For three of the endless days of a sea-voyage Sir Julian had appeared to be attracted by her, and on the fourth he had devoted himself to a blue-eyed widow, travelling second-class. The voyage was nearly over before the first-class passengers saw him again in their midst. Edna could remember still the evening before Dover was reached, when her mother, exasperated, had uttered the short, sudden gibe that had put into words the humiliating truth never before spoken between them.
She remembered still the despairing resentment that had seized upon her, at her realisation that such taunts, once uttered, may speedily become common, between people in constant proximity and without mutual respect.
Her rare tears had shaken her, and it was Sir Julian who had found her, crying in a solitary corner of the deck. Edna could remember though never in her life did she willingly recall that anger and misery together had made her give him, in reply to his urgent enquiry, something that very nearly approached to the raw, crude truth. And that night she had said to herself:
“Thank Heaven, I shall never see him again!”
The next morning he had asked her to marry him, making no protestations of passion such as she had once thought herself fated to evoke, but suggesting a mutual companionship, likely to prove of solace- to both, and to release her from a situation which had become intolerable to her.
Julian’s candour had humiliated her bitterly, for her one moment of envisaging the truth in all its bitterness had passed from her.
But she had accepted him.
She would not have believed it, had she been told that the evening of that self -betrayal, of which she thrust the memory away thenceforward, had witnessed the truest, most intimate relationship in which she and her husband were destined ever to stand towards one another.
The prosperous chatelaine of Culmhayes had had many years in which to forget the mortifications and disappointments of her pre-marriage days. She ruled an admirable household admirably, she “gave out,” she discovered Nature, and she opposed a perpetual exhalation of large-hearted tolerance to the small shafts of rather indifferent satire that more and more formed the basis of Sir Julian’s conjugal intercourse.
Edna indulged in no bitterness of resentment against her husband, except on the rare occasions when she, always unwillingly, remembered that chivalry and not love had prompted his offer of marriage to her. His frequent captiousness, his small verbal incivilities, his absence of any sympathy with her ideals, even his systematic reticence as to his personal thoughts and feelings, roused nothing in her beyond an appreciation of the opportunity that they provided for breadths of sunny-hearted charity. She was not an unhappy woman, and never made the mistake of calling herself one. Even the absence of children she regretted more for their own sakes than for hers, since she believed that her maternal instinct had become diverted into more universal and more spacious channels than could have been the case had it been exercised solely upon sons or daughters of her own.
That Sir Julian was “difficult” she never disguised from herself. He had, in fact, become rather more “difficult” year by year, and Edna had long since given up her early attempts to probe into his point of view. She came to the conclusion that Julian was inarticulate because he was unenlightened, that he liked “Jorrocks,” And that he was permanently discontented because he had not enough to do and refused to envisage the deeper issues of life.
She reflected complacently sometimes that they had never had a quarrel and remained unaware that the fact admirably measured the extent of their estrangement.
Lady Rossiter sighed at the end of her retrospect.
“Don’t you like Miss Marchrose?” enquired Iris quite suddenly.
“But I wasn’t thinking about her! What makes you ask?”
“I don’t know,” said Iris vaguely. “I’ve sometimes thought you didn’t like her awfully much.”
Lady Rossiter reflected before making any reply.
She held the theory that the expression of an opinion should always be a well-considered matter, and was apt to say that words were like thistledown and might blow to unsuspected distances and in unforeseen directions.
There was, however, nothing of the airy quality of thistledown in her deliberately given answer.
“Miss Marchrose does not strike me as attractive,” she said carefully, “but a young woman earning her own living is hardly to be judged by the rules that we should apply to one of nous autres. I never care to say that I dislike anyone it seems to me so trivial, so short-sighted, to dislike the little that one can know of any fellow-creature. The Divine Spark is always lurking somewhere although I admit that sometimes, in the less advanced, it is difficult really to hold fast to that belief.”
“Oh, but you always do! No one is like you,” said Miss Easter, in all good faith. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you say an unkind word of anybody.”
Lady Rossiter smiled.
“The great thing,” she observed gently, “is never to say anything, unless one can say something kind. And it is very strange, Iris dear, how one can nearly always find something that is nice and yet true, to say of everyone.”
“You can, I’m sure.”
Iris was always complaisant, besides being young and happy and therefore disposed to be uncritical, and she had long entertained a simple and quite unreasoning admiration for Lady Rossiter.
Her enthusiasm for Miss Marchrose was a recent impulse only, and did not prevent her from a further endeavour to obtain light upon Lady Rossiter’s views.
“She’s quite too nice to me, always, and I do think she must have been pretty. In fact, she is now, in a sort of way.”
“Quite” agreed Lady Rossiter serenely.
“Sometimes I wonder if she has foreign blood in her.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure,” said Miss Easter impressively, “that I should quite, absolutely, always trust her.”
Lady Rossiter’s common-sense did not altogether admit of her accepting so remarkable a reason for assuming untrustworthiness, but she was entirely in accord with the result of Miss Easter’s logic, however defective the means by which that result was obtained.
“It’s curious that you should say that,” she remarked slowly. “Instinct is a strange thing, Iris.”
“Yes, isn’t it? They always say a woman’s instinct is never wrong,” glibly returned Miss Easter. “But I don’t mean anything unkind about Miss Marchrose, truly I don’t; there’s only one thing I don’t like about her.”
Lady Rossiter made a sound expressive of enquiry.
“I never can bear people who try to be sarcastic,” murmured Iris, voicing unaware the fundamental distrust which governs the whole of the British middle classes.
“Satire is a very cheap, unworthy weapon,” said Lady Rossiter, not without inward reminiscences of Sir Julian as she spoke. “But to be quite fair, I don’t think I’ve ever heard poor Miss Marchrose try to be satirical or anything of that sort. She’s generally rather tongue-tied and awkward when I’m there. You see, Iris, I’m afraid she knows that I have heard a good deal about her, one way and another.”
Lady Rossiter hesitated, remembered Mark, and decided to go on.
“I am afraid there is not much doubt that Miss Marchrose once did a very, very heartless action, and I am afraid that heartlessness and meanness are only too terribly apt to go together. There is something about the hard lines of her mouth but after all, how can I cast the first stone? I had rather let the facts speak for themselves.”
Followed the narrative of Captain Isbister, his engagement to a girl not of his own class, his accident, his offer to release the girl, and her prompt acceptance of it, culminating in the unbridled display of anguish witnessed in the nursing-home by Captain Isbister’s attendant, which climax was received by Iris far otherwise than it had once been received by Sir Julian Rossiter.
“Oh, oh, poor dear thing! How too terrible! I am sure Douglas would go on exactly like that if I ever threw him over. But of course
I never could. It’s the most dreadful thing I ever heard of how anyone could be so heartless!”
“How indeed!” sadly ejaculated Lady Rossiter. “And you know, Iris, by some miracle of science, he actually did recover, and can walk as well as you or I. So if she had been steadfast, they would have been married by this time, and she would have been in a very different position now.”
“It’s like a book,” said Iris, awe-stricken. “But she couldn’t have cared for him really.”
“Indeed, no! I thank God from the bottom of my heart that poor Clarence found out in time what a mistake he had made. He was younger than she, poor boy, and it was all thoroughly unsuitable. He has found his ideal since then.”
Iris looked a shade disappointed.
“Ah, my dear, you are thinking that nothing is like first love and in a way it’s true. But there’s another kind of love, too, that comes later, when one has outgrown the personal part of it all the divine selfishness that is so sweet and natural and inevitable in youth. And that is the love, the great universal tenderness, that comes to one later on, and that seeks a widening circle, and a bigger outlet, in order to spend itself on others. But you know nothing about that yet, childie dear. How should you, indeed?”
Very few people like to be told that there is anything in the gamut of the emotions of which they know nothing, and Iris looked with rather an unresponsive eye at her dear Lady Rossiter.
“After all,” said that lady, rendering her usual smiling acknowledgment to the Deity, “after all, there are many compensations for growing old, in God’s world.”
The aphorism admitted not at all of contradiction, and hardly of agreement, and Iris accordingly relapsed into silence.
“I will let you know about my little tea-party for the staff,” was Lady Rossiter’s last remark. ‘They will like to see your bright face and pretty frock, dear. Their lives are very drab.”
The bright face and pretty frock of Iris Easter, however, were not allowed to shed illumination upon the drab lives of Lady Rossiter’s guests on Sunday until the wedding-present question had been inadequately discussed.
Mr. Cooper was mounted upon verbal stilts, and adorned his discourse with many tags of commercial phraseology; Miss Farmer would only say that she was sure Miss Easter would be pleased whatever they settled; and Miss Sandiloe giggled and looked meaningly at Mr. Cooper. Needless to say, Mr. Fairfax Fuller put in no appearance.
Edna was by turns kindly, practical, helpful and sympathetic, but still no decision could be reached.
“What is the amount subscribed?”
“Just over two pounds, so far, but there are a few more responses to come in.”
“It isn’t the amount, Lady Rossiter, is it?” Wearily enquired Miss Farmer.
“Certainly not. The thought is everything.”
It almost appeared as though the thought was indeed to be everything.
“Have you decided what you wish to give?”
The three members of the staff exchanged glances.
“So many people thought of a pair of silver vases.”
“Or a little travelling-clock, Lady Rossiter.”
“A good many voted for a small paper-knife, as being individual, like,” said Cooper.
“Charming,” warmly said Lady Rossiter, appearing to address all her three vis-à-vis at once.
The discussion continued at a similar rate of progress for the remainder of the afternoon.
Edna began to feel considerably taxed at the inordinate extent to which she was required to “give out,” in her own favourite phrase. There were limits to the life-giving forces that could be radiated for the benefit of three discursive and unbusinesslike fellow creatures on a cold afternoon in winter. True to her principles, she reflected, with a humorousness that remained strictly tender, that she must definitely take the responsibility for which they all appeared so inadequate onto her own shoulders.
She prepared to intimate her decision by a leading question.
“And about the actual presentation? Perhaps it would prevent little jealousies, little follies of that sort after all, human nature is human nature if it were presented by someone not quite of the College personnel? Of course, in the name of you all, by someone who would be able to make a little speech. Oh, nothing formal, of course, only a few words, but one wants those to be the right words! I don’t know if.”
She paused.
“It was proposed,” said Cooper “And I may add carried unanimously that the presentation and a few words of good wishes from us all.”
“Being a good speaker,” interpolated Miss Sandiloe.
“And in an official position, so to speak and a friend of Miss Easter’s,” said Miss Farmer, also in parentheses.
Cooper shot a repressive glance left and right. “I am just telling Lady Rossiter. The obvious person, of course, Lady Rossiter, has been approached. Miss Marchrose has kindly agreed to make the presentation on behalf of the staff.”
XII
IT was left to Sir Julian, as not infrequently happened, to look upon the varied assortment of flotsam and jetsam thrown up by the tide of Lady Rossiter’s eloquence.
Whilst Edna sat indoors, rather limply endeavouring to maintain a high level of sympathetic brightness round the exhausted subject of Miss Easter’s projected wedding-present, Julian, having ascertained the presence of his three guests indoors, hastily walked out of the house.
He sought his habitual refuge the long, deserted stretch of shore skirted by a pebbly ridge, locally known as the sea-wall.
There he found Miss Marchrose.
If Julian had counted upon finding the foam-flecked, windy spot in its usual state of solitude, he gave no sign of being disconcerted.
They exchanged greetings and prepared to walk the mile length of the sea-wall together. In spite of the strength of the salt wind blowing full against them, the blue knitted cap that she wore needed no restraining hand, and she was restfully free from fluttering ends and tags of garments.
With great abruptness she began to speak as they walked.
“I knew that you were related to the Isbisters, of course. If you remember, Lady Rossiter said something about them that night that we had dinner together, and I thought at the time”
She broke off, and Julian, conscious of extreme curiosity as to the reason why she had suddenly introduced so admittedly scabreux a topic, enquired after a moment:
“What did you think at the time?”
“I thought Lady Rossiter wished me to understand that she knew of the relationship in which I once stood to Captain Isbister.”
For the life of him, Julian could think of no rejoinder.
“I know that things of that kind always are known, and the people I’ve been thrown with, sooner or later, always turned out to have heard the story. Or if they hadn’t,” said Miss Marchrose in a voice of calm despair, “someone took the trouble to tell them.”
“Officiousness is the crying sin of the age,” Julian observed sententiously.
“It seems to me a purely individual matter. It can’t concern anyone else not even the people who employ me.”
“Certainly not.”
“Did you know? But of course you did.”
“I knew that Clarence Isbister had been engaged to someone of your name, and that the engagement had been broken off after his accident.”
“I broke it off,” she said defiantly.
“So one heard,”
“Everyone has heard that,” said Miss Marchrose. “Everyone has heard that when he was told that he must be an invalid and helpless for the rest of his life he offered to release me from the engagement and I said yes. And that he was very much upset about it, just at the time.”
Julian stifled a fleeting recollection of the well-worn legend accompanying the story of Captain Isbister’s betrayal.
“Of course, it is inevitable that his relations should have heard about it, I suppose,” Miss Marchrose said.
Julian felt inclined to
reply, “Clarence Isbister is an ass, and not worth worrying about,” And then decided that that would not do, and awaited her next words in silence. He perceived that some unusual emotion had strung her to the pitch of excitement at which self-contained people become reckless, and emotional ones untruthful. Having already formed the conclusion that Miss Marchrose belonged to the former class, he listened with the greater interest.
Her next words gave him a clue to the vexation that vibrated in her tones.
“I was angry, I’m afraid, this morning, when Miss Easter actually began about it.”
“Extremely impertinent of her. I hope you told her so.”
“She is very good-natured,” said Miss Marchrose remorsefully. “She has always gone out of her way to be nice to me, and when I began to be angry with her she only said, ‘Oh, I’m so dreadfully sorry; I should never tell a soul except Douglas, you know, so you needn’t mind my knowing about it.”
At her faint mimicry of Iris’ affected little pipe they both laughed.
“As a matter of fact, poor little thing, she only wanted me to contradict the version that she had heard.
She said she couldn’t and wouldn’t believe it, and was sure that her informant had been mistaken.”
Sir Julian wondered grimly whether Miss Marchrose was as little at a loss as himself to identify the informant in question. Her next words rather relieved him.
“She may very well have heard it from the girl she lives with. Curiously enough, she was once governess to Lady Mary Isbister’s little girl, and it is quite probable that she heard something about it there. I don’t know. There seem to be no end to the coincidences that accumulate round unpleasant things. It happened more than three years ago, and he’s married now, and perfectly happy why can’t it be allowed to rest?”
“No one has any right to attempt to force your confidence.”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 135