clumsily. Please don't think that I'm being impertinent enough to venture the least shadow of criticism. I only thought perhaps I'd been rather clumsy and mal-à-propos. You know, I'm awfully keen for your people to like me a little bit, as well as you."
"Of course they will," Lily assured him. "You and Aunt Clo are friends already. But I haven't very many near relations. There's Kenneth, but he's only a little boy."
"Good!" cried Nicholas. "I like little boys. I'm not afraid of them."
He laughed, and Lily laughed, at the preposterous implication, but it was by just such flashing glimpses of an essentially child-like spirit that Nicholas Aubray endeared himself to Lily.
She liked him so much that she would hardly acknowledge to herself the occasional pangs of revulsion suffered by her liking, when his laughter, rather grating and always over-prolonged, seemed to her to be almost unmeaningly provoked, or when his appreciation of the Hardinges, which in itself Lily welcomed, found bewildering expression in its utter lack of coincidence with her own intuitions.
"Miss Janet Hardinge is more silent than the pretty, golden-haired one, isn't she? I should think she was one of those shy, very reserved sort of people, who are easily overwhelmed."
Lily, who had been at school with the unpopular Janet, and knew her to be neither shy nor easily overwhelmed, felt at a loss.
"Which is your friend?"
"I see most of Dorothy now, but the youngest—the one who's still at school—was the one I liked best, Sylvia."
"'Who is Sylvia, what is she?'" quoted Nicholas Aubray, and again his laughter appeared to Lily to be quite inordinate.
With a sort of superficial attempt at impartial candour, she tried to balance Nicholas Aubray's claim to a sense of humour, vaguely aware that such an adjunct must be desirable in the close companionship implied by marriage.
He had a sense of humour.
Many of his stories of experiences in Court, whether appreciated or not by Philip Stellenthorpe, had made Lily laugh. In Italy, they had laughed together over many trivial things. Lily, when amused, had never appealed in vain to him to share in her amusement.
Slightly bewildered, she derided at last that her own sense of humour had need of extension, in order to cover the area of ground whereon Nicholas Aubray found subject for mirth.