Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

She saw Nicholas Aubray almost daily.

  Lily felt flattered and excited, but her now’ ingrained incapacity for facing an issue definitely, allowed her to keep entirely upon the surface of even her own thoughts, and when she was seized by a misgiving that she felt no slightest real wish ever to marry Nicholas Aubray, she hastily rebuked herself for the vanity of supposing that he had any intention of asking her to do so, thus suppressing her consciousness of the problem in relative values that confronted her.

  It was that policy of suppression upon which her whole education had been based.

  Presently Lily became aware that Miss Stellenthorpe was turning a thoughtful and critical eye upon the situation.

  Her manner to her niece acquired both a more weighty tenderness, and a slightly humorous air of appraisement.

  She tolerated the Marchese della Torre with renewed geniality, and only upon one occasion relegated him to a lengthy tête-à-tête walk with Lily whilst she herself strode far ahead, apparently absorbed in earnest conversation with Nicholas Aubray.

  It was on that evening that Aunt Clo, for the first time, spoke with great frankness and intimacy of herself and her own past to Lily.

  “You have wondered, little one, why I have never chosen to marry, have you not?” she abruptly demanded, gazing shrewdly at her niece.

  Fortunately, Lily felt, the shrewdness was not sufficient to penetrate her own embarrassment and pierce to the true answer of that portentous question.

  Lily had always supposed, on the rare occasions when she had given the matter a thought, that Aunt Clo must have remained unmarried because nobody had ever wanted to marry her.

  It now became almost overwhelmingly evident that such had not been the case.

  “Why should I not say it? I have been greatly desired, and by many. Perhaps, bambina, it may help you, if I let you in where so few have ever yet penetrated — into the story of my heart. As a girl I was, perhaps, not beautiful.” Miss Stellenthorpe musingly observed without, however, any great conviction in her tone. “Certainly I had not the exquisite daintiness, the porcelain prettiness, that I see in you, my Lily. But I was a strong, vital, passionate creature, and intensely magnetic — that, above all. Had I a daughter possessed of that magnetism, she should be guarded — most carefully guarded. The gift is not one to be played with. I suppose I was reckless. Chi lo sa? Ah well, the years have brought their own chastening, maybe. Oh, not in my proud, solitary virginity — that has been my own choice.”

  Aunt Clo upreared her head in a sudden, high-souled gesture.

  “No. But — ay di me! How I have been loved! And I — I, in my turn have loved, carina. Once — and once only. I cannot tell you the whole story, little one. Some day, perhaps, when you, too, have lived and loved — though may you never touch the depths that I have plumbed! I had rejected many loves — lesser loves, as they seemed to me. Then came one — there is only one, in a woman’s life. Our souls rushed together — une veritable fusion d’âmes. There was one summer.”

  Aunt Go became lost in retrospect, her fine eyes fixed upon some point of the horizon far above Lily’s head.

  When she spoke again, her voice had flattened dramatically.

  “Autumn succeeds to summer, carina, and the deep-hearted, passionate red roses drop their petals one by one.... A cataclysm swept across my life. There was storm — separation, interference from others. I was doubly betrayed. There was a woman who had been my dear, dear friend, in whom I had trusted much. And she failed me, Lily. When the crisis came, she was incapable of meeting the demands that the privilege of friendship must always make, sooner or later. Ah yes — she failed me indeed!”

  “Was she — one of the people who interfered?” Lily half fearfully enquired, as Miss Stellenthorpe paused as though for enquiry.

  “Indeed, yes! She was ruthless — ruthless to me, and to that other....”

  “But did he — how could he let her...?” stammered Lily.

  “Ah how! But — ,” said Miss Stellenthorpe sombrely, “she was his wife.”

  No revelation could have come with greater unexpectedness upon her breathless listener.

  “Oh! Was he married, Aunt Clo?”

  Aunt Clo bent a terrible brow upon Lily at the naive colloquialism of the exclamation.

  “Bound by our hideous English laws, he was,” she said slowly. “But there are other, higher standards. He and I knew it — we had scaled the mountain-heights — but the little, feeble soul that had called herself my friend remained below, weakly wailing. The little soul that had only strength to hold on, like some small, sharp-toothed rodent! It held on — grasping the shadow between its tiny, poisoned fangs, when it could no longer hold the substance.”

  Aunt Clo passed a hand slowly across her eyes, as though to banish the vision of so perverted a tenacity.

  Then she turned upon Lily a smile of rare, considered sweetness, blended with great sadness. “I have forgiven — long, long ago. One can outlive such bitterness, my Lily, and come out from the vortex stronger, and bigger and braver.”

  Lily felt a mad desire to enquire whether the unfortunate rodent of Aunt Clo’s history had also emerged from it similarly uplifted.

  “There was a time,” said Aunt Go, “when I asked myself despairingly— ‘Does the road wind up-hill all the way?’ You know the answer, child. ‘Yes — to the very end.’ I have accepted that answer now. Acceptance has long ago become part of myself. Not the pallid, passive acceptance of submission, you understand, but some bright, strong, vital thing that soars upwards like a flame.”

  Aunt Go paused again, and her niece kept silence.

  “You mustn’t call me brave, little one,” Miss Stellenthorpe suddenly protested, when both had remained speechless for some while.

  Lily showed no sign of defying the prohibition. Her aunt stood up.

  “I will leave you. It grows late, and this has cost me something. But don’t reproach yourself, bambina — if I can help you but a very little, be sure that I shall never count the cost.”

  Aunt Go crossed the room slowly, with an unwonted gesture of supporting herself, as she reached a low table near the door and leant her hand upon it heavily.

  She glanced back at Lily, and there was again a slight suggestion of baffled expectancy on her face.

  “Buona notte, my child.”

  With a grave and graceful movement she kissed the tip of her slim, fine fingers and waved them in the direction of her niece.

  Then she appeared to detect suddenly the presence of her other hand, still grasping the little table, and drew it away with an air of surprised melancholy.

  “Aha!” said Aunt Go, half playfully, half sadly. “That is the first time, is it not, that you have seen me in need of extraneous support? That is not like me.”

  She slowly nodded, two or three times, as though considering so new an aspect of herself, and then drew herself up to her full, stately height as she left the room. Lily felt that she herself had been somehow found remiss.

  Comment, at least, had been expected of her, and she had been utterly unable to offer any.

  She wondered uneasily if it were the measure of her own childishness, that Aunt Clo’s story should merely have left her feeling uncomfortably bewildered, and anxiously conscious that her father would have been sincerely shocked by it.

  Lily speculated as to what she should do if Nicholas Aubray were suddenly to discover himself as a married man. She indulged in an agreeable vision of his impassionate declaration, her own heart-broken renunciation of him, and their eternal farewell. After a long, long illness she would face life once more — her hair would be prematurely whitened. She, too, would tell some young, untried soul the story of her own experience....

  Lily had formulated one or two very beautiful sentences when she became aware that she was thoroughly enjoying herself. The discovery scandalized her sincerely.

  These things were serious — they constituted reality, and here she was playing a kind of game with them!

/>   Lily felt profoundly dissatisfied with herself and her own inability to regard as sacred the many things that her upbringing had taught her should be classified under that traditional heading of Philip’s. It bewildered her to find that Nicholas himself, although his ardour touched and pleased her in a strange, exciting way, did not awaken in her any of the emotions that she had always associated with the dawn of love.

  There was not even the vague, elusive sense of remote and delicate romance that Colin Eastwood had inspired.

  But Philip had implied that episode to have been an undignified and childish cheapening of herself — something that, in the belittling phrase of omniscient parenthood, “could not lead to anything,” and Lily herself, translating into the cruder and more direct terms of youth, had known that, between her and Colin, there could be nothing so matured and definite as a spoken engagement with definite prospects of marriage.

  Consequently, her relations with Colin must have been unreal — those with Nicholas must be real. Thus Lily, faithfully endeavouring to follow the careful rule of thumb laid down for her, and unutterably perplexed at finding it so much at variance with that inner vision to which she believed herself to have no right.

  Daughter of Philip and Eleanor Stellenthorpe, and product of their teaching, she found the way of least resistance in allowing herself to shelve the whole question, telling herself that it would certainly be mere folly and vanity to envisage prematurely the possibilities latent in a decision which she might never be called upon to make.

  The issues at stake were consequently left to obscure themselves still further while Lily strove to persuade herself of their non-existence, and while the necessity for that decision which she was strenuously unfitting herself to make coherently came nearer to her every day.

  The weather had grown crisp and cool long before Nicholas Aubray’s affairs in Rome were concluded, and he came out to the villa at Genazzano to announce his approaching return to England.

  “I shall be very, very sorry to go,” he said emotionally. “If anyone had told me, when I first grumbled at coming to Italy, that six weeks later I should actually want to stay on — I shouldn’t have believed it.”

  He looked at Lily as he spoke.

  “Aha!” quoth Aunt Clo. “Italy claims us all. I — but I was long ago enslaved, as you perceive. You will return, my friend.”

  “I hope so. But good-byes are always sad things, I think. One is always sorry, I mean, to say good-bye to a place in which one has been happy.” He was again addressing himself to Lily, surprising her, as he occasionally did, by the earnest warmth with which he could deliver himself of a platitude. She hoped that he did not see Aunt Clo wince as she rose from her place.

  “Mes très chers, je vous quitte. One little half-hour. There is an unhappy child whose supreme moment is drawing very near. I have told you of my Carla? They are trying to persuade her that she has sinned — ah, the horrible folly and cruelty of it all!”

  Miss Stellenthorpe hastened away, and Nicholas Aubray, after a moment, exclaimed, as he not infrequently did:

  “What a splendid person your aunt is! I can’t tell you how much I admire her.”

  “She is very kind,” said Lily, trying to atone by the fervour of her voice for a certain blankness that invaded her at this fresh example of Nicholas Aubray’s enthusiasm.

  “Isn’t she — isn’t she? She’s been a godsend to the peasantry here, I feel sure. She has,” said Nicholas significantly, “been very kind to me.”

  “I know she likes you very much.”

  Lily spoke hurriedly and almost at random, overwhelmed by sudden nervous shyness.

  “She’s — she’s enjoyed your being here, and all our excursions.”

  “Did she tell you that we had a long talk the other day?”

  “She didn’t tell me so specially,” said Lily, and added hastily: “You’ve known her a long time, haven’t you?”

  “I have never seen as much of her as I should have liked, but I’ve always thought of her as a most splendid person, whom I should like to know much better. But it’s never too late to mend, eh?”

  He laughed, in jerks.

  Lily seldom felt at ease with Nicholas Aubray when he was amused, although she forced her own smiles, in sympathy with the childlike appeal of the gaze that he was fixing directly upon her.

  He grew grave again suddenly, after his wont.

  “What about you? Am I to say good-bye to my little pal without anything to look forward to?”

  Lily’s heart beat with excitement and a sense of flattery, but she also felt overwhelmingly embarrassed, and quite unable to summon up the warm reply with which she would have liked to please him.

  “I wonder whether you ever write letters?” said Nicholas, when he had waited in silence for some time.

  “I haven’t got many people to write to.”

  “You’ve got your pal — your old, ancient pal, who perhaps seems to you almost in his dotage—”

  He broke off anxiously, and this time Lily’s quick perception of his unspoken need of reassurance came to her help.

  “I think of you as being of my own age,” she exclaimed quickly, “or else just a little bit older, so as to be able to help me about things, and — and advise me sometimes.”

  “That’s very sweet and dear of you to say that. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it—” said Nicholas, with the abrupt huskiness of tone of a man easily moved to emotion.

  Suddenly he laid one of his hands very gently over Lily’s, with a tentative, almost timid, gesture.

  She knew that his sensitiveness would be instantly hurt by the least gesture of withdrawal, even though he was giving her the opportunity of making one.

  Tenderness for his feelings, a half-frightened desire to see what would follow, and a certain exultant vanity, kept her motionless.

  Subconsciously, there passed through her a regret, of which she failed to catch the significance, that it had always been physically distasteful to her to be touched. She accepted the dislike as being part of an inevitable state of affairs not susceptible to alteration.

  “You didn’t mind my doing that, did you?” said Nicholas nervously.

  He had taken his hand away, after a prolonged, gentle pressure upon hers.

  Lily shook her head.

  She could not have given with truth either a negative or an affirmative answer, nevertheless she was relieved at Nicholas Aubray’s exclamation:

  “I’m glad of that! I wouldn’t vex you for the whole world, you know’. I f ever I do anything that you don’t like, you must tell me. Sometimes I think I’m too clumsy — and rough and — and elderly, to hope to keep your friendship. And it would make me very sad, if I lost it now.”

  “No, no — you couldn’t!” Lily murmured.

  “Well, will you let me hear from you — often — and see you when you’re in England again?”

  “I hardly ever go to London, though, I’m afraid,” said Lily naively.

  “Perhaps I might be allowed to come to your part of the world, though. I want to get to know your father, and — and everyone and everything that belongs to you. I wonder if you realize that, little pal?”

  Lily said: “I think I do,” because she felt that that was what he wanted her to say, and then was terrified at the thought of what his rejoinder might be.

  “Thank God for that!” cried Nicholas, with a sort of boyish, laughing heartiness.

  She was half relieved and half disappointed.

  “That’s a bargain, then. We’ll write to one another.”

  “Ought I to?” Lily faltered, with a sudden recollection of the obnoxious phrases as to hole-and-corner correspondence, once employed by her father. The remembrance caused her to crimson, and Nicholas Aubray looked at her very kindly.

  “I told your aunt, when we had our talk together the other day, how very much I should like to be allowed to hear from you,” he said quietly, “and she was good enough to suggest that I might propose
it to you. So it only depends upon you, now.”

  Something chivalrous in the words and manner alike sent a rush of affection and gratitude through Lily’s being.

  At such moments she felt that nothing was wanting in her liking for Nicholas Aubray.

  “I’m so glad you did that,” she said impulsively.

  “You don’t think I could ever take advantage of your youth and kindness to ask you to do anything that you might for an instant regret later on!” he exclaimed. “I’m not such a skunk as that! No. Thank God, you never would do anything of the kind that some of these modern girls seem to go in for.... That was just one of the things that attracted me to you so awfully — if I may say so.”

  “You don’t think I’m old-fashioned and priggish? I often think I’m not like most other girls — I think I was brought up differently.”

  “All the better!” cried Nicholas vigorously.

  “I’m glad you think it’s all the better,” said Lily. “Sometimes I — I’ve felt that I hated being unlike other people.”

  She glanced at him wistfully, half wondering if he would reassure her, if she confessed to that old, hidden feeling of not being a Real Live Person, but only a pretender.

  “I only wish there were more people like you,” said Nicholas Aubray. “Some day you must tell me all about your bringing-up, and why you think it’s made you different. Will you?”

  “It’s quite dull, I’m afraid. Only about how I was at home, and then at a convent for a very little while and afterwards at school.”

  “I’m sure I shouldn’t find it dull,” said Nicholas Aubray, “I should never find anything dull that was about yourself. I want to hear everything.”

  His look, straight into her eyes, emphasized his words.

  “I should like to feel that you were able to make a real safety-valve of me — tell me anything and everything, quite freely.”

  Lily’s liking for him just then was so strong that the required assurance came in a rush of sincerity.

  “I don’t think I should mind telling you anything, and I’ve always wanted a friend. So few people seem to understand—”

  A certain recollection, awakened by the words, made her pause.