She even said, “Oh, I do wish you were coming, too! I shall miss you so,” and felt that Muriel was her first cousin, exactly of her own age, and that they had been, and would always continue to be, sisters to one another.
And Muriel waxed disconsolate and affectionate, and gave Zella a small flat bottle of very strong scent “for the train.”
Aunt Marianne also gave her a present.
She came to Zella’s room after her niece was in bed, and said very kindly:
“Here is a little keepsake, darling, and I want you to make Aunt Marianne a promise.”
The little keepsake was a copy of the “Imitation,” bound in soft green morocco, with a green satin ribbon marker, and the smallest print Zella had ever seen. The promise was that she should read a chapter of it every night before going to bed.
She made the promise willingly, feeling intensely grateful for the gift, as a token that Aunt Marianne had, after all, found something about her niece that was lovable, although Zella knew herself to be a liar and deceitful and ungrateful.
“Aunt Marianne has marked one or two passages,” Mrs. Lloyd-Evans told her gently. “But of course you can find others for yourself that will have a special meaning for you as you grow older. I always think that a book means so much more to one when one has marked all the little bits that come home to one most.”
Zella, more than most children, had been brought up to consider scribbling on the pages of a book little short of criminal; but grave and considered underlinings and annotations in a book of devotion were a different matter. She rather looked forward to discovering in the “Imitation,” which she had never read, passages peculiarly suited to the especial needs of her soul.
“I have put in a little pressed fern leaf from the garden, dear, to remind you of your home at Boscombe,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Evans; “and I thought one day you would like to add another for yourself, from your dear, dear mother’s resting-place near the little church at Villetswood.”
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans still avoided the expressions “grave” or “churchyard,” and used such euphemisms as the present one, when speaking to Zella.
“I wish you could have paid a little visit there, dear, before going away, just to say good-bye to it.”
“Oh, so do I! cried Zella, who had not thought of it before, but now felt a sudden wish that she and her father had been returning to Villetswood before leaving England. “But it isn’t really good-bye; we shall be back in a month or two.”
“I hope so,” sighed Mrs. Lloyd-Evans. “Good-night, dear child, and remember that you can always count upon a welcome here whenever you like, and for as long as you please.”
Zella knew that it was true, and felt more ashamed than ever for having wanted so much to go away from kind Aunt Marianne and dear Muriel.
The next day she and her father left Boscombe.
“Good-bye, Marianne, and thank you a hundred times for being so good to Zella. I wish I could tell you how grateful I am.”
“Good-bye, Louis. One is so glad to have done all one could.... Take care of yourself, and let us know when you have arrived safely. Zella, my dear child, good-bye, and don’t forget to write to Aunt Marianne. God bless you!” Mrs. Lloyd-Evans added in a low voice: “Be a great comfort to poor papa.”
“Good-bye, Zella,” said Muriel, hugging her. “You will write to me, won’t you?”
“Yes, of course I will; and you’ll write to me, won’t you? Good-bye, Muriel darling!”
“Good-bye, Uncle Henry.”
“Good-bye, Zella.”
“Good-bye.”
The hall resounded with farewells.
At last Zella and her father were in the carriage, and Zella and Muriel had waved handkerchiefs from the hall door and the carriage window respectively, and the horses had turned down the drive and out of sight.
“Oh, I wonder when Zella will be back here again,” instantly sighed Muriel.
“You had better run up to the schoolroom, darling,” said her mother. And she remarked to her husband, when Muriel was out of hearing: “Henry, one never realized before, when dear Esmee’s influence was there, how very foreign poor Louis really is.”
“H’m. I see what you mean,” was Henry’s non-committal rejoinder. He did not see particularly, but Mrs. Lloyd-Evans at once enlightened him.
“What Englishman,” she sighed, “would dream of taking a child like Zella, who is already rather a spoilt, artful little thing, to such a place as Rome? Mark my words, Henry; I should not be in the least surprised if the next thing we hear is that poor Louis, who is very weak and easily led, has been got hold of by some artful old Cardinal and turned into a Roman Catholic.”
VIII
Zella followed her father up the narrow stone stairs to the mezzanino of the house in the Via Gregoriana where lodged the Baronne de Kervoyou and her daughter.
She had not seen the Baronne for what seemed to her a very long while. The last time had been in Paris, when she and her father and mother had stayed at the Hotel Meurice for a fortnight. The memory of that time, which seemed so unutterably bright in the retrospect, brought the ready tears to Zella’s eyes.
She felt rather nervous, though she would not have acknowledged it, and wondered if Grand’mere would make any allusion to her mother. If so, Zella thought, she would very likely begin to cry.
But when they were admitted, by a smiling and bowing man-servant in a white apron, into the small salon, Zella perceived that there was to be no display of emotion.
The Baronne de Kervoyou, stouter than ever, rose with difficulty from her chair, said, “Ah, mon ami, vous voila!” very quietly and kissed her stepson on both cheeks.
She gave her hand to Zella, who curtseyed very prettily, and then stooped and kissed her forehead.
“Stephanie!”
Stephanie de Kervoyou, hovering in the background, came forward eagerly to greet her half-brother, and spoke kindly and affectionately to Zella. The conversation for the first few moments was entirely of the journey, of the rooms engaged by Stephanie at the pension in Via Veneto, for Louis and his daughter, and of their arrival on the previous night.
Zella sat silent. She looked at Grand’mere, and wished, as she had often wished before, that Grand’mere wore more of the aspect that youthful romance would fain attribute to a Baronne de Kervoyou, descended from the Royal House of Orleans, and united by marriage to that ancient and honourable Huguenot family of which Zella’s father was the last representative.
The Baronne was seventy years of age, exceedingly stout, and magnificently upright. Her white hair was drawn back from her large, plain old face under a small black lace mantilla, and she habitually wore the stiffest of black silk dresses. She had never been beautiful, and had known such poverty as only the impoverished aristocracy of France can know, until her marriage, at twenty-seven, to Andre de Kervoyou. Her family had looked upon her tardy alliance with the rich Breton widower as a mesalliance; for the title was of Huguenot creation, whereas the oldest blood of a Royal Family ran in the veins of the poor and unbeautiful Gisele de la Claudiere de Marincourt. She never mentioned the fact, and never forgot it.
The solitary weakness of her life had been her marriage with un protestant.
She had failed to fulfil the many injunctions laid upon her by her confesseur to convert Andre de Kervoyou and his little son, whose mother had been an Englishwoman. And on the condition that she would never attempt to do so, the Baron, when his daughter Stephanie was born, had allowed her to be baptized into her mother’s faith.
Her word given, the Baronne kept it faithfully, even against the peremptory advice of her confesseur, when her husband had died before his son was five years old.
The Baronne changed her confesseur, and confided the religious instruction of her stepson to a ministre protestant of her acquaintance.
She never indulged in remorse, and was wont to say, when remonstrated with by her scandalized Catholic relations: “A promise is a promise. One does not go back u
pon one’s word.Ca ne se fait pas.” The words were characteristic of her. “Pour moi, quand on a dit Ca ne se fait pas, on a tout dit,” she would admit, with her curt laugh.
Zella, who remembered the aphorism of old, supposed that a display of emotion was among the things that are not done, since Grand’mere was imperturbably discussing with her father the exceedingly dull and impersonal matter of a recent change of Ministry in France.
She looked at Tante Stephanie, who had at once taken up her interminable embroidery.
She was a thin, sallow edition of her mother, her fine, straight brown hair brushed back from a high forehead and pushed slightly forward, her complexion colourless, and her aquiline nose ornamented by gold-rimmed pince-nez.
Tante Stephanie had not changed.
Although Zella did not know it, Stephanie de Kervoyou had hardly changed at all in the last twenty years. She had looked equally middle-aged as a pensionnaire, as a young girl, and as a spinster who had long since coiffee Ste. Catherine.
Presently she turned to Zella, and said:
“Your first visit to Rome, child! I look forward to showing you all the beautiful churches and galleries and buildings. St. Peter’s, of course, must be your first visit.”
Her voice, low and musical, was her sole charm.
“I am longing to see it all,” said Zella rather timidly. She was not sure of any artistic tendencies in herself, but her most passionate desire, as always, was to adapt herself to her surroundings.
“You must let me take her out this afternoon, Louis,” said Stephanie eagerly. “It will be a treat for me to have a companion. I do not know if you are busy?”
“Not at all; and if you will lunch with me at the pension we could all go to St. Peter’s together. Provided that my mother can spare you?” he added, turning respectfully to the Baronne.
“But certainly, my dear son,” she replied courteously.
Zella, fresh from the Lloyd-Evans household, where such social amenities as were habitual to the Baronne and her family would certainly have been stigmatized as foreign at the best, and affected at the worst, became slightly bewildered. She felt as though she had been suddenly thrust into a new world, whose standards, though more in accord with those of her own perceptions than were those of the world she had just left, were nevertheless slightly unfamiliar. With characteristic adaptability she made haste to readjust her point of view.
It did not take Zella long to recognize that the whole of her Aunt Stephanie’s enthusiasms were centred upon the Catholic Church and Classical Art. She seldom spoke to Zella of the former, although they visited many churches together, where Zella knelt silently beside the devoutly inclined figure of her aunt, in front of gaudily decked altars erected before coloured plaster statues that seemed to Zella for the most part masterpieces of bad taste. She could not understand how Tante Stephanie, who loved beauty, could be moved to enthusiasm before these unlife-like representations of men and women whom Zella, with a scepticism quite unconsciously imbibed from her parents, cynically supposed to have been medieval impostors or mythical creations of a crafty and superstitious priesthood.
It may be supposed that Stephanie de Kervoyou, praying earnestly and hopefully as she daily did, that the gift of faith might be vouchsafed to her beloved brother and his little daughter, remained unconscious of the thoughts passing through the youthful mind of her niece as they explored one church after another.
“Look, Zella,” said Stephanie, in the Roman Forum.
The sky was brilliant above them, and Zella saw massive stones and innumerable ruins all round. She gazed silently, thinking more of what she should presently say about it, than of what lay before her eyes. It was all very wonderful, and one slender section of an arch, three rough pillars with two great stones laid over them, stood out prominently above the surrounding groups of masonry. Zella wondered if she should admire that. Presently Tante Stephanie pointed to it, and said:
“That is one of the most beautiful things in Rome — the Arch of Titus. It was built by the Emperor when”
The explanation was unheard by Zella, who was lost in the vexation of not having trusted to her own artistic perceptions, and shown Tante Stephanie, by a well-timed exclamation of enthusiastic admiration, how capable she was of instinctively seizing upon the best, without waiting to have it pointed out to her.
Zella’s own artistic perceptions, however, were not to be implicitly relied upon, and on more than one occasion she received proof of this. Her cry of admiration at sight of the great glittering Memoriale to Victor Emmanuel at the corner of the Piazza Venezia was a genuine and spontaneous tribute to the garish beauty of the huge white and gilt erection standing out in bold relief against the brilliant blue of the sky. But Tante Stephanie, after the delicate silence that Zella had learnt to be her only method of expressing disagreement or disapproval, said in the low, diffident voice that nevertheless carried the unmistakable weight of sincerity:
“You know, the Memoriale is hardly considered a very good specimen of architecture. Some of the statuary is good, in the modern style, but you can see for yourself — those little pillars and columns that support nothing at all, and have no raison d’etre, what do they mean?”
“Nothing, of course,” said Zella in tones of conviction. But she was inwardly vexed and distressed at having appeared ignorant and wanting in artistic perception. One might surely have assumed with safety that any building in Rome was a suitable object for admiration, thought Zella with some indignation.
When the Baronne, with the peculiarly abrupt manner that was characteristic of her, and that always made Zella nervous, asked her what she liked best in Rome, Zella could only stammer agitatedly:
“Oh, St. Peter’s, I think, and — and the Forum.”
“Ah, young people like size. To be sure, they are very beautiful, and you will like St. Peter’s more and more as you go there oftener. It is not learnt at one visit, nor at two. And what about modern Italy’s little effort — the Victor Emmanuel monument?” inquired the Baronne, with twinkling eyes.
Zella might have taken warning from her tone, but she felt with relief that here she was sure of her ground, and replied with aplomb:
“Oh, well, of course some of the statues are nice; but as a whole I did not like the architecture much — there are so many little pillars and columns that seem to have no raison d’etre.”
She felt that her judgment was, at all events where Grand’mere was concerned, triumphantly vindicated, and was proportionately disconcerted when the Baronne broke into her short, abrupt laugh.
“I understood, on the contrary, that you had admired it this morning, and personally I am inclined to agree with you. It is only Stephanie who is so ultra-fastidious, with her love of the ancient. The Memoriale, to my mind, is a fine bit of contrast with the old grey buildings all round, and the blue sky behind; but I know little of architecture,” said the Baronne, shrugging her shoulders. “But you, Zella, you should learn to have the courage of your own opinions, my good little one.”
Zella, though much out of countenance, was impelled to speak in her own defence.
“You see, Grand’mere, I know I make mistakes. I do not know much about art yet,” said Zella reluctantly; “but my taste is being formed every day, isn’t it?”
The last aphorism was her father’s, uttered by him the day before.
“That is perfectly true, and I did not intend to hurt your feelings, child,” said the Baronne gravely and politely. “If your taste in art was perfect at fourteen years old, you would be a little miracle; and we do not want miracles, excepting those sanctioned by the Church. But it is better to make an occasional mistake in good faith than to derive your opinions wholesale from another source, however reliable.”
“Yes, Grand’mere, I see.”
Zella felt grateful to the Baronne for immediately leaving the subject.
It was a continual surprise to her that neither her grandmother nor her aunt ever seemed to have any desire of
improving the occasion. To her father’s unvarying indulgence she was used, but it was gratifying always to be treated by Grand’mere and Tante Stephanie as though she were a grown-up person, fully entitled to the consideration due from one adult to another. All that was required of her were certain rather old-fashioned forms of respect to which she had been brought up as a matter of course, and those outward expressions of good-breeding which were almost as natural to Zella as to the Baronne herself. In two months’ time Zella felt as though her life at Boscombe and at Villetswood belonged equally to some dream-like and far-remote past, and as though the routine of her days in Rome would constitute the remainder of her life. She did no lessons, excepting an hour’s French reading every afternoon to her grandmother, when, to her secret surprise and annoyance, her French accent was subject to frequent corrections. Her father undertook to teach her Italian, and set about it by speaking Italian at meals whenever he remembered it; and the most educational items in Zella’s days were the long expeditions to churches, galleries, and museums, with her Aunt Stephanie. And never did Zella acknowledge to herself that these expeditions generally seemed to her wearisome, and merely the lengthy and necessary preliminary that must be gone through before the welcome interruption of tea.
IX
They spent Christmas in Rome.
Hitherto, Christmas to Zella had meant a general sense of holiday and extra enjoyment, and a liberal interchange of presents. That the 25th of December might be looked upon in any other way was somewhat of a revelation to her.
Tante Stephanie religiously kept the fast ordained by her Church all through Advent, and Zella discovered, through the admiring comments of the loquacious manservant Hippolyte, who had accompanied his ladies from Paris to Rome, that she also rose daily to attend the successive Masses from five o’clock onwards at San Silvestro.
The Baronne spoke of Midnight Mass as a matter of course, in spite of the intense cold and her tendency to bronchitis, and Louis de Kervoyou was anxious that his daughter should see all the ceremonies so amply celebrated in the churches of Rome.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 8