To Zella’s absolute dismay, she began to weep uncontrollably. Something in her cousin’s words, and in the violence of his unmistakable sincerity, hurt her unbearably.
“Thank God, you’re crying,” said James earnestly. “We may get to the back of it all now. Don’t you see that he isn’t any good to you, and never can be, nor you to him? He can never touch your reality, and what his may be, God only knows. I suppose it’s there somewhere, smothered.”
“James,” said Zella, with the tears pouring down her face, “what is my reality? Nothing is real to me. I shall never, as long as I live, say this to anyone again, but nothing is real to me. I’ve only played at being unhappy, and at religion, and at every other emotion I’ve ever felt, and somewhere in the depths of me I’ve known all the time that I’m only pretending. Shall I never be sincere about anything? or only just as you said — being what the people with me expect and want me to be?”
“It’s because you want to be liked, and because you want to be admired, and because you are naturally sympathetic; but it’s most of all because you want to be loved. Don’t you see, Zella? What good would Pontisbury’s love do you when it wouldn’t be for the real you at all, but only for the surface bit you showed him?”
“Nobody who knew me really would love me,” said Zella, voicing for the first time in her life her deepest and most intimate conviction. “I am not true. I’ve always known it, ever since I was a little girl. I don’t suppose there’s a day,” she said recklessly, “when I haven’t spoken more or less insincerely, simply for the sake of effect.”
“But it doesn’t pay,” said James with a curious simplicity. “You defeat your own ends. You try to be the same sort as other people, and you’re miserable, and they aren’t convinced; whereas, if you stick to being the kind of person you were created, your own sort find you out sooner or later, and then the other sort don’t matter.”
“It’s been like that with me,” said Zella. “I’ve tried to conform to the standards of all the people whom I’ve been with, until I have no standards of my own left.”
“Yes, you have,” he told her gently. “You know that it’s been all humbug.”
He looked at her compassionately, but with a curious detachment, in the moonlight.
“Oh,” she wailed pitifully, “it will never come right. I’m what I’ve made myself, and Stephen does care for me. I want someone who will believe in me, who will tell me that I’ve not made a muddle of it all.”
“No,” said James; “that is the mistake you’re making. You don’t want someone who’ll tell you you’ve not made a muddle of it all. You know you have, and that way lies salvation. You want someone who’ll tell you that you have made a muddle of it all — and that it doesn’t matter.”
The music from the drawing-room stopped, and almost at once the sound of footsteps and voices drew near.
James took two steps forward, the ample Cardinal’s robes completely shielding his cousin’s tiny figure.
She raised an absurd lace handkerchief to her burning face.
“Where shall I take you?” he asked in a low tone.
“We can walk up and down the lower terrace,” she replied in a steadier voice; and went down the steps.
Along the broad alley, where only one or two paper lanterns had found their way, he paced slowly beside her.
“Zella, are you all right? I don’t ask you to forgive me for having upset you, for it was the only thing to do. But can’t I help you?”
“You have — in a way. I’ve seen myself, for once in my life, without being a pretty picture.”
There was a very bitter note in her voice.
“But, all the same, I don’t say that you’ve convinced me about Stephen. Supposing I cared for him?”
“If you tell me that you want to marry Pontisbury more than you want anything on earth, it’s different. I shouldn’t say ‘You’ll have changed your mind in a year’s time,’ and ‘First love never lasts,’ and all the rest of it. You want it, and you’re willing to take your risks for the sake of having what you want. One must take one’s risks. That’s another thing. But you don’t want it, Zella.”
“I don’t know,” she said faintly.
“Not when you’re down on bedrock, as you’ve been to-night.”
There was a silence.
“James,” said Zella suddenly, stopping and facing him.
They stood still in the moonlight.
The sweeping folds of the scarlet drapery lent a strange dignity to his stooping shoulders and thin aquiline face. Her heart was beating violently, and she was for a moment unable to speak, but he faced her unquestioningly.
It was almost impossible that Zella’s vanity should not have put the obvious interpretation upon his interference.
She was wrought up to a pitch of intense excitement, and the semi-darkness, together with the sense of unreality always inspired by fancy dress, gave her daring. Even the heavy unaccustomed plaits of hair swinging against either shoulder added to her sense of recklessness.
“Why have you told me all this? What makes you try and stop me?”
James looked at her with his melancholy gaze.
“Because,” he said slowly, “the most important thing to me, though it sounds very odd, is trying to avoid muddles. I hate seeing them, and there are so many. Also because we were small children together, and there’s the tie of blood between us; and also” — he paused for a moment, and Zella knew that he had never before put into words what he was about to say—” I care a great deal for Uncle Louis.”
The very naiveté of the remark carried conviction home to her.
The strangest and sharpest pang of the strange evening went through her, and for a moment her wide, frightened eyes glimpsed a vista of hitherto undreamed-of possibilities that receded even as she gazed She caught her breath in a long gasp.
Her courage, like that of most imaginative people, rose in exact proportion to the demand made upon it.
When she spoke again her voice was quite steady:
“I see. The only thing you can do for me now is to forget everything I’ve said, and never, never to remind me of it again.”
“I will never remind you of it unless you ask me to,” he answered.
“I shall never do that,” she said with conviction. “But I shall never forget, either, James, it’s what you said just now — you and I are the same sort au fond, though we are so opposite. In a way I trust you more than anyone — your view, I mean. Tell me one thing. It ought to be, ‘Do you think I shall ever be sincere?” but it isn’t.”
She paused.
“You have answered that question yourself, haven’t you?” he said. “Whatever you are going to ask, it is because you really want to know, and not because it is the right question. You are sincere with the people who understand, Zella. The rest is a matter of more courage.”
She shook her head, but gave him no other reply.
He waited for her question, and it came at last:
“Do you think that I shall ever be happy? Will it always be like this, a sort of self-cheating, trying to win the approbation and affection of anyone I am with, and only succeeding — if I do succeed — at the cost of being more or less insincere all the time? I want to be happy more than I want anything on earth: do you think that I ever shall be?”
“You know,” he said slowly, “I can’t really tell you that. I can’t possibly know. But you want my opinion just for what it’s worth, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then, I don’t think you’ll have a happy life. But I think you’ll be happy — at least once, and perhaps often.”
“If I marry Stephen, do you think that will give me one of the happy times?”
“No; you know I don’t. Neither do you, really. If you’ll only just look at it in an everyday light, Zella. Life is bound to include things like breakfast, and journeys, and colds in the head, all the time. And Stephen’s no good to you for that sort of thing; he only does fo
r making love, and telling you the sad story of his life, and keeping things at high tension generally. He would do all right as the man from whom you’d have to part for ever, and you could have half a dozen farewells and renunciations, and he’d make a magnificent exit and be a heart-rending memory for ever after; but for the ordinary things that go on all the time and every day, he’s no good.”
The girl who had thrilled the night before at the thought that she loved Stephen, and that he loved her, felt the momentary glamour fade from her vision, and knew that it had been brushed away by the naked hand of Truth.
She might rally her forces and leave James unanswered save by her silence and the defiant courage of her return to the lighted room where the music played on and Stephen waited for her; but James’s truth would remain with her, in the oddly colloquial terms in which he had chosen to present it.
For the ordinary things that must go on all the time and every day — breakfasts, and journeyings, and colds in the head — Stephen was no good.
XXIX
“God,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Evans solemnly, yet in tones that reminded Louis of a showman exhibiting the strange peculiarities of his charge—” God is not mocked. There is such a thing as flying in the face of Providence, and that is what Zella has done in my opinion.”
“Then,” said Louis, with unwonted irritability, “I do not agree with your opinion, Marianne. Zella did not care for Stephen Pontisbury, and very sensibly told him so, instead of foolishly drifting into an engagement that would have eventually been broken.”
“And why should it have been broken, pray? He was very much in love with Zella, and told me himself, with tears in his eyes, that she had been his ideal, and he could never care for anyone else again in the same way. It is a fearful responsibility for Zella; one does not know where disillusion and despair may drive a young man.”
“He had only known her ten days, after all, Marianne. His disillusion and despair cannot be so very profound.”
“Louis, you do not know what this means to a nature like his. He told me himself that after this he could never believe in a woman again. And when, as the mother of a son myself, I could not help asking him where he was going, and what he was going to do, what do you think he replied?”
Louis thought for a moment, and then said:
“I should think he flung himself out of the room, and said ‘To Hell!’ and slammed the door after him.”
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans looked rather disconcerted. “I do not know why you should say that. As a matter of fact, he said, ‘I am going to the Devil, for all I care.’ One knows very well he would not have used such an expression to a lady, but that he hardly knew what he was saying. My heart aches for him, and I have no patience with Zella, throwing away such a chance.”
“She would not have been happy with him.”
“How could she have been anything but happy with a good man, who loved her with all his heart, and who could have given her every material advantage as well? She has no heart, or she could not have played fast and loose with him as she did.”
Louis groaned.
“I dare say I’ve not looked after her properly. She is only a child, Marianne, and I let her alone, thinking it a boy and girl affair which would have adjusted itself. In my day, if a young man wished to ask a young lady in marriage, he would have approached her father and demanded a definite permission to pay his addresses to her.”
“That is the terrible system of mariage de convenance, Louis, though, as I always say, inconvenance would be the better word, since we all know that the divorce court in France is made up of unhappily married couples,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, apparently under the impression that the Divorce Courts of other nations existed only for the exhibition of conjugal felicity. “It would have been terrible to expose poor little Zella, badly though she has behaved, to anything of that sort, and one can only be thankful that things are as they are in this country. But all this will do her no good, Louis, mark my words. A girl cannot lead a young man on and on as she did, and then suddenly turn round and refuse him, without getting herself talked about.”
“I do not see who is to do the talking in this case. Pontisbury will naturally keep it to himself, and poor little Zella is too miserable ever to wish the affair mentioned again. Nobody else can say anything, since nobody else has been told.”
“People see things without being told, Louis. Alison St. Craye is quite sharp in her own way, and is probably delighted at having the chance of telling a long story. And then there’s that very fishy Frenchman who dangles about after her. The only person who noticed nothing is poor James, who really wouldn’t have mattered, since he is a near relation, and naturally wouldn’t have cared to spread the story. But then, as I always say, Jimmy goes about with his head in the clouds.” Zella came into the room.
She was pale, and her eyes had dark circles round them from crying. Stephen’s startled, almost incredulous reproaches when she had refused to marry him, finally his anger, had shaken her even while the conviction grew that marriage with him would have been an impossibility. Even Mrs. Lloyd-Evans’s indignant amazement and argumentative disapproval had added incredibly to her despairing sense of utter failure and misery.
Louis had not reproached her, but neither had he commended her, and Zella craved passionately for someone to restore her shattered self-esteem.
Looking ahead with the infinitely far-seeing gaze of youth, life seemed to her unutterably dreary, bereft of the excitement which had coloured the horizon for so short a while, and left her blankly conscious of having failed to find reality on the very threshold of adventure.
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans looked at her with an expression of gloomy commiseration.
“One does not know what to say to you, my poor child!” she untruly observed, “but remember that Aunt Marianne is always there. If you would like to come and stay quietly at Boscombe until all this has blown over, you have only to say so. Uncle Henry and I are always ready for you, as you know, and we shall be quite alone.”
Zella wondered miserably why she should be treated as though only seclusion could henceforth be her portion.
“Thank you, Aunt Marianne,” she said apathetically; “I came in to tell you that the carriage is round.”
Louis rose and went into the hall.
“Well, dear,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, adjusting her veil before the glass, “one wishes the visit had had a happier ending, but what’s done cannot be undone. When you are older, I am afraid you will look back upon this time with pain and shame, and perhaps with bitter regret; but, as I always say, one learns by experience, and there is a silver lining to every cloud. Don’t begin to cry again, my dear child. You have made poor papa very unhappy already, and it is selfish and cowardly to go on crying when it is too late to alter anything.”
Zella was crying again, in a dreary, hopeless way. Her aunt kissed her with reserve.
“You had better not come into the hall, dear; one doesn’t want the servants to see.”
“Marianne!”
Henry Lloyd-Evans hovered uneasily at the drawing-room door, which he had just opened.
“Yes, dear; there is plenty of time. I am just saying my little good-bye to Zella,” called out his wife with a sudden access of spurious cheerfulness designed to deceive the servants who might possibly be outside the door.
“Oh,” said Zella, with an uncontrollable outburst of self-pity, “I am so miserable.”
“Yes, my poor child,” said her aunt, not without a tone of latent satisfaction in her voice. “The way of transgressors is — yes, yes, Henry, I am coming! Do leave the door alone, dear. Well, Zella, one is very sorry to leave you like this; but, as I always say, as the tree falls.”
“Marianne, you will miss your train,” said Louis, in his turn appearing at the door.
“Gentlemen are always so impatient,” ejaculated Mrs. Lloyd-Evans in a tone that boded ill for the peace of Henry’s drive to the station.
“Good-bye, dear, and God bless you
; but you have made your bed, and so must it lie.”
Thus Aunt Marianne, hurried but still reproachful, was borne away from Villetswood.
Louis was driving to the station.
The house, in the heat of the midsummer afternoon, was very still and lonely.
Zella sank on to the floor and leant her head against the window-sill, still crying wearily, because it was easier to go on crying than to do anything else.
She did not wish that she had accepted Stephen, but she wished that her surroundings would admire her and think well of her for refusing him; and, instead of this, every one of those who made up her small world either pitied or blamed her. Except James. But James had gone away on the morning after the fancy-dress dance, and had not even written to her, as Zella had half expected him to do. Besides, the thought of James was too tiring just now. The high level of his uncompromising sincerity, his harsh truths and judgments, seemed to her ugly and uncomforting. She wanted to receive the relief of understanding, and yet the tenderness of pity and the blindness of love.
The door opened softly before Stephanie de Kervoyou.
Zella looked up, with her small pale face and great tear-stained eyes, but did not move.
Stephanie gave a little soft sound of pitying dismay, and came gently forward. Zella dreaded lest she should be implored, however kindly, to get up from the floor, or to stop crying, or told that she would make herself ill.
But Mdlle de Kervoyou said nothing at all. She merely seated herself in the arm-chair nearest the window, and held out her hand half timidly, as though almost expecting to be rebuffed.
Something in the appealing gesture touched Zella, and she leant her brown head against the arm of the big chair, and felt Stephanie’s hand softly stroking her hair.
There was a strange comfort in the unreasoning, unquestioning tenderness, and presently Zella stopped crying.
“Pauvre cherie!” murmured Stephanie. Her tone was almost mechanical, as though Zella would always be “pauvre cherie” whatever the cause of her tears.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 31