Lydia, with an angry, insurgent feeling that they were all against her, compressed her lips slightly and said nothing for a moment.
“Here’s the carriage,” Billy announced.
“Good night, mama,” Jennie murmured, in accents that sounded rather contrite.
She came forward into the restricted circle of light cast by the old-fashioned standard lamp, and Lydia saw that her face was flushed and her eyes shining like stars. An untidy bunch of heavily-scented syringa was thrust into her belt.
The syringa had not come from the Four Acres field, where the aeroplane was. The great, blossom-laden bushes stood at the furthest and darkest end of the lower drive at Quintmere.
Lydia looked at the syringa and glanced at Jennie, but Jennie’s gaze remained unembarrassed, only curiously dilated and unusually brilliant.
Lydia could read nothing there.
“Good night, Joyce — good-bye, Mr. Valentine — and bon voyage.”
They clustered at the hall-door as Billy ran down the steps and spoke to the old coachman. All the servants at Quintmere were old.
“Lunch-time to-morrow I shall expect you,” said Lydia to her daughter. “I am going to put your night things together as soon as I get in, and send them back in the carriage.”
The softness vanished in an instant out of Jennie’s eyes.
“Do let Susan do it, mama. She’ll know quite well what I want. I hate you to tire yourself fussing about my beastly things.”
Never had Jennie been quite so outspokenly defiant of Lydia’s tenderness. Was it the presence of that rather common young Colonial, with his too-evident enjoyment of her revolt, that gave such a lance to her display of bad taste? Lydia drew the child towards her, and kissed her with calm decision.
“Don’t be a silly little thing. You know I like to do things for you myself — then I know they’re properly done. Besides,” said Lydia very clearly, “you know very well that I always pack for you.”
She got into the carriage as she spoke, but she had seen Jennie flush to a quick, angry scarlet, and although she could not hear what the girl said as she flounced round, it was easy enough to guess.
“Yes, and I hate mama to pack for me, and do all that sort of thing!” Jennie had hated it, and crudely and ungraciously voiced her hatred, ever since her fourteenth year, but she was as naturally unhandy as Lydia was methodical, and had never been encouraged to wait upon herself.
Lydia had always preferred to sacrifice herself, her own time and her own strength. Jennie’s few and bungling attempts at doing her own packing, her own mending, her own tidying, had been merely ludicrous.
No wonder that every such spasmodic effort, generally undertaken in angry opposition to her mother’s toil on her behalf, had merely led to a double share of work falling upon Lydia, patiently repairing the effect of Jennie’s blunders far into the night.
But the thought of past justifications did not come to Lydia’s help now.
She leant back in the dark corner of the little closed carriage, helpless and puzzled.
What had that impossible youth said to little Jennie under the syringa-bushes in the dark drive — why had they taken that way home — that was no way at all — from the Four Acres field? It must have been at Jennie’s suggestion, for how could Mr. Valentine have known anything about it? How long had they been alone — when had Billy, the foolish boy, left them together? Roland Valentine was the sort of young man who would take advantage of Jennie’s inexperience — her ignorant, youthful daring. Because Jennie was a hoyden, to whom flirting was unknown, because the allurements of her youth differed absolutely from Lydia’s own, because she was not pretty, and, most of all, because Lydia thought of her always as a child, and never as a young woman, it had been almost impossible to her ever to believe that Jennie could prove attractive to men.
Joyce Damerel’s insistence on the possibility had merely irritated her, but with a mingling of gratification and dismay. She had gradually come to admit the possibility of such a thing when Billy, and actually three or four of Billy’s friends, had successively fallen victims to most unmistakable attacks of calf-love for the youthful charms of Jennie between the ages of fourteen and seventeen.
One of them, six months ago, had even proposed marriage to Jennie! And it was not Jennie, but the disconsolate lad himself, who had confided to Lydia Jennie’s unflattering reception of the proposal: “It’s awfully nice of you and all that, but don’t you think love, and proposing, and all that sort of thing, rather spoils the fun?”
“She’s simply a child,” the rejected one had informed Lydia, with all the desperate solemnity of twenty. “She doesn’t a bit know what love means.”
Lydia had agreed, with a sincerity to which a strong inward sense of relief added force. Jennie was a child still, undeveloped and uncomprehending. It would be her mother’s part to shelter and protect her for many years yet.
In this strain Lydia had talked to Jennie’s first suitor, oddly reassuring herself at the same time as she impressed upon him the deep intensity of her maternal role.
The boy had been very young, and very easily impressed. He had accepted the value of Lydia’s maternity just as she had offered it to his uncritical gaze.
Had they been older, and Jennie less obviously untouched by his innocent, clumsy love-making, Lydia could almost have wished them to marry.
Jennie’s husband must be a man who would recognize her foolish rebellion against her mother’s love for what it was — the ill-regulated ebullitions of a youthfulness that was wholly unfitted for the independence that it craved.
Lydia remembered the secret assent to all Jennie’s folly, that had been so obvious in the eager eyes and nodded head of young Valentine, and came back to the disagreeable consideration of the immediate past.
They ought not to have been allowed to go out alone together after dinner, like that. Of course, it had all been an accident — Billy had been stupid and careless of conventional proprieties, and neither Jennie nor her escort were likely to recall him to discretion.
Mr. Roland Valentine was quite obviously the sort of man who would always, in the phrase of Lydia’s youth, “take advantage.”
She moved uneasily in the dark corner of the carriage as she remembered Jennie’s great grey eyes, shining like lamps, and her round, flushed face.
Had the Colonial — Lydia so designated him to herself with contemptuous intent — perhaps even tried to kiss her? Although Lydia could look back upon episodes in her own youth, unprotected as Jennie’s had never been, and feel intimately convinced of her own powers of dealing with any awkward or even dangerous situation, of conducting to a successful issue even such unsavoury incidents as those in which the Greek, Margoliouth, or Mr. Codd, the detective, had figured — it was utterly impossible for her to credit Jennie with the like capabilities. Jennie could not take care of herself — little Jennie! The carriage stopped, and Lydia went up into her daughter’s untidy bedroom, and packed a small handbag for the return journey of the brougham to Quintmere.
She did not feel as though she could sleep, and before seeking any rest, she carefully put in order all the tumbled contents in the plain chest of drawers and dressing-table. It partly assuaged her vague sensation of anxiety to be occupied, and partly caused her to feel certain a slight amusement at the thought of Jennie’s indignant protests could she have seen her mother at work.
It was all unreasonable enough, too, Lydia reflected dryly, for slatternly little Jennie was only too glad to let Susan, the maid, tidy up after her, and brush and mend her clothes. But when it came to her own mother, Jennie apparently could not brook to be served.
Involuntarily the remembrance flashed across Lydia’s mind of the defiant unthankfulness that had found vent in Jennie’s exclamation of the previous evening: “I do hate people to know that you make my things.... It sounds as though you were always working yourself to death for me, and I let you do it — and it isn’t true.”
Lydia sighed, and
went to her own room.
She had long ago grown used to the quiet of the country nights, and it seemed almost like a dream to her now, that, as a girl, she had once worked hard in London, and lived by herself, and counted as friends people who had passed out of her life as completely as though they had never existed. The impermanence of these relations troubled her not at all. Stepping-stones, that was all.
Lydia often felt quite surprised at the fidelity with which Aunt Beryl and Aunt Evelyn and Olive Senthoven kept their claims on her attention alive. Olive had long ago left the sanatorium, reported cured, and certainly not breaking down in health more than once or twice in every few years. She had even, much against Lydia’s will, repaid a part of the sum disbursed by the Damerels on her behalf.
She wrote Lydia slangy, uninteresting letters at regular intervals, giving discouraging accounts of Beatrice, with a husband who drank, and an over-large family of unhealthy children, and boasting of her own ability to earn a meagre allowance by means of typewriting.
She seemed to take for granted Lydia’s continued interest in her uneventful and uninteresting life of drudgery, in Aunt Evelyn’s sciatica and increasing deafness, in the sordid struggles of Beatrice and her indescribable Swaines; even in Bob, who had married a Canadian woman, and wrote that he should never return to England.
Lydia commented politely on these pieces of information, that varied so seldom, and in her replies wrote in return of the garden, and of the First Prize taken at the Agricultural Show by Jennie’s sweet-peas, and of the letter she herself had just received from Aunt Beryl.
The letters of Aunt Beryl came just as regularly, and even more frequently than those of Olive, but they were less difficult to answer. The old associations of childhood made it seem natural enough to write to Regency Terrace, even though one felt no real interest whatever in the deficiencies of successive “girls,” And the smashing by them of successive household gods.
“... That’s the last of the green teacups gone, that you’ll remember from a long way back, dear, though Grandpapa never would have them used, only unless we’d people, if you recollect.”
Lydia might or might not remember the green teacups, but she always responded sympathetically, and it was really no effort to write and tell Aunt Beryl what she and Jennie were doing, while they still met at least once a year, and Aunt Beryl had even been to stay at Lydia’s cottage one summer when Lady Lucy and Joyce had been abroad.
But to-night Aunt Beryl seemed almost as remote and unreal as did the strange people whom Lydia had once known at Miss Nettleship’s boarding-house. The only living reality was Jennie.
Lydia lay awake in the semi-darkness of the summer night, and thought intently and passionately about her child for a long while.
Clear-thinking as she had been all her life, she could not adjust the focus of her mind to an unbiased vision of herself and Jennie. It was as though, for the first time, a strong personal element governed her life and strangely deflected her powers of judgment.
She waited for Jennie’s return the next day with a certain anxiety, desirous of hearing a full account of the previous evening, and of Jennie’s walk under the syringa-bushes, but in full possession of the self-control which never allowed her to cross-question her child.
Cross-questioning, indeed, was unnecessary with Jennie, always ready to talk only too freely about her own exploits.
“Miss Jennie should be here for lunch, Susan. You might make castle-puddings — she likes those.”
“Yes, ma’am. The eldest Madge boy left a message this morning, ma’am, to say if Miss Jennie would go and see little Jackie, he’d be so pleased. They can’t say enough in praise of Miss Jennie, can they, ma’am?” Susan’s homely face beamed with simple pride.
“However she did it, pulling up those heavy hurdles — and they say she handled the little fellow so knowingly, too — Dr. West was praising her up at the Madges like anything, they said.”
“I hope Jackie is getting on all right,” said Lydia, rather austerely. “I’ll go down there this afternoon myself. Miss Jennie isn’t very famous for carefulness, — is she, Susan? — and I was rather afraid she might have done more harm than good.”
XXIV
“On — mama, I quite forgot to tell you before” The casual note in Jennie’s voice was overdone to an extent that must have awakened suspicion even in a listener far less acute than was Lydia.
“Well?”
“He said he’d like to stop here, just on his way back, next week.”
“He — who?” Lydia did not make this inquiry for the sake of obtaining information. She had no doubt whatever as to the identity of the forthcoming visitor, but Jennie was making her thoroughly uneasy, and she wished to test the grounds for the vexed anxiety that had now been with her for nearly a week.
“Oh, didn’t I say?” said Jennie, more elaborately casual than ever, and, picking up the kitten, began to try and make it bite its own tail. “I meant Billy’s friend, the one who had the aeroplane.”
Lydia’s mind automatically registered her daughter’s avoidance of Mr. Roland Valentine’s name.
“Do you mean he wants to go to Quintmere again? I’m not at all sure that grandmama would care to have him. He’s not quite — well, not exactly a gentleman, is he?”
“Oh, Pussy-kitten, you’ve scratched me!” cried Jennie, in tones of reproach. “Not Quintmere, but here. He’s going back to London, and he thought of getting out of the train at Clyst Milton Junction and walking here, and then he could go on by the threethirty from Ashlew.”
“But he could go straight on to Exeter, like anyone else does. What does he want to stop here for?”
“To — to break the journey,” suggested Jennie feebly.
“He’s leaving the aeroplane at Plymouth.”
There was a silence, during which the kitten, inwardly approved by Lydia, made its escape.
Deprived of this defence, Jennie lifted a very pink face and faced her mother. There was something at once defiant and childlike in her expression that secretly rather touched Lydia.
“He really wants to see me, mama, and I — I didn’t think you’d mind, and when he suggested coming, I asked him to have lunch. You always say you like me to have my friends here. Mama, you don’t mind, do you?”
“I don’t mind anything so long as you’re open with me, darling,” said Lydia, making use of an unwonted term of endearment. “But I don’t know that I altogether understand how you and this youth could have made friends in such a very short time.”
“Don’t you?” said Jennie vaguely.
She appeared to think that the conversation was ended.
Lydia wished, as she had wished at ever-shortening intervals since Jennie’s ninth year, that her daughter would confide in her, appeal to her. The protective instinct surged within her strongly.
“Tell me, Jennie dear — I’ll help you as much as I can.”
“There isn’t anything to tell,” said Jennie, in the same vague, unsatisfactory manner. “He’ll turn up on Tuesday, I should think.”
“Ask Billy to come over, if you like.”
“Oh, he’ll be gone away by then, don’t you remember?” said Jennie quickly.
Lydia said nothing more.
She was conscious of preoccupation during the rest of the week, and noticed for the first time that signs of care were beginning to show in her face, round her eyes and mouth.
Several times she went with Jennie to the Madges’ untidy cottage, although the girl made no attempt to conceal the fact that she would have much preferred to make her visits there unaccompanied. Lydia listened with a little, kindly smile to Mrs. Madge’s incoherent declarations that Jackie was never so good with anybody as with the young lady, and quietly gave Mrs.
Madge several hints from her own experience as to the management of children. She also provided an occasional milk-pudding or custard, and presently shared with her daughter in the voluble, incoherent gratitude of the slovenly woman.
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She also said to Jennie that it was a great pity that Jennie’s old toys and picture-books had been so maltreated and destroyed by a tomboyish owner that none of them could serve to cheer poor little Jackie’s idleness now. There really was so very little to amuse a sick child. Lydia herself went and read stories aloud to the little boy from time to time — a kindness entirely beyond the compass of Jennie, who hated books, mispronounced many of her words in slipshod fashion, and gabbled like a schoolgirl.
“I don’t believe I’m good for anything, except perhaps gardening,” said Jennie, in cross, resentful accents.
“You would be good for a great deal, if you would only take pains and let yourself be taught,” said Lydia serenely.
She was far from disapproving of this most unwonted mood in her usually self-assertive daughter.
It was quite true that Jennie was in no danger of displaying the efficiency that had been Lydia’s at nineteen. She was very clumsy with her fingers, except when dealing with either plants or animals, and although she was not stupid, a certain slowness of development and inability to express herself very often made her appear so. She could neither sew nor write with any facility, nor did she show any signs of having inherited her mother’s business aptitude. These deficiencies should have made her very dependent upon Lydia, and the services that Lydia was only too ready to devote to her, but, then, Jennie did not like being served, although she would not take the steps towards learning such independence as might be conceded to a daughter in her mother’s house.
Perhaps she had not learnt these things young enough.
A French governess had given her lessons, and had taught her French far superior to the unsatisfactory amount assimilated by Lydia long ago at Miss Glover’s school, but French was not in request at Clyst Milton or Ashlew, and Jennie’s proficiency was wasted after Mademoiselle left.
She was unmusical, she could not draw. On the rare occasions when Jennie lamented her lack of accomplishments, Lydia consolingly reminded her: “You have a faculty for arithmetic. It’s not often found in women — the mathematical mind — as an old friend of Uncle George’s used to tell me when I was a girl. You’ve inherited the mathematical mind from me.”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 176