Even Sir Francis, who found Achille still discoursing in the drawing-room on his return from the Club at seven o’clock, indulged in a little mild chaffing of his younger daughter when M. de Villefranche amid many bows, had finally taken his leave.
Barbara responded with a sprightly amiability that she had never displayed in her pre-Neuilly days, and which Alex angrily and uncomprehendingly perceived both pleased and amused Sir Francis.
“But I am not sure I approve of your taste in the selection of your admirers, my dear,” he said humorously, his right hand lightly swinging his glasses against his left.
“I have never met any Englishmen, you know, father,” said Barbara piteously, opening her eyes very wide. “If mother would only let me come out this year and see a few people!”
Alex was aghast at Barbara’s duplicity, recognizing perfectly her manoeuvre of implying that only her mother’s consent was still required for her début.
“Well, well, well,” said Sir Francis, wearing the expression of an indulgent parent; “but surely young ladies are expected to wait till their eighteenth birthday?”
“Oh, but I should so like a long frock,” sighed Barbara, her head on one side — an admirable rendering of the typical “young lady” known and admired of her father’s generation.
Sir Francis laughed, unmistakable yielding foreshadowed in his tone, and in the glance he directed towards his wife.
“‘Gad! Isabel, we shall have a regular little society butterfly on our hands; what do you think?”
Lady Isabel, also smiling, nevertheless said almost reluctantly, as though to imply that assent would be in defiance of her better judgment:
“Of course, this year will be exceptionally gay because of the Jubilee. I should rather like her to come out when there is so much going on, but I don’t quite know about taking two of them everywhere.” She glanced at Alex and sighed almost involuntarily. It was impossible not to remember the tentative plans that they had discussed so short a while ago for a brilliant wedding that should take place, just when all London was busy with festivals in honour of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. The same recollection shot like a pang through Alex, feeling the pain of her mother’s disappointment far more acutely than her own humiliation, and making her speak sharply, and almost unaware of what she said, sooner than endure a moment’s silence:
“You can take Barbara instead of me. I hate balls and I’m sick of going to things.”
She was horrified at the sound of the words as she spoke them, and at her own roughened, mortified voice.
There was a moment’s silence.
“That,” said Sir Francis gently and gravely, “is neither a very gracious nor a very dutiful speech, Alex. Your mother has spared herself neither trouble nor fatigue in conducting you to those entertainments organized for your pleasure and advantage, and it is a poor reward for her many sacrifices to be told with a scowling face that you are ‘sick of going about.’ If those are your sentiments, I shall strongly advise her to consult her own convenience in the future, instead of making everything give way to your pleasures, as she has done for the last two years.”
Lady Isabel looked distressed, and said, “It is very difficult to know what you want, Alex. If you’d only say!”
“I don’t want anything; I’m quite happy,” began Alex, overwhelmed with the sense of her own ingratitude; and by way of proving her words she began to cry hopelessly, although she knew that Sir Francis could not bear tears, and that anything in the nature of a scene made Lady Isabel fed ill.
“Control yourself,” said her father.
They all looked at her in silence, and her nervousness made her give a loud sob.
“If you are hysterical, Alex, you had better go to bed.”
Alex was only too thankful to obey. Still sobbing, she received the conventional good-night kiss which neither she nor her parents would have dreamed of omitting, however deep their displeasure with her, and left the room reproaching herself bitterly.
They had all been so cheerful before she spoilt it all, Sir Francis in unwontedly good spirits, and both of them pleased at the harmless amusement caused by Barbara’s visitor.
“I spoil everything,” Alex told herself passionately, and longed for some retreat where she might be the solitary victim of her own temperament, and need not bear the double pang of the vexation and grief which she inflicted upon others.
She did not go downstairs to dinner, and soon after eight o’clock Barbara came in and told her that there was supper in the schoolroom for both of them.
“Though after this,” said Barbara importantly, “I shall be having dinner properly in the dining-room quite soon. They are going to let me put up my hair, and I think they will let me be presented at a late Drawing-room, though they won’t promise. It was settled after you went upstairs.”
“Are they vexed with me?” asked Alex dejectedly.
“Not particularly. Only disappointed.”
Alex would rather have been told that they were angry.
She had not spirit enough left to snub Barbara, discoursing untiringly of all that she meant to do and to wear, until at last her younger sister remarked patronizingly:
“Cheer up, Alex. I believe you’re afraid of my cutting you out. But we shall be quite different styles, you know. I can’t hope to be a beauty, so I shall go in for being chic. Hélène always says it pays in the long run. By the bye, Achille thought you were very pretty.”
“How do you know?”
“He told me so.”
“Nonsense! How could he? I was in the room the whole time.”
“Oh, there are ways and means,” retorted Barbara, tossing her head.
Alex would not gratify her by asking further questions. To her habitual fashion of ignoring slights until it became convenient to repay them, however, Barbara added now an impervious armour of self-satisfaction at the prospect of her approaching entry into the world.
She even, three months later, received with no other display of feeling than a rather contemptuous little laugh, the elaborately-worded lettre de faire part which announced the approaching marriage of Hélène de Métrancourt de la Hautefeuille to her cousin, Achille Marie de Villefranche.
XV
Diamond Jubilee
All that summer every one spoke of “Jubilee weather,” and London grew hotter and sunnier and more crowded day by day.
Alex found herself wishing, fretfully and almost angrily, that she could enjoy it all. But the sensation of loneliness that had always oppressed her, although she did not analyse it, was always most poignant amongst a great number of people, and her listlessness and self-absorption in society at last caused Lady Isabel to ask her gently, but with unmistakable vexation, whether she had rather “leave most of the gaieties to little Barbara, to whom it’s all new and amusing.”
“Why?” asked Alex, startled.
“My darling, I can see you’re not very happy, and I quite understand that, of course, one doesn’t get over these things in a minute,” said Lady Isabel, with a sigh for the memory of Noel Cardew. “This will be your third season, and I had hoped it would be the best of them all, what with the Jubilee celebrations and everything — but if you’re rather out of heart with the gaieties just now, I don’t want to force you into them, poor child.”
Lady Isabel gazed with wistful, puzzled eyes that held nothing but uncomprehending perplexity at her disappointing eldest daughter. Alex knew that she was wondering silently why that daughter, expensively educated and still more expensively dressed, admittedly pretty and well-bred, should still lack any semblance of attractiveness, should still fail to achieve any semblance of popularity.
Alex herself wondered drearily if she was always destined to find herself out of all harmony with her surroundings. She never questioned but that the fault lay entirely in herself, and a sort of fatalism made her accept it all with apathetic matter-of-factness.
She gave inert acquiescence to Lady Isabel’s tentative suggestion
that most of the invitations pouring in daily should be accepted on Barbara’s behalf only, partly because she hated being taken out with her sister, who was always critical and observant, and partly from sheer desire that Lady Isabel should no longer have the mortification of watching a social progress, the indifference of which Alex regarded with morbid exaggeration.
Barbara, rather to Alex’ surprise, although enjoying herself with a sort of quiet determination, proved to be exceedingly shy, but in two months she had achieved several gushing, intimate friendships with girls rather older than herself, which led to her receiving innumerable invitations to tea-parties, a form of entertainment always abhorred by Alex, but from which Barbara generally returned with one or two new acquaintances, who were sure to claim dances from her on meeting her at subsequent balls.
She was not very pretty, and evening dresses, displaying her thin arms and shoulders, took away from the effect of smartness that she had acquired in France, but she danced exceptionally well, and was seldom left partnerless.
Alex often wondered what Barbara, who was notoriously silent and awkward with strangers, could find to talk about to her partners.
It did not occur to her that Barbara made an art of listening to them.
The climax of the season’s festivities was reached on the blazing day towards the end of June, when the Jubilee procession wound its way through the flagged and decorated streets, with the small, stout, black-clad figure in the midst of it all, bowing indefatigably to the crowds that thronged streets and windows and balconies and even, when practical roofs.
A window of Sir Francis’ Club in Piccadilly was placed by him, with some ceremony, at the disposal of his wife, his eldest son up from Eton, and one daughter, but it was evident that he would regard any further display of family as rather excessive, and Alex herself suggested that she should see it all from a window in Grosvenor Place which had been procured for Pamela and Archie, under the care of old Nurse, and various minor members of the household.
“But that would be so dull!” protested Lady Isabel, shocked.
“Alex can do as she pleases, my dear,” said Sir Francis stiffly.
He was not pleased with his eldest daughter, and imagined that her evident shrinking from society arose, not from her acute perception of this fact, but from shame at the recollection of her behaviour towards Noel Cardew, which Sir Francis in his own mind stigmatized as both dishonourable and unladylike. The further reflection he gave to the matter — and reflection with Sir Francis was never anything but deliberate — the more seriously he resented his daughter’s lapse from the code of “good form,” and the harassed look which she was gradually causing to mar his wife’s placid beauty.
He would have liked Alex to be prettily eager for pleasure, as were the young ladies of his day and ideal, and he regarded her obvious discontent and unhappiness as a slur on Lady Isabel’s exertions on her behalf.
Very slowly, with the dull implacability of a man slow to assimilate a grievance, and slower still to forgive what he does not understand, Sir Francis was becoming angry with Alex.
“Let her do as she likes, Isabel,” he repeated. “If the society we can provide is less amusing than that of children and servants, by all means let her join them.”
Lady Isabel did not repeat his words to Alex. She only said:
“Your father says, do as you like, darlin’. We shan’t have over-much room, of course, especially as we have asked so many people for lunch afterwards, but if you really cared about comin’ with us, I could manage it in a minute—”
She paused, as though for Alex’ eager acclamation, but Barbara broke in quickly:
“There won’t be much room, with all those people coming, will there? And father always says that one grown-up daughter at a time is enough, so if Alex really doesn’t want to come it seems a pity....”
So Alex, with an unreasonable sense of injury, that yet was in some distorted way a relief to her, as showing her not to be alone in fault, watched the procession from Grosvenor Place, with Archie flushed and shouting with excitement, and Pamela, in curly, cropped hair and Liberty silk picture frock, such as was just coming into fashion, breaking into shrill cheers of rather spasmodic loyalty, as she fidgeted up and down the length of the bunting-hung balcony.
Alex, on the whole, was sorry when it was all over, and the two children ordered into the carriage by Nurse for the return to Clevedon Square.
She declared that she was going to walk home across the Park, partly because the crowds interested her, partly to assert her independence of old Nurse.
“Then you’ll take James with you, in a crowd like this,” the old autocrat declared.
“Nonsense, I don’t want James. You’ll come with me, won’t you, Holland?”
“Yes, Miss,” said the maid submissively.
Since Barbara’s coming out, the sisters had shared a maid of their own, and Holland very much preferred Alex, who cared nothing what happened to her clothes, and read a book all the time that her hair was being dressed, to the exacting and sometimes rather querulous Barbara.
They found the Park comparatively free from people. Every one had gone to find some place of refreshment, or had made a rush to secure places for the return route of the procession from St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Flags streamed and waved in the sunshine, and swinging rows of little electric globes hung everywhere, in readiness for the evening’s display of illuminations.
Alex suddenly felt very tired and hot, and longed to escape from the glare and the noise.
She wondered whether, if Noel had been with her, she could have taken part in the general sense of holiday and rejoicing, sharing it with him, and whilst her aching loneliness cried, “Yes,” some deeper-rooted instinct warned her that a companionship rooted only in proximity brings with it a deeper sense of isolation than any solitude.
Her steps began to flag, and she wished that the way through the Park did not seem so interminable.
“Couldn’t we find a cab, Holland? I’m tired.”
“It won’t be easy, Miss, today,” said the maid, a disquieted eye roving over the Park railings to the dusty streets where pedestrians, indeed, thronged endlessly, but few vehicles of any sort were to be discerned.
Alex would have liked to sit down, but none of the benches were unoccupied, and, in any case, she knew that Lady Isabel would be shocked at her doing such a thing, under no better chaperonage than that of a maid.
Quite conscious of her own unreason, she yet said fretfully:
“I really can’t get all the way home, unless I can sit down and rest somewhere.”
She had only said it to relieve her own sense of fatigue and irritability, and was surprised when Holland replied in a tone of reasonable suggestion:
“There’s the convent just close to Bryanston Square, Miss. You can always go in there it’s always open.”
“What convent?”
Holland named the Order of the house at Liège where Alex had been at school.
She exclaimed at the coincidence.
“I thought their London house was in the East End.”
“Yes, Miss,” Holland explained, becoming suddenly voluble. “But the Sisters opened a new house last year. I went to the consecration of the chapel. It was a beautiful ceremony, Miss.”
“Of course, you’re a Catholic, aren’t you? I forgot.”
“Yes, Miss,” said Holland, stiffening. It was evident that the fact to which Alex referred so lightly was of supreme importance to her.
“Well, a church is better than nowhere in this heat,” said Miss Clare disconsolately.
Lady Isabel had decreed nearly two years ago that church-going, at all events during the season, was incompatible with late nights, and Alex had acquiesced without much difficulty.
Religion did not interest her, and she had kept up no intercourse with the nuns at Liège since leaving school.
Holland, looking at once shocked and rather excited, pointed out the tall,
narrow building, wedged into a line of similar buildings, with a high flight of steps leading to the open door.
“It’s always open like that,” Holland said. “Any one can go into the chapel.”
The open door, indeed, gave straight on to the oak door of the chapel across a narrow entrance lobby.
Alex was instantly conscious of the sharply-defined contrast between the hot glare and incessant roar of multifarious noises outside in the brilliant streets, and the dark, cool hush that pervaded the silent convent chapel.
The sudden sensation of physical relief almost brought tears to her eyes, as she sank thankfully on to a little cushioned prieu-dieu drawn up close to the high, carved rood-screen before the chancel steps.
Holland had slid noiselessly to her knees behind one of the humble wooden benches close to the entrance.
There was absolute silence.
As her eyes grew accustomed to the soft gloom, Alex saw that the chapel was a very small one, of an odd oblong shape, with high, carved stalls on either side of it that recalled the big convent chapel at Liège to her mind. The wax candles shed a peculiarly mild glow over the High Altar, which was decked with a mass of white blossom and feathery green, but the rest of the chapel was unlit except by the warm, softened shaft of sunshine that struck through the painted oval windows behind the altar, and lay in deep splashes of colour over the white-embroidered altar-cloth and the red-carpeted altar steps.
The peace and harmony of her surroundings fell on Alex’ wearied spirit with an almost poignant realization of their beauty. The impression thus made upon her, striking with utter unexpectedness, struck deep, and to the end of her life the remembrance was to remain with her, of the sudden sense which had come upon her of entering into another world, when she stepped straight from the streets of London into the convent chapel, on Diamond Jubilee Day.
It seemed to her that she had been sitting still there for some time, scarcely conscious of thought or feeling, when the remembrance gradually began to filter through her mind, as it were, of teachings, unheeded at the time, from her schooldays at Liège.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 107