Lily knew the choice to be Ethel's.
The insistence upon abrupt translation from life on earth into a world of perfect joy and peace, where "all is pure and all is holy," again bewildered and almost distressed Lily.
Could such violent dislocation as was implied really take place?
A child did not, in the space of a night, become a man. Learning, even on the lowest plane, was not acquired in an hour. Did God, then, reverse all His laws as manifested upon earth, whenever a soul left its body?
If so, the spirit now in heaven was not Cousin Charlie at all. It was somebody quite else, with understanding and aspirations that had never been his; one to whom new revelations had been made, that must of necessity transform the soul that received them.
The Charlie Hardinge loved and mourned by his wife and by their children would have been saddened and frightened by such a cleavage of himself from them. One could imagine him, clinging still to old formulæ, asking piteously for explanations, calling upon old, familiar trivialities.
But radiant in the presence of his God, every value he had known upon earth transmuted, without pause or preparation?
Lily knew that she could accept no such assurance. She remembered, as a little child, asking whether she might pray for her dead mother, and Philip's gentle teaching that those at rest with God needed no intercession. They were at peace. The child had been comforted, receiving the words with full confidence, because spoken by her father. Now, Lily found that her whole being rejected them, although she desired to believe, and was frightened of her independent judgment as of a sin. The thought of Charlie Hardinge's soul, as she imagined it to be, deprived of the familiar body and of all the homely accessories to existence, obsessed her. With a sense of furtive guilt, Lily prayed. She prayed that he might not be afraid, or lonely, that someone might be there to help him, and that he might, in some mysterious way, keep in touch with the people that he loved and that loved him, without feeling the added pang of their tears and their sorrow.
Surely the twenty-five years with Ethel counted for something, even in eternity?
She fell again into a maze of speculation, that lasted until all was over.
As the groups of people moved away from the newly-filled grave, Lily saw Janet Hardinge beckoning to her. She went to her, and Janet said wistfully and miserably, as Sylvia had said the day before: "I think it makes it easier if there are people there, Lily. Please come up to the house with us, won't you?"
The Hardinges' house was filled with strange uncles and aunts, most of them entirely unknown to Lily. Tea was laid in the dining-room, and the house, with blinds up-drawn again, and the hall door open, had to Lily's eyes an odd look as of having been newly relieved from strain.
She sat between a Hardinge aunt and an uncle whose name she did not know.
He was a kindly, red-faced man, who shook his head, saying, "Well, well, well," very much as Charlie Hardinge himself might have said it, and then appeared to dismiss the more serious aspect of the gathering from his conversation, if not altogether from his thoughts.
"This is a very good room," he said approvingly, looking round him. "Nice aspect, nice sunny room. They ought to use this room a great deal."
On Lily's other side the Hannigan aunt murmured lugubriously:
"They must just try and begin life again, and make the best kind of a home they can. That's what I tell them. They've got to begin again, now."
And at the other end of the table Lily could hear yet another aunt telling Sylvia that she must be brave and eat some sponge-cake and drink up her tea.
Mrs. Hardinge did not appear at all.
Tea was prolonged as though nobody knew what was to be done, once it was over.
"They ought to go away, and make a thorough break," said Miss Hannigan to Lily. "Then they could come back here again, you know, and start fresh."
"Let me cut you a piece of cake, now," said her other neighbour.
She was relieved when a diversion was caused by the maid's announcement that her husband had come to fetch her.
Janet had gone upstairs to her mother, but Sylvia embraced Lily convulsively in the hall, and said:
"Oh, Lily! It's all so awful, and it goes on and on. I keep feeling that I shall wake up and find it's all a dream."
A few tears of exhaustion rolled down her little white face as she spoke, but Lily saw that she had literally cried until she could cry no more.
"Are you all going away for a little while?" she said hesitatingly. "Your aunt said something about it."
"They want us to go back to Ireland with them, but Mother thinks they couldn't really afford three visitors, and such a long journey wouldn't be worth while for less than a month."
"Cousin Ethel wouldn't go alone, or perhaps with just Janet, and let you come to me—or somewhere else, of course, if you'd rather?"
"Oh!" cried Sylvia, "we must all keep together now that there are only the three of us left."
Lily, as she left the house, violently disputed this sentiment within herself. The longer the three desolate women remained together, just so much the longer would they react upon one another emotionally. Lily wondered whether she was herself heartless in so thinking. It made her seriously uneasy to know that Philip Stellenthorpe would most certainly consider her to be so.
She felt strangely rebellious, and at the same time ashamed of it.
"Well," said Nicholas, "I'm extremely thankful it's over. I was very much afraid there was going to be an accident, weren't you?"
"What—when?"
"Didn't you notice? I suppose your little head was somewhere in the clouds again. One of the bearers wasn't fit for the job—quite unmistakably intoxicated. That's the worst of having country labourers—one can't ever be quite sure. I was on thorns, I can tell you."
He laughed a little, quite gently, but the sound jarred vaguely upon Lily.
"Has the whole thing upset you, poor child? It's the first time, I suppose, you've been to a funeral, isn't it? Well, I must say I hope nothing of that sort will ever be done over me. I should like to be buried at sea."
He flung back his shoulders, tapping his broad chest with the tips of his fingers.
"When this 'poor clay' is laid by, I must say that I should like to think that its only grave was to be rolling waters, eh, Lily?"
She was conscious of feeling more utterly out of tune with his mood than ever before.
"What can it matter, if it isn't oneself at all? Lots of people say that, about being buried at sea, but it's no more and no less than being buried anywhere else. What's the difference?"
He looked surprised.
"What's happened to my holy little saint? I should have thought that the prayers and the consecrated ground and all the rest of it meant a great deal to you, Lily."
His kind, good-humoured air of interested curiosity made her regret her own exasperation, of which, however, she knew herself to be far more conscious than he was.
"Nicholas, tell me really. What do you think has happened to Cousin Charlie's soul, now?"
"My dear little girl! We know that he was very kind and good, and—and Almighty God's mercy...." He stopped, looking disconcerted.
"What's come over you, Lily?"
"I don't know. Only it all seemed so unreal, somehow, to think of Cousin Charlie perfectly happy in heaven and either not knowing anything at all about the people he loved best, or else, in some miraculous way, able to understand why God should let them suffer, and what good is going to come out of it all, so that he doesn't mind. It all seems so—so unlike the ordinary sort of person that he was."
"Yes," said Nicholas. "Yes."
"How could he suddenly turn into a pure spirit who would find eternal joy in the presence of God?" cried Lily recklessly. "They sang that hymn about heaven, but how can one imagine an ordinary, average, good person suddenly in heaven for ever and ever more, unless they've become absolutely different? Surely it's the same essential spirit that was on earth, that goes on into the next world?"
"Heaven, eh? Harps and crowns and white robes and wings and all the rest of it, eh, Lily? No, my dear, I can't say that any of that appeals to me very much."
"Do you believe in it, Nicholas?"
"The old idea of heaven or hell, world without end, Amen? No—yes. I don't know. No, I can't say I do."
"What do you think happens after death, then?"
"One goes on, somewhere or other, of course."
"Yes."
"But I know no more than you do, my dear," said Nicholas. "I don't suppose we were ever meant to know."
Lily was intensely aware that such a conclusion shirked the question entirely, but she said nothing more.
It was from that time that she began to acknowledge to herself her own inner conflict between loyalty, that she had been taught was the supreme virtue, and the insistent demand of something within herself that claimed a right to independent judgment.
Reacting to the sense of having been deluded, Lily gradually forsook the habit of going to church, and was relieved when Nicholas made no comment.
They did not talk about religion. The subject was one which quite evidently held not the slightest interest for Nicholas.
Lily went once or twice by herself to the Brompton Oratory, but always with a sense of doing something wrong. She also purchased, almost furtively, from a green baize board erected at the bottom of the church, a penny pamphlet purporting to explain the chief difficulties that might be supposed to confront a potential "convert" to the Catholic religion.
The little book was ungrammatical, written in slipshod English, and was far from even being explicit. But Lily understood that in the Catholic Church was to be found even less liberty of thought than in her own. The Church told her children what to believe, and beyond that they might not look.
Lily wondered whether such restriction of outlook might not be conducive to great inward peace.
She thought of it wistfully and sentimentally, but knew very well that she could never now, of her own free-will, seek to suppress, unsatisfied, the new spirit of doubt that encompassed her.
With her faith in the arbitrary presentment of the religion that had been imposed upon her, Lily also lost much of her childish faith in the essential infallibility of her father.
His religious beliefs were his own, and she did not seek to question them, but she resented more and more having been brought up to suppose that such beliefs could be transmitted wholesale, to be received without question and without analysis. No such acceptance, she thought, could be of enduring value. Discontent possessed her.
She continued to take pleasure in the many enjoyments that awaited her, but she knew that she was missing happiness.
Alternately, Lily blamed and pitied herself.
XVII
Nicholas Aubray had no idea that he made certain remarks at certain hours of every day, with almost clock-work regularity.
It was left to his wife to make this discovery and others; her critical faculty developing with every year, the years themselves still too few to prevent her from putting her discoveries into words.
"You mustn't be too sharp in your judgment of other people, my dear," Nicholas said to her from time to time, without any more direct reference to an increasing uneasiness in the atmosphere, that he would not, indeed, admit even to himself.
Lily, too, had her reticences.
The shibboleth declared any criticism of another to be uncharitable at best, disloyal at worst. Unthinkable, to criticize one's husband.
Lily sought valiantly to ignore that which certain perceptions in her registered almost automatically.
She loved Nicholas, therefore she must see Nicholas as perfect.
The effort, in the course of time, became considerable, and very wearying.
She lived in a constant searching of spirit, fond of Nicholas and grateful to him when he petted her, touched by his many thoughtfulnesses and frequent gifts, intensely desirous of believing that she loved him, and irritated almost—although never quite—to the point of protesting aloud when he sang out of tune.
Nicholas sang very often, from exuberance of spirits, and it was almost always out of tune.
He had a singular faculty for remembering the words of popular musical-comedy songs, and no ability at all to retain the simplest of airs correctly.
"I say, Lily, that was a catchy sort of thing we heard last night."
"Oh yes, I know."
Lily spoke hurriedly, trying to escape from the conviction that she was in dread lest Nicholas should attempt to reproduce the tune that he had liked.
"The one that girl sang in the second act—very fine girl, too!"
His tone was jocosely significant, and although such humorous allusions did not really amuse her in the least, Lily eagerly caught at this one.
"I saw you look at her, Nicholas! She's rather your type, isn't she?"
"What do you mean by my type, madam, I should like to know? How do you know I've got a type, eh?"
He began to laugh spasmodically, and Lily's lips mechanically took on the curves of the amusement that she did not share.
"My type, indeed! Ha, ha!"
Lily's meaningless laughter echoed his genuine mirth. Then he began to hum:
"Catchy sort of tune, that."
"Oh yes. Would you like me to get the score?"
"Not unless you want it yourself. I thought that was pretty nearly the only good thing in it, didn't you? Besides, what do you want with a score when you've got a husband who can reproduce it note for note to you next morning? Ah—hum——!"
Nicholas cleared his throat and expanded his chest in facetious burlesquing of an operatic performance.
He sang it through again, with mock dramatic emphasis and gesticulation, and Lily dug her nails into the palms of her hands and stretched her mouth into a fixed smile.
She was unspeakably disgusted at herself.
Why should she mind these things? And why, minding them, should not love for Nicholas make her minding of no account?
For she still maintained to herself that she loved Nicholas.
That which perplexed her perhaps most was her own increasing tendency to dwell upon a recollection that for several years now had been almost altogether obscured——Vonnie.
The memory of her childish championship of Vonnie, the sick despair of knowing herself to be better loved and cared for than was Vonnie, the pain that she had suffered through Vonnie's pain—all recurred to her with an odd sense of contrast.
How could one compare the two? The kindly derision of common-sense sounded in her imagination, insensibly clothing itself in the accents of that embodiment of common-sense, Monica Melody. "Childie, childie, think what you're saying. Why, how can you compare the two, Lily? The affection of a little child for another little child, and the love of a woman for her husband! Oh Lily, Lily!"
Miss Melody would certainly conclude with mellow, tolerant laughter.
And yet the comparison existed, and remained insistent.
She would never suffer for Nicholas as she had suffered for Vonnie.
"Perhaps I am better balanced now," Lily wistfully suggested to herself, but the suggestion carried no conviction.
She found the phrase that elucidated the question for her almost by chance:
To the limit of capacity.
Quite involuntarily, the application leaped to her mind.
She had loved Vonnie to the limit of capacity. Her feeling for Nicholas did not extend even to the first outposts of that limit.
But she loved him, nevertheless. It was a question of degree.
Lily stifled the illuminating thought, accused herself of the extreme of disloyalty, and watched eagerly for signs in herself that she did love Nicholas. That he loved her, she could not doubt, and the thought filled her with remorseful gratitude. It still surprised and touched her that her husband, unlike her father, should so seldom find fault with her either directly or by implication, and that he should share and enjoy her enjoyment of almost every form of entertainment.
He listened, with obvious pleasure and interest, to everything she said, and no subject was too trivial for discussion. He seemed never to be blasé or indifferent. Occasionally, only, he was out of temper or depressed, when his already long face would become indescribably elongated, and his conversation monosyllabic.
Lily found that if she asked him a direct question, on such occasions, he would gravely and curtly reply: "Why should anything be the matter?" after the manner of a sulky child that desires to draw attention to its sulks but is too proud to give a reason for them. If she said nothing, he either recovered himself quickly, or spoke, with a sort of remote, detached condemnation, of the circumstance that had annoyed him. He never admitted to a trivial disturbance of mind, but sometimes, with transparent self-satisfaction, he would lay claim to outbursts of stupendous fury.
"I'm afraid I lost my temper pretty thoroughly to-day. The fellow won't try that game on again. He got my monkey up, and I let him have it straight. Hit out straight from the shoulder. I told him exactly what I thought of him, and you should have seen his face, Lily—the poor little devil was green. I don't remember, word for word, exactly what I said, but I fancy I let him have it pretty straight. I don't mince matters when my blood's up. Mind you, Lily, a temper like mine's no joke. I've always been afraid of going too far, one of these days."
He looked at her as though for confirmation, and she said, knowing that it would please him:
"It's a fault on the right side, I suppose. A man who hasn't got a temper doesn't get very far, I imagine."
"You're right there, my dear. I shouldn't be where I am now if I hadn't been able to put the fear of God into those who work for me, from time to time."
Nicholas laughed.
"You've never seen me angry, my dear, and I hope you never will."
"Only over a collar-stud," observed Lily, with defective tact.
The mild joke was not at all a successful one.
Nicholas's hatchet face lengthened immediately and grew inordinately grave.
"I'm talking about necessary anger, my dear girl, the sort of wrath that's pretty nearly indispensable when you're dealing with men and women, if you want to get the best out of them. Weaklings have got to be made to feel that they're up against strength. If a man's strong, he's got to have a temper."
"Nobody could call you weak, Nicholas," said Lily, and the remark, as she had meant it to do, restored his complacency.
"Well, I've many faults, but there are two feelings for which I don't think I shall be held to account, I must say. I'm not a weak man, Lily—and I fancy I'm a pretty shrewd judge of human nature. I think I can sum up men and women fairly correctly, even at first sight."
Lily did not like Nicholas when he boasted. In the depths of her heart, uneasily conscious of arrogance the while, she disputed his statement that he was a judge of human nature, for his judgments seldom tallied with her own, especially where women were concerned.
"I don't suppose," said Nicholas, laughing, "that the fellow I told off this morning will come near me again for a fortnight. I imagine he was pretty thoroughly scared."
"I daresay," smiled Lily.
She went on smiling, and Nicholas went on laughing. His laughter had long ago got upon her nerves, but she did not own to herself that this was the case.
Even when her amusement was genuine, she never found it easy to prolong her laughter to the extent of his. Very often, her amusement was not genuine at all.
Nicholas had a fund of anecdotes, quotations, and good stories, some of which he retailed over-frequently. Many of the stories were witty; one or two, to the daughter of Philip Stellenthorpe, appeared to be merely coarse. It seemed to her that Nicholas was totally unable to distinguish between wit, even if admittedly "improper," and the form of rather gross vulgarity that claims to be funny merely on the grounds of its vulgarity.
Sometimes she despised herself for making the distinction, which with her was entirely instinctive. Nicholas, however, so far as she could see, did not discover that she made any distinction at all in her appreciation of his sallies.
His perceptions, acute in some directions, appeared to Lily to be astonishingly blunt in others. Whenever he perceived in her any sign of physical weakness or fatigue, it touched her sharply and always afresh, but it always surprised her. At times, when his simplicity and enthusiasm were most in evidence, she welcomed in herself a rush of tenderness for him.
His frequent demonstrations of affection she accepted with a sort of passive pleasure, as might an affectionate child, but she dwelt little on the subject of outer demonstrations in her own thoughts, aware that Nicholas, disappointed, had at first thought her unawakened, and then frigid.
There were many thoughts, indeed, upon which she lacked courage to dwell in her resolute suppression of the lurking consciousness of an irrevocable mistake.
She hoped that she might have a child, and then, forlornly, that repeated disappointment and anxiety might not alienate Nicholas's love for her, which she knew subconsciously, to be the thing in him that she cared for most.
Nearly four years after her marriage she had a long illness, and once more the hope of motherhood was taken from her.
"Poor child!" said Nicholas, much harassed.
He was very busy, and it distressed him to think of the many hours that he was out of the house.
"That nurse is no companion for you—stupid, uneducated woman. I wish we could get hold of a younger one. Or is there anyone whom you'd like to have, little girl? What about one of the Hardinges?"
"No, thank you," said Lily wearily. She did not want Janet or Sylvia with her. "I think I'd rather be alone. I'm so tired—and nurse is really very kind."
But Nicholas was not satisfied. To please him, Lily made pretence that she would like to invite Miss Stellenthorpe to stay with her, and was secretly relieved when Aunt Clo, in the minute handwriting described by herself as "scholarly," wrote and lamented that she could not leave Italy for another six weeks.
"Alas, Bambina mia, that I should not be able to fly to you! But there is one here who needs me—a sick, broken creature, whose bruised soul requires patience and tenderness. Yours, my Lily, is a sickness of the body. This other has been deeply, cruelly, wounded in the spirit. Can I, who have plumbed the very depths, refuse to give of my healing, such as it may be?
"But courage, little one! I will fly to you when once this frail craft has been piloted into safe harbour. Ah, these conflicting claims! Are they the penalty exacted of Strength, I ask myself? I smiled with a great tenderness, my Lily, at your enclosure, and the many words in which you wrapped the offering. These things matter so little! Nevertheless, you know that I have denuded myself of much, and I accept, with willing and gracious thanks, your so charming thought. It matters little to me how I travel to you, but an you will it to be in the luxury of a wagon-lit, so be it!
"In six weeks, then, my beloved child."
There was never any formal beginning to Aunt Clo's letters, and her signature, launched abruptly onto the page with no conventional valedictory phrase, was a complicated hieroglyphic of initials, understood to be characteristic.
"What a splendid person she is," Nicholas remarked, as he did with punctuality whenever Miss Stellenthorpe was mentioned, "always helping somebody. Helping lame dogs over stiles, eh?"
Lily did not answer, and he repeated: "Eh, Lily?"
It was one of the tiring things about Nicholas that he always required a reply to everything that he said, however obvious.
"Yes."
"But all the same, charity begins at home. Shall we write and tell her so, eh?"
"She'll come in six weeks," said Lily, smiling without any mirth, conscious only of overpowering fatigue.
"Six weeks! I should like to think of something for you before that, my dear."
Two days later, Nicholas came to her exultant. "The very thing! I've got the very thing for you—splendid!"
Lily tried not to look dismayed.
"Somehow, I thought I shouldn't be defeated. Once I set out to do something, it generally gets done, I fancy!" He paused to laugh.
"Do you remember old Dickenson, Lily? Nice old boy, with a long family. I met him yesterday and he was telling me about his eldest girl—quite a handsome girl too, I remember her as a flapper. It seems she went off and trained as a hospital nurse. Plucky of her, wasn't it? There were half a dozen of them at home, and no money, and this girl didn't get on particularly well with the rest of them, for some reason, so off she goes. Dickenson was telling me, they thought she'd never get through her training—they give them a very stiff time, I fancy, but she stuck it and came through splendidly. She's at home now, I don't quite know what happened, but she was going to be married, and then it was broken off. I didn't ask for details, naturally. But there she is, a handsome wench, and fully trained, and she must be a plucky girl, too. Dickenson says she's eager for a job. You'd like her, Lily, and she'd be more of a companion for you than old Stick-in-the-mud. What about having her here?"
"As a nurse?"
"The doctor's all for it. Stick-in-the-mud's time is up in about a week anyway, isn't it? and he says you don't really want very much done for you now—only someone at hand. No night-nursing. How'd it do to get Miss Dickenson here till your aunt comes? She'd stay with us as a sort of friend, you know."
The eagerness of Nicholas for his plan was very evident.
"Have you seen her, Nicholas?"
"Not since she was a flapper. I remember her as a very attractive child. I think she must be a plucky girl, too, to have gone off like that," said Nicholas, dwelling reflectively upon his catchword. "Plucky thing for a girl to do."
He reiterated the verdict again, with greater emphasis, after seeking an interview with Miss Dickenson.
"By George, Lily, you'll like that girl. She's a girl of spirit, quite good-looking, too. I know you'll get on together."
The complete conviction of his tone was almost infectious, especially as Lily thought it disloyal to let herself remember how frequently her estimate of other people had failed to coincide with that of her husband.
Nicholas rather elaborately urged his case.
"You mustn't think I want to force this idea of mine upon you, on any account. But it would ease my mind about you, when I have to be away all day. She's a lively sort of girl, full of spirit, and I don't fancy she has much of a time at home. They're shockingly badly off, too, and no doubt it would be a relief—however, that's not the point. But I think you'd like a girl of your own kind about the house, wouldn't you? Less professional than a regular nurse, and yet just as useful. She was most eager about doing anything for you—there'd be no nonsense about her."
"It would be more amusing for you in the evenings, after dinner," said Lily reflectively.
He looked vexed.
"That has nothing whatever to do with it, my dear. If you think I'm urging this idea with a view to my own——"
"No, no," cried Lily hastily.
In her weakness, she felt the tears rising to her throat at the mere apprehension of having offended him, or appeared to be ungrateful.
"I should really like it for my own sake, Nicholas. She sounds very nice indeed. Why shouldn't she come next week and stay till Aunt Clo comes?"
"That's entirely as you wish. It's for you to decide."
He still spoke with the ultra-gravity of tone that denoted that his curiously childish susceptibilities had been touched.
"It's a splendid idea," said Lily with a trembling lip. "I'd like to have her very much. It was very clever of you to think of it, Nicholas."
With disproportionate relief, she saw his expression relax.
"That's good, then. I'll arrange it to-morrow. I thought I'd find something for you, poor old girl! I generally hit on something when I've made up my mind to it, eh? You'll like Doris Dickenson, Lily, she's a plucky girl, and I don't fancy she's had too easy a time of it. I know pretty well whom you'll cotton to by this time, eh?"
"Yes, indeed," said Lily.
She was no more conscious of hypocrisy than if she had been humouring the boast that a child standing on a table, might make of being taller than a grown man.
The susceptibility of her husband to feminine beauty was to Lily so much of a commonplace that her first sight of the object of his new enthusiasm surprised her quite unexpectedly.
Doris Dickenson belonged to the type of woman whose unfailing attraction for men remains for ever incomprehensible to her own sex.
Lily did not think her colourless, freckled, and rather heavy face in the least good-looking, her blue-green eyes were almost without lashes, her plump hands, with fingers broad at the base and tapering sharply to a point, were over-manicured. She was both tall and heavily made, although she moved well, and the only claim to beauty that Lily could allow her was the flaming colour of her coarse, abundant red hair.
"It makes a difference having her, eh?" said Nicholas contentedly.
It made a great difference.
Lily wondered very much whether anyone had ever considered Doris Dickenson to be a good nurse. She had the typical faults of the professional, and but little of her conscientiousness and enthusiasm for her work.
Lily, more than ever deficient in self-confidence through physical weakness, wondered despairingly whether it was entirely her own fault that she sometimes found Miss Dickenson almost unbearable. Was she, as Nicholas often said, hypercritical?
Things unimportant in themselves assumed monstrous proportions and took possession of her mind. Amongst them were small characteristics of Doris Dickenson.
Her flow of incessant talk, concerned almost exclusively with herself, her experiences, her relations, and her love-affairs.
The recurrence in her conversation of the particular adverb or adjective that momentarily obsessed her, regardless of its applicability.
"How devastating!" she would drawl, of a broken wine-glass, a thunderstorm, a new novel. Even a bunch of flowers was "devastatingly pretty." But the following week, the events of the hour were all "preposterous," and the word was introduced into her conversation in every impossible connection, until a fresh adjective appeared to replace it.
She also possessed to perfection the trick of the meaningless tag—of all others perhaps the most characteristic of the second-rate mind.
"Here's your medicine. I say, why do you look like that?"
And, very frequently:
"Don't say it in such a tragic voice! What makes you say it like that?"
Lily at first made futile efforts to find a reasonable answer to the bewildering senselessness of such enquiries.
But she found that Doris never listened to an answer, never appeared to expect one.
Lily came to the conclusion that "Why do you look like that?" was merely meant as a concession to the conventionalities, a hasty passing assumption of an interest in her welfare, that could not even carry its pretence through to the end.
Lily grew more and more weary, and wondered why she lacked moral courage to tell Nicholas that his experiment was not proving successful. That he would never perceive it without being told, she took for granted.
Nicholas lacked neither generosity nor tenderness towards his wife, and she took herself bitterly to task for the involuntary disappointment that possessed her in her constant perception of his lack of intuition.
XVIII
"I say, Mrs. Aubray, do you think I leave you too long alone in the evenings, after dinner?"
"Not at all," said Lily, trying not to make her voice over-emphatic.
"Do you really mean that? I'm sure you really think I neglect you appallingly."
Lily knew very well that Miss Dickenson was not really sure of anything of the kind, and would have been both astonished and indignant had her self-indictment been endorsed by her patient.
"I mean, do tell me really. I should hate it if you thought that I stayed away after dinner when I ought to be cheering you up. But you would tell me if you did, wouldn't you?"
"I'm very glad that you should keep my husband company at dinner when he's by himself, and of course he always comes up to me after dinner when he's in, so naturally——"
"Oh, good gracious! You don't suppose I meant that I wanted to stay with you while he's here? I wouldn't do such an appalling thing for the world; why, it's an appalling idea. You didn't think that was what I meant, did you? I mean, I'd rather be told if you did, of course, but you didn't, did you? Do say if you did, though."
For all the incessant string of tiresome appeals on Miss Dickenson's lips, her roving eyes betrayed the utter lack of any purpose or meaning behind her words.
"Don't look like that! Why do you look like that?"
"Like what?" said Lily, crossly and childishly, although experience had taught her that the question never provoked a reasonable answer.
"Like that. Sort of appalled, aren't you? But I'd always rather know things—that's why I ask."
"Like Rosa Dartle." The words seemed to drop, in spite of deadly weariness, from Lily.
"Like who?"
Doris very often gave one the trouble of repeating a thing, when Lily felt certain that she had heard it the first time.
She now said nothing at all.
"Like who, did you say?"
Lily shut her eyes, and her impulses at the moment were little short of murderous.
"I say, what's up? Tired? Who's Rosa Dartle?"
"A character in Dickens—'David Copperfield.'"
"How appalling! Dickens' people always are appalling, aren't they? What makes you think I'm like Rosa Dartle, whoever she may be?"
"She used to ask questions."
"I say, I like that! D'you think I ask questions? It's supposed to be a sign of an enquiring nature, isn't it?"
Lily, her despair untinged by any humour, gazed into an abyss of such utter futility as silenced her with sheer amazement.
"Isn't it?"
"I daresay it is."
She adjusted her unwilling part in the sorry dialogue to the level of her companion; lacking both physical energy and moral courage to put an end to it.
"You've got an appalling number of books in this house, haven't you? I always mean to read some day when I've got time, but I've always been too busy. They say it's never too late to mend. Of course in hospital there simply wasn't a hope, and my off-time was always so taken up. Of course we were never allowed to speak to the doctors—far less go out with them—but there was one perfectly mad fellow who used simply to follow me about. Appalling wasn't the word for it. I say, I believe I'm shocking you! Are you shocked? I'd rather you said if you are. I mean really——"
It went on da capo, and Lily was disgusted with herself for her utter inability to silence the elder woman by any of the pungent sentences that she constantly formulated in her own mind, but could never bring herself to utter aloud.
She did not really believe that Doris Dickenson was in the least sensitive, in spite of her touchiness, but the girl's footing in the house as semi-guest, semi-professional attendant, as well as Nicholas Aubray's friendship for her, made it seem extraordinarily difficult to rebuke her self-sufficiency in terms trenchant enough to penetrate her singular obtuseness of mind.
"You get on with her all right, don't you?" said Nicholas, with the simple satisfaction of one stating a fact rather than asking a question.
"Yes," said Lily hesitatingly. The teaching inculcated in her childhood always made it an effort to her to speak the truth, when the truth might possibly distress or disappoint her hearer.
But she added after a moment:
"She does talk rather too much, I think."
"Does she?" said Nicholas, in a surprised voice. "I must say I haven't noticed that. I always think she's rather shy."
It was quite true that Doris was nearly always rather silent when Nicholas was with Lily, although Lily did not believe that she was at all shy. She seemed, indeed, to be more nearly sulky than shy, at such times.
But she always listened attentively to what Nicholas said, and glanced at him from time to time out of the corners of her small, blue-green eyes.
One evening when Nicholas was alone with Lily he told her that Doris had been telling him something about her life, during their tête-à-tête dinner.
"She's had a very hard time, Lily, mind you. I think it's wonderful it hasn't made her in the least bitter, poor child."
Lily saw that Nicholas's rather facile sympathies had been roused. She felt vaguely surprised.
"Did she tell you about her engagement, and why it was broken off?"
"She did. I suppose she's confided it all to you, long ago?"
"No. She's mentioned several times that she was once engaged, but she's never told me why she didn't get married."
"I daresay she's very reserved," said Nicholas. His tone betrayed a slight sense of flattery at having received a unique confidence. "I don't know quite why she told me about it, but I suppose she saw that I was interested. I suppose that was it."
Lily smiled a very little.
Nicholas never made it difficult for any woman to see when he was interested.
"The man must have been a bit of a brute, I should fancy. He got engaged to her while she was at this hospital place and they were to be married almost directly, so of course she resigned from the hospital. I fancy, though she must have worked hard there, that the surroundings were never particularly congenial. In fact, she as good as told me that she only went to work so as to give her younger sisters a better time at home. Rather plucky, eh? But of course she left when she thought she was going to be married. And then what does this wretched fellow do but get insanely jealous over some pal or other of hers, lose his head completely, and say things that no girl could possibly overlook. She couldn't forgive him, of course, and I don't blame her. Life with a jealous husband—and for a girl like that—Good Lord!"
"It's odd she should be so attractive," said Lily. "She isn't pretty."
"No—no, I suppose not. But she's taking, don't you think? Something very arresting about her, altogether. I must say, I can't help admiring her spirit. She's told you how they worked them at that place, I suppose?"
"The hospital? Yes."
"For a girl brought up, I suppose, very much as you were yourself," said Nicholas, "it must have taken some spirit to stick it out. She was telling me that there wasn't a soul there of her own class, practically, for her to speak to, and she used to cry from sheer loneliness, sometimes. I can't imagine her crying, somehow."
"Neither can I," said Lily drily.
Something in the quality of the silence that followed did not please her, and she went on speaking hastily:
"But she seems to have made a few friends all the same, Nicholas. At least she's always telling me of the young men who ran after her."
"I daresay," said Nicholas curtly.
The lengthening of his face indicated that his enthusiasm had been somewhat dashed, and Lily, characteristically, at once sought to efface the unsympathetic colouring that she had purposely given to her words. "I rather wonder she hasn't married. She could have done so easily, I should think."
"Oh, of course she could."
The tone in which he spoke was once more confident and enthusiastic.
"Old Dickenson told me something about that. He said she was the sort of girl men used to look at while she was still in the nursery—although both her sisters are prettier—in fact, as you say, this one isn't exactly good-looking, I suppose. I don't know what it is about her—magnetism, I suppose. Certainly she's attractive. Don't you think so?"
"She's more so to men than to women, I should imagine."
"Perhaps. You women have odd ideas about one another's merits, eh?" He laughed heartily and was still laughing when Doris came into the room.
Nicholas rose and placed a chair for her.
"We were just talking about you. I was telling my wife something about the stiff upper lip you've shown all along. I can tell you," said Nicholas significantly, "she admires pluck as much as I do. Eh, Lily?"
"Oh, I don't know," said Doris.
She was taciturn in the presence of Nicholas and his warm, friendly admiration.
"We both want you to feel that you've got real pals in us—people that you can always turn to, you know. I don't want to think of your going through any more of those lonely times that you were telling me about——"
"It's awfully sweet of you both," said Doris slowly. She looked at Nicholas as she spoke.
His small, tawny eyes expressed all the candid, unsubtle simplicity of his spirit. A hundred times he had looked at Lily herself with just such open, uncritical admiration.
"I think you've a great deal to be proud of, you know," said Nicholas. "There must have been times when you felt pretty nearly down and out, eh?" And Doris again replied:
"Oh, I don't know."
"But I do," said Nicholas, nodding triumphantly.
Lily wondered, with a certain impatience, why Doris did not indulge in one of those lengthy expositions of her own grievances against life, and the hospital, and her father, with which she had so often wearied her patient.
Was she really sufficiently intelligent to realize how very much more effective was this uneloquent refusal to dwell upon the hardships that Nicholas was so evidently ready to accept at her own valuation?
Next morning, however, when the two were again alone together, Doris was quite as voluble as ever and Lily quite as profoundly fatigued by her.
"I shall soon be strong enough to get up," said Lily. "I don't want to lie here longer than I need."
"You're like me," Miss Dickenson retorted. She possessed a wonderful power of extracting a personal application from apparently anything in the world. "That's just like me. I never can bear to give in. You know, sometimes I've really been on my last legs, as the saying is, and the Sister or someone has noticed it, and told me to slack off a bit. But I simply can't take things easily. I have to go on till I drop. That's absolutely me all over."
She leant back comfortably in an armchair as she spoke and began to polish her finger-nails with the palm of her hand—a favourite exercise.
"I was so awfully surprised at your not manicuring, Mrs. Aubray. It was one of the first things I noticed about you. You know, I'm afraid I always notice people's hands. It's the first thing I look at, almost. I suppose I sort of judge people by that. I sort of can't help it. I always look first of all at their hands."
Lily wondered, with the acrimony born of weariness, why this well-worn boast should almost invariably emanate from those least capable of any intelligent observation whatsoever.
She ignored Miss Dickenson's claim to perspicacity altogether, and replied to her earlier remark.
"I hope you don't feel that you have to go on till you drop, here. It's the last thing I should wish, and besides there's nothing but weakness the matter with me. I shall be getting up very soon—I hope before my aunt comes."
"Oh, yes, your aunt is coming. Now, when I'm ill, I never have any of my relations near me—not my sisters or anyone. It isn't that I don't think they'd come, you know, but I simply couldn't ask them. A weird sort of pride, I suppose. I really am a weird sort of person altogether, you know."
Lily closed her eyes.
"What makes you put that face on—it makes you look so weird. What were you asking about—oh, yes—me when I'm ill. It's too funny, you know. I go on and on long after other people would have let themselves collapse, and then, when I do have to give in, of course I'm most frightfully bad. I'm a fearfully bad patient, too, because I'm always down on the nurse. I suppose it's because I know so well how nursing ought to be done."
"Oh," said Lily.
She remained speechless, even after Miss Dickenson had three times asked what made her say it like that.
"It sounded so weird," remarked Doris distrustfully, in conclusion.
But the sense of irony that occasionally sustained Lily was not always at her command. She regained her strength very slowly, and had no great desire to be well again.
Her relations with Nicholas were in a curiously fluid state. His presence, after enduring that of Doris Dickenson all day, always brought to her a rush of relief and pleasure, and often his companionship appeared to her as almost a perfect thing. The revulsion of feeling was proportionately painful when words of his, casually and kindly spoken, from time to time forced upon her an unwelcome realization of the gulf that mentally separated them.
They would never agree about people.
Lily, shamefacedly admitting the immense importance to herself of the personal equation in life, yet tried to blame herself for regarding the difference between them as being an important one. Sometimes, even, in her weakness and youthfulness, she tried to deny its existence.
Her husband's cult for Doris Dickenson, however, Lily unaffectedly welcomed. Incomprehensible though it seemed to her that Miss Dickenson's company should afford aught but weariness to anybody, she was glad that Nicholas should not have a solitary breakfast and dinner.
He always disliked being alone, unless when he was busy, and Lily felt vaguely that her prolonged stay upstairs would be partly compensated for if she could provide other companionship for him.
She was glad to remember that Nicholas had always liked Aunt Clo.
When Miss Stellenthorpe's visit became due, Lily said to her husband:
"Am I to say anything to Miss Dickenson about going away?"
"Why?" said Nicholas, looking astounded.
"I thought she was only staying till Aunt Clo arrived; and Aunt Clo will be here to-morrow."
"Oh well—it isn't a sort of Box and Cox arrangement, is it? There's plenty of room for them both. Just as you like, my dear, of course—but your aunt might feel freer if you still had your regular nurse at your beck and call. Besides, she's a nice girl—a nice girl, and a plucky one. You'd be sorry to lose her."
To the daughter of Philip and Eleanor Stellenthorpe it was almost an impossibility to cut across that kind, well-pleased statement with a wounding contradiction.
Lily's spirit sought the familiar refuge of the weak, a feeble and unconvinced optimism. "Perhaps Doris will go of herself, when Aunt Clo is here."
To a certain extent, the half-hearted prediction was verified, although the eventual departure of Doris Dickenson was not, perhaps, entirely a matter of free-will.
"Bambina!" said Miss Stellenthorpe, less than a week after her arrival, with even more than her habitual emphasis of diction. "Bambina mia! How can this be?"
"What?"
"This canaglia!" said Miss Stellenthorpe, snapping her finger and thumb and becoming several degrees more cosmopolitan than usual.
"But who—what—je vous le demande—who is this Dickenson ... que vient-elle-faire dans cette galère? Ecco! My Lily! Mais c'est rigolo, voyons!"
It was always a little difficult to be adequate when replying to Aunt Clo.
"She is looking after me professionally—she's been properly trained."
"Ahimé!" Aunt Clo sighed gustily, her eyes upturned to Heaven.
"I don't like her," Lily confessed. "She tires me very much; she talks such a lot, and really what she says is never worth hearing."
There was actual relief in putting into words the thoughts that she had so often suppressed in her own mind.
"Basta! I understand, my child. Enough. You lie there, like a trampled flower, with this thing—this inferior, third-rate machine—rattling above you! But of what is Nicholas, ce bon Nicholas—of what is he thinking?"
"He arranged it on purpose for me—he was thinking of me," said Lily eagerly. "He thought she would be more of a companion than just an ordinary nurse. We know her family, and she was to be here more or less as a friend."
"Et patati et patata," said Miss Stellenthorpe scornfully. "Leave this to me, little one. I understand the Dickenson type very well."
It appeared indeed that she did.
Sitting in Lily's room, her large and shapely legs crossed beneath the astonishingly brief serge skirt that had temporarily replaced the blue knickerbockers of Genazzano, Miss Stellenthorpe elegantly smoked a number of cigarettes, and eyed the while, with critical penetration, Miss Doris Dickenson.
"You're like me, Miss Stellenthorpe. I'm afraid I smoke like a chimney—you know, my nerves sort of want it, somehow. I always inhale, too. Everyone always says I smoke too much."
"And who is 'everyone'?" negligently enquired Miss Stellenthorpe.
Doris stared at her.
"Everyone is everyone, I suppose," she said shortly.
Aunt Clo smiled with irrepressible superiority, turning to her niece.
"But how typical, is it not, of young England? The art of definition: everyone is everyone, she supposes! Ha, ha!"
"One talks carelessly, sometimes," Lily said, strongly inclined to laugh.
"But not at all," graciously exclaimed her aunt; "if by 'one' you allude to yourself, carina, I can assure you that it is not so. Your vocabulary, your originality, the extent of your reading, all combine to render your conversation stimulating. How I revel in the clash of wits! My niece and I between us must teach you the use of words, my little Dickenson."
Aunt Clo's little Dickenson appeared to be far from delighted at the proposition.
"How d'you mean, the use of words?" she asked curtly.
"Your vocabulary," Aunt Clo explained in a kind voice, "is that of a child, or a savage. It is, I believe, a statistical fact that certain savage tribes use a language of only two hundred words. It suffices for their need of self-expression. The vocabulary of the average English man or woman comprises little over fifteen hundred words, in daily use. People like myself, on the other hand, sooner or later have recourse to the most recondite expressions available, in the instinctive desire to avoid the banale. Words from other languages creep in—classical quotations—conversation becomes an art——"
Miss Stellenthorpe waved her cigarette gracefully round her head.
"How devastating!" said Doris Dickenson in the pause that followed.
Her voice was charged with the rather laboured sneer that in the English middle-classes is described as "sarcasm."
"Unhappy one!" said Aunt Clo, and groaned aloud. "What is this 'devastating' that you employ à tort et à travers? A senseless and meaningless cliché!"
She fixed a large and gleaming eye, that held undisguised horror in it, upon Doris.
Lily was conscious of a fearful joy in listening, as the many scathing criticisms that had thronged into her own mind were thus eloquently and unrestrainedly put into words by her aunt.
The sulky face of Miss Dickenson was darkly flushed.
"I speak thus for your own good, my Dickenson," said Aunt Clo, shaking a long forefinger. "You render yourself intolerable to the well-educated, and it is but a kindness to tell you so. Not only are you inexperienced, and therefore crude of outlook, but you are ignorant, self-assertive, stupidly bombastic, and talkative to a degree that——"
"Really, Miss Stellenthorpe, if you think I'm going to sit down under such rudeness——"
Doris's voice had risen instantly to the true virago's pitch of shrillness.
"Silence!" said Aunt Clo. "You disturb my niece. Perform the material duties, my Dickenson, for which I remark that you have been well trained, but cease to weary us with the trivialities of your conversation. En voilà assez, n'est-ce-pas?"
"I don't understand gibberish."
It was evident that Doris, after the manner of her kind, was recklessly seeking after rudeness for the sake of rudeness, regardless of wit or point. Miss Stellenthorpe raised her handsome eyebrows in an expression of patient despair.
"You perceive, my Lily? This girl—mal' educata indeed, as my beloved Italians say—knows neither her own language nor any other. What can you expect of such? Deplorable, oh deplorable!"
Aunt Clo looked at Miss Dickenson and shook her head repeatedly.
"Wretched one, have you never been taught that until you have learned the art of listening, you are unfit to talk? L'art d'ennuyer c'est de tout dire. That art, my unhappy Dickenson, you possess to the full. It is your only one. I come to this house—straight, I may tell you, from unravelling the many tangled threads of another's destiny—I come, and what do I find? What, I ask you, do I find? I find my niece, broken in body and spirit, needing the utmost cherishing, the greatest delicacy of handling, the reticence of true sympathy—and compelled instead to submit to your ministrations. You ask me, perhaps, to tell you fully and freely of what those ministrations consist."
"I don't ask you," cried Doris passionately. "I don't want to know what you think."
"Non far niente! I shall tell you just the same," declared Miss Stellenthorpe with unabated spirit. "Pour moi il n'y a que la vérité. The day will yet come when you will remember my frankness with gratitude and admiration. But even should that day not come, my Dickenson, it matters little. The time has come for me to speak, and I shall speak. I have sat here in silence," said Aunt Clo, not altogether truthfully, "and I have been filled with amazement that my niece should not, long ago, have said what I am saying now. Instead, with a supineness for which, candidly, I blame her, she has allowed herself to be overwhelmed. Overwhelmed, you ask me, by what? By a ceaseless torrent of meaningless, ill-chosen, unmelodious words, my Dickenson, strung together without rhyme or reason. You have but one topic—the supremely uninteresting one of yourself. You are reminded of yourself à tout bout de champ—worse, you insist upon reminding us of yourself. But we do not want to know about you. You are not interesting. A-t-on jamais vu un toupet pareil! You tell us of your views, your habits, your trivial little experiences, as though they were of cosmic importance. Could futility go further, I ask you? You reply at once: No, undoubtedly not. There is yet hope for you, then."
On this optimistic pronouncement Aunt Clo met at last with the interruption that her niece, fascinated by so much candour, had been unable to offer.
Nicholas Aubray entered.
"Well, well," said he cheerily, "the Female Parliament sitting?"
The trivial pleasantry was received in perfect silence, and Nicholas cast a sudden, shrewd glance round the room.
"What on earth——?"
"Niente!" said Aunt Clo vivaciously. "A few words, amico mio, of counsel to the young—the very young, I may say."
"Is that Lily?" asked her husband, with a rather puzzled smile.
"But no! Our Lily may be young in years, but in wit, in understanding, she is delightfully mature. But the little Dickenson there—sans rancune, hein, my Dickenson?"
Miss Dickenson's heavy face, from red, had become white.
She looked at Miss Stellenthorpe, with the concentrated hatred that only embittered vanity can engender.
"I am going to leave the house," she said thickly. "I shan't stay in a house where I've been insulted."
"Who has insulted you in this house?" demanded Nicholas, half smiling.
Doris made a dumb gesture indicating Miss Stellenthorpe.
"Nonsense!" said Nicholas brusquely. He put his hand on the girl's arm.
"What's all this about? You've misunderstood something. What is it?"
"Rien de rien!" declared Aunt Clo contemptuously. "For the little Dickenson's own good, mon ami, I take it upon myself to point out certain wearisome tricks that our Lily has borne far too long, and hence comes this talk of insult. Enfantillage!"
Aunt Clo's cigarette described a parabola that dismissed the subject as being one of no further importance. Nicholas turned to his wife.
"Lily—of course Miss Dickenson mustn't dream of leaving us. We should be most distressed——"
Lily looked at Doris.
She had neither the courage to persuade her to stay, nor to encourage her to go.
"I shan't stay," said Doris obstinately.
Nicholas frowned, looked at his wife appealingly and then at Miss Dickenson with evident concern.
It came to Lily, with a slight sense of shock, that Nicholas could not be depended upon in a crisis. He was uncertain.
Doris was staring at him with smouldering eyes, and both were silent.
It was Aunt Clotilde, high-handed to the last, who carried off the situation.
She uncrossed her amazing length of limb, rose to her feet with a swinging movement, and flicked the ash off her cigarette with considerable elegance of gesture.
"You have said well, my Dickenson," observed Aunt Clo. "You will remain here no longer. Go, then; and on no account forget what I have said to you. Speak less, eschew slang, learn to place your words correctly, avoid clichés that mean nothing, and above all, cast from your mind for ever the delusion that the art of conversation consists in the dropping of detached pieces of information concerning yourself."