When Thursday morning dawned serene and cloudless, Zella woke early, and lay in bed reading intently until she remembered, with a sickening pang, that on this day was to take place her mother’s funeral.
Then she pushed the book away and began to sob, with a dreary sense of shame and degradation added to her unhappiness.
After the silent breakfast, at which Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, with all the first shock of her grief apparently renewed, had refused everything but a cup of tea, Louis de Kervoyou said abruptly:
“They will be here at two o’clock, Marianne, to fetch”
“I know — I know,” she interrupted hurriedly.
“It will take quite an hour to walk down there; they will have to go slowly.”
The coffin of Esmee de Kervoyou was to be borne down the hill to the village churchyard by some of the tenants on the estate.
“Will anyone be coming back here afterwards?” asked Mrs. Lloyd-Evans.
“Only old Mr. Oliver and his daughter, who will have a long way to drive,” said Louis, with his fixed composure; “and Henry, of course,” he added.
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans’s husband was arriving that day.
“Will you be kind enough to see about some refreshment, Marianne?” said Louis. “They will be back here by four o’clock.”
“I will see to it all. These duties are so dreadful, but one must be brave. Don’t think of it, Louis; I will do it all.”
Zella listened as though she were in a dream. Presently she turned to her aunt, and whispered: “Am I going to — to — it?”
“Oh yes, darling; you will walk with poor papa,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Evans aloud.
“What is that?” Louis looked round, and was struck with compassion at the sight of Zella’s colourless face and the great stains round her eyes.
“Why don’t you go out into the garden? It is a lovely day,” he said gently.
Zella shrank back a little, looking at her aunt, whom she felt to be shocked at the suggestion, and Mrs. Lloyd-Evans interposed tactfully:
“It will be beautifully fine for this afternoon. Zella will walk down to the church with you, Louis, I suppose.”
He looked at her as though he scarcely understood.
“I had never thought of her coming at all,” he said at last. “Why should she? You don’t wish to come, do you, Zella?”
Zella hesitated, thinking that her father wanted her to say no, and that her aunt would think her heartless if she did.
“Whichever you like,” she faltered.
“Zella is quite old enough to come to her own mother’s—” Mrs. Lloyd-Evans again choked over the word and left it unspoken. “Indeed, Louis, I think we must consider what people would say, dreadful though it seems to think of these things at such a time; but people would wonder”
“There is nothing to wonder about. She shall do as she wishes. Why should she want to go?”
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans interposed quickly:
“Zella, my poor child, you want to see your dear, dear mother laid to rest, don’t you? near the little church where “Mrs. Lloyd-Evans stopped rather abruptly, as she discovered that she could not recall any possible connection between the little church and Esmee’s memory.
“Her mother is dead,” cried Louis, low and vehemently. “What they are taking to the churchyard is not her. I will not have any false sentiment introduced into the child’s mind. Zella, you can decide for yourself. Do you wish to go or not?”
“No,” murmured Zella, who was frightened at a tone which she had never heard before from her merry, kindly father.
Louis de Kervoyou, as he left the room, made a gesture of acquiescence that was supremely un-English, and served to remind Mrs. Lloyd-Evans that one must make allowances for a brother-in-law who was practically a Frenchman.
“Poor papa is very much overwrought, darling, and no wonder,” she murmured. “Besides, gentlemen do not always think quite as we do about these things.”
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans always spoke of “gentlemen,” never of “men,” unless they definitely belonged to the lower classes of the social scale.
“Gentlemen do not always quite understand,” was one of her favourite generalizations, and she told Zella gently that gentlemen did not always quite understand the comfort that was to be found in the Church.
Zella thought that her aunt would be shocked if she said that she had-very seldom been to church, and had not liked it when she had gone, so she answered tearfully:
“Poor papa! he is dreadfully unhappy.”
“You must try and comfort him, dear child.”
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, not in general prodigal of endearments, now seemed unable to address her niece without some such expression. Zella felt vaguely that it must be appropriate to her new black frock and bereaved condition.
“Why not go to him in the study, darling, and tell him that dear mother is in heaven and happy, and he must try and not grieve for her, and that you mean to be his little comfort?”
Zella, at this suggestion, mechanically saw her own slender black-garbed figure kneeling beside her father’s chair in the study, and heard her own clear, unfaltering voice uttering tender sentiments of faith and consolation. It seemed appropriate enough, and Aunt Marianne evidently thought it so. A certain subtle discomfort at the back of her mind, however, warned her that the project, for some reason which she could not quite analyze, might prove difficult to execute.
“Perhaps afterwards,” she faltered, “not now.”
“No, darling, now is best,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, with the soft-voiced inflexibility, totally unfounded on reason, characteristic of her where her own opinions were concerned. “Papa is all alone in the study; it is your place to comfort him.”
It must be the right thing to do, then.
Zella left the room slowly, and as she crossed the hall she discovered that a little pulse was throbbing in her throat and that her hands had suddenly become cold. She clasped them nervously together, and told herself that papa, who had never been angry with her in her life, could not be anything but comforted if she came to him now. She was his only child — all that he had left to him; it was right that she should try and be a comfort.
She did not know why she felt so frightened.
Suddenly she turned the door handle.
“Come in,” said her father’s familiar tones, with the weary sound that was new to them.
He was sitting at the writing-table, much as Zella had pictured him in her mental rehearsal, and the fact suddenly gave her courage to carry out her own role.
Crossing the room swiftly, she knelt down beside him, and repeated faithfully, though with a nervous catch in her voice, the sentiments deemed appropriate to the occasion by Aunt Marianne.
“Darling papa, please don’t be so dreadfully unhappy. Darling mother is in heaven now, and she is happy, and — and I will try and be a comfort to you always, as she would have wished.”
The hurried, gasping accents, which were all that Zella’s thumping heart allowed her to produce, died away into silence, and she felt that the performance had been absurdly inadequate. She had not even dared to raise her eyes to his, with a beautiful look of trust and tenderness; on the contrary, they were cast down as though from shame.
Still the appalling silence continued. Her father had not moved. At last he spoke, but it was in a tone that Zella had never heard from him before:
“I don’t want any play-acting now, Zella. You can go back to your Aunt Marianne.”
The words cut her like a knife, few though they were and quietly spoken. In such an agony of pain and humiliation as she had never known in all her short life before, Zella sprang to her feet and rushed to her own room.
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans found her there half an hour later, crying convulsively, and soothed her very affectionately, supposing that it was the thought of her mother’s funeral which had renewed her tears. But the tears were bitterer and more painful than all those Zella had shed from grief, for they came from her passionate and dee
ply wounded self-esteem.
That afternoon the body of Esmee de Kervoyou was laid in the grave, while her only child, crouching upon the floor in her room, pressed her fingers into her ears that she might not hear the tolling of the bell.
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans had said rather half-heartedly, “My poor child, you cannot stay here alone. Shall Aunt Marianne stay with you?” but Zella had begged to be left alone, and, as Mrs. Lloyd-Evans afterwards said to her husband:
“I was torn in two, Henry. I couldn’t have borne not to follow my poor Esmee to her last resting-place, and, besides, it would have looked so very odd if I, her only sister, had not been there.”
So she had tenderly told Zella to lie down upon her bed and rest a little, and had left a Prayer-Book, with the Burial Service carefully marked, and a Bible, beside her.
While the sound of heavy, careful feet, staggering downstairs under the weight of an awkward burden, was still audible, Zella lay with clenched hands, wishing that she could cry or pray, and feeling utterly unable to do either.
When all the sounds had died away, she took up the Bible and Prayer-Book desperately, but both were unfamiliar to her and she could not command her attention. She had had very little orthodox religious teaching, and had never known the need of a definite creed. She always supposed that her father and mother were Protestants, just as she knew that her grandmother and aunt in France were Catholics, but of the devout practice of either religion Zella knew nothing. In fact, Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, who called herself a Catholic and was a member of the Church of England, had given Zella a greater insight into the orthodox practices of religion during the last few days than any she had as yet received. But in her present overwrought condition Zella found the Bible incomprehensible and the Prayer-Book intolerable.
When the sound of the church bell came, faint and distant from the valley, Zella, shuddering, rose and locked her door, then snatched the copy of “Treasure Island” from the bookshelf, and, crouching against the bed, with her hands over her ears, read furiously.
III
“Henry, if we walk up and down the drive, no one need see us from the village; though, after all, now that it’s all over... one must take up one’s ordinary life again sooner or later, and dear Esmee herself would wish one to be brave. Besides, I want to talk to you, and since poor Louis is again shut up in the study, and I have persuaded Zella to lie down, we may as well get some fresh air before it grows dark.”
“Come along,” said Henry Lloyd-Evans thankfully.
He was a tall, melancholy-looking man, who had been depressed and uncomfortable all day, and was heartily relieved to get out of the house of mourning.
“First of all,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, taking her husband’s arm, “how did you leave the children?”
“All right. They were going to bicycle to Redhill this afternoon, and have tea in the woods.”
“Henry dear, I don’t think you should have allowed that. The servants will think it so odd. You may be sure they know perfectly well that the funeral was to-day. If Miss Vincent had been there, she would not have allowed such a thing, and the children must have known that perfectly well. It was very naughty and artful of them.”
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans often suspected other people of artfulness, and it was a continual distress to her that she so frequently discovered traces of it in her own children.
“Muriel asked me if it would be all right, and I said yes; it really didn’t seem to matter, so far away, and you couldn’t expect the poor kids to stick indoors on a fine day like this,” said her husband apologetically.
“Of course not, Henry — I am not so unreasonable as to expect anything of the kind; but they could quite well have stayed in the garden, and I think it showed great callousness to have gone tearing about the country on bicycles while their aunt, my only sister:” Mrs. Lloyd-Evans showed a tendency to become tearful.
“My dear,” protested Henry, “I don’t suppose they can even remember your poor sister.”
“Nonsense! James was eight and Muriel nearly seven last time they stayed here. And little Zella has always been like a sister to them.”
A sister with whom they had quarrelled so violently that Zella’s last visit to the Lloyd-Evans’s, two years ago, had been brought to an untimely end at her own request. Henry remembered the occurrence grimly, and how quietly voluble his wife had been upon the subject of Zella’s deplorable upbringing, which she had stigmatized in one breath as foreign, pagan, and new-fangled.
But he had long ago learnt the futility of arguing against his Marianne’s discursive inconsequence and gentle obstinacy, and he was at all times a man who preferred silence to speech.
“I wanted to ask you about Zella,” continued Mrs. Lloyd-Evans—” whether it wouldn’t be a good idea to take the poor little thing back with us on Saturday. It will cheer her up to be with companions of her own age, and the change will do her good. I don’t know what poor Louis is going to do with her, I’m sure.”
“To do with her?” echoed Henry uncomprehendingly.
“Yes. I don’t suppose he’ll keep a girl of fourteen alone with him, in this great lonely place. She has had no proper education — only what poor Louis himself has taught her, instead of engaging a good sensible governess — and the best thing he could do would be to send her to some first-rate school.”
“He may — eventually — marry again.”
“Henry,” said his wife with gentle impressiveness, “do not say things that sound unfeeling.”
Henry became silent.
“For my poor Esmee’s sake,” continued Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, after a suitable pause, “I want to be a mother to her child. And I can’t help feeling, Henry, how dreadful it would be if Zella got into the hands of her father’s French relations.”
“I didn’t know he had any.”
“Henry! I have spoken of them to you myself times out of number. You can’t have forgotten. There is that dreadful old Baronne, as she calls herself — though I always think those foreign titles sound very fishy — who pretends to be Zella’s grandmother.”
“How can she pretend to be? Either she is or she isn’t,” Henry, not unnaturally, remarked.
“She is Louis’s stepmother, don’t you remember? and consequently no relation whatever to Zella,” explained Mrs. Lloyd-Evans resentfully. “And I must say, Henry, it seems to me very extraordinary that neither she nor her daughter should have taken the trouble just to cross the Channel, when they heard of this dreadful tragedy. Dearest Esmee was always perfectly sweet to the artful old thing, and Zella was taught to call her Granny and everything; and now this is the result.”
This logical summing up of the situation was received by Mr. Lloyd-Evans in silence. Presently, however, he said tentatively:
“I suppose they are Roman Catholics?”
“Indeed they are, and I always think it is a most special mercy of Providence that poor Louis was not brought up to be one too. Luckily, his father made some wise stipulation or other before he died, that his son must be brought up in a good old-fashioned Huguenot religion; and the Baronne could not get out of it, although she and her Jesuits must have had a good try.”
“Perhaps,” said Henry, wisely avoiding the burning topics of the Baronne de Kervoyou and her hypothetical Jesuits—” perhaps Louis will want to keep Zella with him for the time being.”
“I mean to talk to him about it, Henry. I know that gentlemen do not always quite understand; but I shall tell him that it would be the best thing possible for Zella to let me mother her for a few months, and perhaps choose a really nice school for her later on. Louis will feel much more free without her, too.”
“Do you know what his immediate plans are?”
“He will certainly travel for a little while,” instantly replied Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, who had no grounds whatsoever for the assertion, beyond her own conviction that this would be the proper course of conduct for her brother-in-law to pursue.
“Then, in that case, Marianne, do as you thin
k best about offering to let Zella come to us.”
Marianne had every intention of doing as she thought best, but she said:
“Yes, Henry dear, one must do all in one’s power at these sad times to help. Don’t you remember the quotation I’m so fond of? —
“‘ Life is mostly froth and bubble; Two things stand like stone:
Kindness in another’s trouble, Courage in one’s own.’”
Henry, who was always rendered vaguely uncomfortable by the most distant allusion to what he collectively termed “poetical effusions,” said that it was growing very dark, and Marianne had better come in before it became any colder.
“It’s not a moment when one thinks of one’s own health or comfort,” Marianne murmured sadly, but she followed her husband indoors.
Meanwhile Zella, kneeling at her bedroom window, with elbows on the sill and chin resting on her clasped hands, wondered miserably what was to become of her. Her mother’s funeral, the culminating episode of those dreadful few days which had been as years, was over. Zella felt dully that there was nothing more to wait for, and found herself thinking vaguely that surely now mother would come soon and make everything all right again and comfort her.
But it was mother who was dead!
Her thoughts wandered drearily to her father. There had been no more silent times alone with him; since Aunt Marianne’s arrival, and since that brief episode in the study that morning, every word of which seemed burnt into her brain for ever, she had not seen him at all. She wondered if he would always be broken-hearted, never to laugh and joke again, like the kind, jovial father she had always known. Were all widowers always unhappy for ever? Zella tried to recall any that she had ever known, and could only remember old Mr. Oliver, who had come with his daughter that afternoon. He was a kind, cheerful old man, who always talked a great deal and laughed at his own jokes; but, then, he was nearly seventy years old, and his wife had died a great many years ago.
“Perhaps when papa is quite old,” thought Zella despairingly: “But how dreadful it will be during all the years and years before he is as old as Mr. Oliver, if he goes on being unhappy all the time! Will there be this dreadful silence all through the house, and nothing to do, and everything reminding us all the time, and never being able to say anything about mother.... Aunt Marianne says he mustn’t be reminded of his loss. One doesn’t Uncle Henry never speak about poor little cousin Archie who died, except Aunt Marianne sometimes, in a sort of very solemn religious way. But how could one speak like that about mother? And yet we couldn’t ever talk about her in an ordinary way, as if she were still here. Oh, how can I ever bear it? To think that I shall never be happy anymore!”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 3