Muriel led the way into the small curtained recess which was dignified by the title of the back drawing-room.
“You see,” she explained, “mother always likes me to take my own friends in here, and she and the old people stay in the other room. Then we don’t get in each other’s way.”
More laughter, as at a witticism.
“My dear, I’m simply thrilled about the hats,” began Miss Newlyne instantly. “Now, have you settled which it is to be — the bow or the buckle?”
“It’s the buckle. I simply couldn’t bear that bow, when I actually saw it on. It’s about the bridesmaids’ hats, Zella. This is another bridesmaid, Enid — you know, my cousin,” said Muriel in a rapid, explanatory manner.
“Oh yes, rather,” replied Miss Newlyne with a sort of vague general enthusiasm.
There was a fresh influx of visitors, and Muriel jumped up and vanished through the curtains, with the ready laugh that appeared to herald most of her movements.
The other girl talked rapidly and good-naturedly to Zella, who observed that her vocabulary bore a singular resemblance to Muriel’s own. Most things connected with the approaching wedding were ripping, some were lovely, and one or two were simply weird.
Presently Muriel returned with another girl and a very young man, both of whom were greeted with familiarity and mildly humorous remarks by Miss Newlyne.
“There aren’t enough chairs to go round, but that’s a detail,” remarked Muriel. “Jack must sit on the floor.”
She paused to laugh, and everyone else laughed too.
“You see, I always bring my own friends in here, when mother has the parents in the drawing-room, so then we don’t get in each other’s way.”
This piece of information Zella heard reiterated as often as Muriel ushered anyone into the back drawing-room. And as a source of amusement it appeared to be unfailing.
In the midst of much giggling, the bell rang once more, and Muriel jumped up:
“That’s Chumps!” she screamed. “I’ll go and bring him in.”
Bringing Chumps in was apparently a work of time, but presently Muriel reappeared, with a very pretty air of triumph, followed by a tall, good-looking young man some years older than herself.
He was greeted with various cries of “Hullo, Chumps!” to which he responded with much amiable chaff, and then subsided into a small chair beside Zella, to whom Muriel had just introduced him.
Zella, subconsciously desirous of making a good impression, talked to him rather at random, and did not feel that they made much progress towards acquaintanceship in their ten minutes’ conversation.
The talk became general. He and Muriel appeared to find a peculiar enjoyment in contradicting one another incessantly, appealing to the others with various disparaging comments.
“Now, isn’t he perfectly mad, Zella? Did you ever hear anyone talk such nonsense in your life?”
“It isn’t nonsense, is it, Jack? It’s she who’s mad, if you like — mad as a hatter. Let’s feel her pulse — racing like anything. I knew she was delirious.”
He possessed himself of Muriel’s hand, and she giggled violently, struggling to release it.
“You are an idiot, Chumps! do let go. You’re shocking my cousin.”
“No, I’m not. It’s you that are shocking her, if anyone is,” was Chumps’s immediate repartee.
But Zella was shocked by them both.
Was this what Aunt Marianne meant by describing the engaged couple as madly in love and radiantly happy?
Apparently it was, for later in the evening Mrs. Lloyd-Evans came to Zella’s room and asked her whether it were not wonderful to see Muriel’s happiness.
“And I feel,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Evans impressively, “that one need never, under Providence, feel anxious about her in the future. Dear Chumps is devoted to her, heart and soul, and one cannot see them together without feeling how perfectly they are suited to one another. You know, Zella dear, ‘marriages are made in heaven,’ they say, and that is what one feels in this case.”
“Oh yes,” said Zella sympathetically.
“Muriel is very young, but, after all, marriage is a girl’s natural sphere, and a woman’s life is never complete, dear, until she has met her mate.”
Zella, inwardly thinking the words odiously reminiscent of the Zoological Gardens, maintained her expression of intelligent sympathy, and Mrs. Lloyd-Evans continued to discourse in the low, heartfelt monotone characteristic of her, with an expansion that suggested recent repression.
Indeed, Zella, remembering Aunt Marianne as the gentle but inflexible autocrat of Boscombe days, noted with surprise the changed relations between the erstwhile submissive and blindly obedient Muriel and her mother. Not that Muriel had become undutiful now. Her manner towards her mother was affectionate, with a hint of tolerance, and she received all Mrs. Lloyd-Evans’s most gently solemn platitudes about marriage with shrill, good-natured laughter.
Zella wondered whether James would also have evolved upon the independent lines which had been indicated in his boyhood, and looked forward with some curiosity to meeting her cousin at dinner that evening.
She put on the white Parisian evening dress chosen for her by the Baronne, and looked at herself in the glass.
Her thick pale brown hair was waved on either side of her pretty forehead, accentuating the colourless delicacy of her small face, and her dark grey eyes were brilliant under the straight black brows and lashes.
Zella told herself firmly that she was a great deal prettier than Muriel, and resolutely crushed down a certain lurking sense, resented by her fastidiousness as well as her vanity, that Muriel had attained some coveted goal, and was consequently entitled to triumph.
In the drawing-room she found Mr. Lloyd-Evans, who greeted her with his accustomed air of melancholy kindness, and said:
“Well, here’s my little girl cutting a dash — getting married before she’s nineteen. Much too young, I call it. But Carruthers is a very good fellow, and they’re desperately keen on one another. We all know the course of true love can’t be stayed, eh?”
Zella rightly conjectured that her Uncle Henry was thus obliquely expressing his pride and satisfaction at Muriel’s prospects.
In the midst of her prettily worded congratulations James Lloyd-Evans entered the drawing-room.
Zella was surprised at the feeling of pleasure with which she greeted her cousin. They had not met since the Boscombe days, and from a plain, taciturn boy James had become a tall hatchet-faced young man, holding himself badly, with the slouching shoulders and permanent frown of extreme short-sightedness, his sole claim to good looks an infrequent but humorous smile.
His melancholy eyes, resembling his father’s, expressed unmistakable admiration as they rested on Zella, and her instant perception of the fact gave a charming self-confidence to her manner.
The old sense of being understood rushed back upon her even during the few words they exchanged before Muriel and her mother came rustling in, closely followed by the announcement:
“Captain Carruthers!”
In the small dining-room, which seemed filled to overflowing with six people in it, Mrs. Lloyd-Evans was arch, Muriel almost hysterically full of giggles, and her fiancé sheepish, as to the necessity of not “dividing” the engaged couple. Under cover of much laughter and facetiousness, James said to Zella, “Sit here, while they’re making up their minds, won’t you?” and took his stand beside her.
Zella felt a thrill of triumphant gratification, and wondered to herself, with some naiveté, what, if the sight of her had so much impressed James, would be the result of intelligent conversation and ready sympathy.
These qualifications were, accordingly, brought into play as soon as the conversation had become sufficiently general to admit of a low-toned duologue between Zella and her neighbour.
Nor did James appear to fail in appreciation.
The intellectual affinity between them, which Zella had always suspected to exist
, was no longer hindered from displaying itself by gentle reminders from Mrs. Lloyd-Evans that “little people should be seen and not heard,” or the inexorable formula, “Jimmy dear, do not try and be clever.”
Zella, falling into one of the abstract discussions familiar to Villetswood, was in her element, and the animation of her face and manner caused Chumps, seated opposite to her, to wonder what topic James could have discovered to evoke such lively interest from the bored and absent-minded Miss de Kervoyou, who had responded so tepidly to his own efforts at conversation that afternoon, “I suppose your cousin is clever, isn’t she?” he hazarded in an undertone to Muriel; and Muriel, feeling that it would be disloyal to make any admission so likely to damage Zella’s chances of social popularity, replied vaguely:
“Oh, I don’t know. She’s awfully nice, any way.”
It was perhaps as well that their intense absorption in the frequent sound of their own laughter prevented Muriel and her betrothed from suspecting the subject of conversation presently selected by Zella.
“An English engaged couple is a new sight to me,” she observed, under cover of an animated appeal from Muriel:
“Now, mother, isn’t Chumps perfectly idiotic?” and her lover’s instant retort: “No, I’m not, am I?”
In point of fact, an engaged couple of any nationality would have been an equally new sight to Zella; but the old desire to show herself cosmopolitan, and if possible slightly Bohemian, was strong upon her. She was rather disappointed at James’s extremely conventional reply:
“They are very happy, which is the main point.”
“That is what Aunt Marianne says, and everyone else.”
“Well?” he asked, laughing a little in answer to the dissatisfaction in her voice.
“Well, it strikes one as curious that all that ragging and laughing between two quite ordinary people should be symbolic of happiness, that’s all.”
Zella had been in earnest, but now suddenly recollected her auditor, and added a more or less insincere rider to her remark:
“Of course Muriel is a perfect darling, but he is quite ordinary, I suppose?”
James, who would not improbably have preferred to postpone a discussion of his future brother-in-law until such time as dimensions wider than those of the Lloyd-Evans dinner-table should separate them, replied dispassionately:
“Quite. You are not going to add, I suppose, ‘What can she see in him ‘?”
Zella, who had been meditating some such platitude, laughed a little and asked if that was the stock remark.
“One is told that it is, from the bride’s relations, and vice versa from the bridegroom’s, in cheap satirical novels about Society with a capital S. But I have never met it anywhere else, have you? Certainly not in this case, where every friend and relation either of them possesses is perfectly delighted about it.”
“It would be difficult to be more delighted than they are themselves,” rather dryly remarked Zella, as fresh peals of delighted laughter proclaimed yet another verbal encounter of wits between the lovers.
“Zella,” said James suddenly, “don’t you see that it’s all a question of proportion. Their capacity for happiness is what it is; neither of them will ask for any more nor wish for it — their measure is full.”
His manner was more free from any assumption of superiority than the words might have appeared to warrant.
“You mean that they have realized the highest ideal of human happiness of which either is capable?”
“Something like that. It’s just a matter of proportion,” repeated James, with an inflexion in his voice that suddenly reminded Zella of the dogmatic schoolboy who had theorized in the schoolroom at Boscombe. “The whole thing will come down to a question of proportion, if you come to think of it — how much one can enjoy, or suffer, or think, or anything. Rottenly put, but I dare say you know what I mean.”
“I wonder if it’s better to be capable of less rather than of more, emotionally, than other people,” said Zella, not wondering in the least, but anxious to inform James that she belonged to the latter category.
“Better to demand less, perhaps, since the Fates are more likely to grant it.”
“I don’t think it’s exactly a question of better or worse. One is as one’s made. Those two are rather exceptional, though, for they’ve got everything they want to make them happy; and I don’t fancy many people get that, however modest their demands.”
“Perhaps one in every million,” said Zella, not averse to a mild display of cynicism on her own account.
“It’s different,” said James rather irrelevantly, “for those who hitch their waggon to a star.”
There was an instant’s silence between them, and her curious sureness of intuition prevented Zella from asking the obvious question.
The next moment James laughed.
“As for our turtle-doves’ methods of displaying their happiness, you know, I don’t expect you to sympathize with it. You aren’t the same sort, and simply couldn’t be expected to understand.”
“Understand what?” said Zella, half flattered at being considered of another, presumably superior, sort, and half piqued at James’s supposing that there was anything in the gamut of human nature that she could not understand.
“Why, the way Chumps and Muriel rag one another.”
“It is very — English, no doubt,” said the descendant of the Kervoyous, with her delicate eyebrows arching in unconscious imitation of the old Baronne.
“It is, very,” cheerfully agreed James, rising as Mrs. Lloyd-Evans made a move towards the door.
“As a matter of fact, Muriel and good old Chumps both belong to the type who, if they had been born in rather different surroundings, would have found the most exquisite enjoyment in constantly changing hats with one another.”
The aphorism returned to Zella’s mind several times during the course of the evening.
From being mildly interested, she became intensely bored at a prolonged and passionate discussion between Muriel and her mother as to the latest additions to the former’s trousseau, and stifled yawns so unsuccessfully that Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, always a firm believer in the tiring effects of a journey, insisted upon dismissing her to bed at half-past nine.
“Muriel shall come in for a little chat when you are in bed, since Chumps has to leave early,” she said consolingly.
Zella was not without hopes that a tete-a-tete conversation with her cousin might yet reveal unexpected aspects of romance, and certainly there was no lack of confidence to complain of.
“My dear,” cried Muriel, establishing herself on the bed and wielding a large silver hairbrush, “I’m simply dying to talk to you; and this is absolutely the last chance we’ll get, for we’re doing things every single night now right up to the day, and there won’t be another moment free. Now, do tell me — what do you think of him?”
“He’s awfully good-looking,” instantly replied Zella, instinctively adapting her vocabulary to Muriel’s.
“Isn’t he? and am I not frightfully lucky?” said Muriel earnestly. “I simply can’t believe it sometimes — to think that only a year ago I was pegging away at that beastly old fiddle in Germany, and now here I am, simply too happy for words, going to marry Chumps in a fortnight!”
The ecstatic contemplation of this climax reduced her to a moment’s silence.
Then Zella said sympathetically:
“Do tell me how it all happened — when you first fell in love, and everything about it.”
“Oh, my dear, it was awful! I simply didn’t care about dances and things unless he was there, after we’d really got to know each other, staying in the same country-houses for shoots, don’t you know.”
“You met at a shooting-party, didn’t you?”
“Yes, last November, at Lady Newlyne’s — the mother of that girl who was here to-day, you know. That’s why I had to ask her to be a bridesmaid, though, as a matter of fact, I simply loathe red hair, and it made it awfully diffi
cult to choose the colour for the dresses. Any way, it was at her house we first met. It was ripping! Everybody was in frightful spirits, and we knew each other awfully well, and we all ragged like anything, don’t you know. One evening some of the men pretended they couldn’t talk anything but broken English, and Chumps took me in to dinner, and was perfectly killing, talking pigeon English all the time.”
Muriel paused to laugh whole-heartedly at the recollection, but, perhaps perceiving some lack of response in Zella’s perfunctory smile, added apologetically:
“Of course it was absolutely idiotic of him, but I must say I do like people to have a sense of the ridiculous, and that Chumps certainly has got.”
Zella felt no doubt of it, as Muriel continued to give her further details of Chumps’s progress through life as a humorist. These bore a strange resemblance to one another, and at last Zella said:
“And when did you first know that he was in love with you?”
“Oh,” said Muriel, “that was the awful part of it! I wasn’t a bit sure whether he really did care, you know, until the night of our dance. Of course we were great chums and all that, but I couldn’t believe he really cared — simply couldn’t believe it! Well, at the dance he did say something, when we were sitting out — the sort of thing that might or might not mean anything, don’t you know.” She paused.
“I know,” said Zella sympathetically, wondering what on earth she meant.
“But he didn’t absolutely propose till the next Saturday afternoon, when he came to Hurlingham with us. I can remember the very date,” said Muriel impressively. “It was the 20th of April; and the wedding-day will be exactly three months afterwards. Isn’t it weird?”
Zella was spared the necessity of agreeing by a series of taps on the adjoining wall, which Muriel interpreted as a signal from Mrs. Lloyd-Evans that Zella should be left to rest.
“I must go, I suppose,” Muriel said. “You are a dear, Zella, to be so nice and sympathetic. I expect next year you’ll be getting ready for your own wedding. I do hope so.”
“What does it feel like?” inquired Zella of her departing cousin, in the desperate hope of extracting a definition of the undefinable.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 20