“Dorothy! You’re never furious,” said Lily incredulously.
She could not remember ever to have seen Dorothy otherwise than good-humoured and easy-going and light-hearted.
“Well, I was angry that time. I foamed.”
Dorothy paused reflectively.
“Of course, we made it up afterwards, and it was heavenly.”
“I can’t imagine your ever being very angry,” said Lily.
“Neither could I,” Dorothy admitted frankly. “I always thought I had a beautiful temper, especially compared to poor Janet. But I’m afraid I haven’t, after all. Perhaps the truth is that Frank is the only person I’ve ever known who’s really worth quarrelling with.”
The explanation, with its odd, un-Hardinge-like quality of discernment, was destined to remain in Lily’s memory.
She asked Dorothy to stay with her, and they purchased together the very economically-chosen outfit that Dorothy hoped to take to India with her, which Lily supplemented as often as she dared with presents from herself and Nicholas.
“Thanks awfully, Lily. The blue feather you gave me will go too beautifully with this, won’t it? Settlement je pense que je sais un shop moins cher dans le High Street. Nous pouvons disons ici que nous le penserons-over.”
The Hardinge superstition that none but themselves could understand schoolroom French was an old one, and had served them many an ill turn with Miss Clotilde Stellenthorpe.
When Dorothy’s visit was over, and the time before her marriage and departure for India seemed to be lessening very rapidly, Lily realized that, although they had little in common save youth and a year or two’s companionship, she would miss her very much.
After all, it had been amusing to discuss frocks and ornaments and purchases together, to rejoice candidly in the glory of Lily’s new possessions, and to laugh together at old, foolish, trivial jokes and catchwords that had no merit at all except that of association.
Lily, rather surprised, and very much ashamed, one evening broke into involuntary tears. She did not want Nicholas to know that she had cried, but the tear-stains on her face would not be effaced, and after all, Lily thought that he would understand. There was already a sharply-marked line of division in her thoughts between the things that Nicholas would, and those that he would not, understand.
She told him why she had cried.
“Poor little dear!” Nicholas was very kind and petted her, saying that she was tired, and must take more care of herself. But the next day he was inexplicably depressed, with a tendency to monosyllables and a complete inability to smile.
Lily, only too familiar with such phenomena in her father, felt her heart sink.
“Are you worried, Nicholas?” she ventured.
“No.”
He raised his eyebrows slightly, as though wishing to show her that he was surprised at the question.
You’re not vexed with me, are you?”
“I could never be vexed with you, darling,” he said, speaking more naturally.
Later, he returned to the subject of his own accord.
“What made my little wife think I could be vexed with her? So long as you don’t feel that I’m an elderly fellow who had no business to marry a pretty little girl out of the nursery. Is that it, eh, Lily?”
He laughed as he spoke but there was a kind of nervous anxiety in the look that he turned upon her.
“Of course I don’t, Nicholas!”
She raised her lips to his quickly, partly in order to hide the understanding that she felt had leapt into her face.
She saw that Nicholas was sensitive upon the subject of his age. He had found, in Lily’s regret at the loss of her old playmate, an implied allusion to the years that separated him from his wife.
It had hurt his feelings.
All this Lily felt with intuitive certainty. Neither she nor Nicholas alluded further to the subject, but he retained his gravity of demeanor until some trifling whimsicality struck his sense of humour, when his habitual spontaneous gaiety returned to him, with all the suddenness of a child’s transition from sulky silence to laughter.
Lily was gladdened and relieved by the restoration of her husband’s good spirits, and her plastic youth received yet another impression.
She must never let Nicholas know that she was anything less than radiantly happy, or he would attribute it to the disparity of years between them, and his feelings would be hurt.
There was no calamity that it seemed to her more essential to avoid.
XVI
A year after Dorothy Hardinge’s marriage, her father died suddenly.
“It seems so incredible, somehow,” said Lily.
“My dear, none of us can live for ever. But I know what you mean.”
The face of Nicholas was abnormally grave, perhaps in decorous concealment of the indubitable fact that Charlie Hardinge’s unexpected death could hardly affect him very deeply, save through concern for its effect upon Lily.
“I don’t know why it’s so difficult to associate some people with death. Cousin Charlie, somehow, seems part of all the things I’ve always known, all my life. I can’t realize he isn’t there any more.”
Nicholas patted her hand gently.
“You’d like to come down with me for the funeral, wouldn’t you? We could stay with your father for a couple of nights, no doubt, and you might be a comfort to those poor girls. They’re both at home, of course?”
“Yes. Poor Dorothy, it will be dreadful for her, away in India.”
“Yes, that’s hard luck!”
Nicholas was very sympathetic and kind, and Lily felt grateful.
She was, as she had said, utterly unable to associate good-natured, commonplace Cousin Charlie Hardinge with the idea of death.
Philip Stellenthorpe met his daughter and son-in-law with an air of appropriate solemnity which, however, was too near to his habitual expression to be greatly noticeable.
“This is a sad business — terribly sudden. I’m glad you’ve come down — very glad. They’ll appreciate that very much.”
“How is Cousin Ethel?” said Lily.
“I’ve not seen her, but the girls say she’s bearing up very bravely, poor thing. I went over there at once, of course, to see if I could be of any help, and saw Janet. Very much upset, of course, poor child, but most sensible and helpful. A brother of poor Charlie’s is arriving to-day with his wife, and meanwhile we’ve made most of the necessary arrangements.”
“What time is the funeral?”
Philip gave a very slight start at the question, asked in serious, but unsubdued, tones by Nicholas, and Lily guessed instantly that her father had hitherto avoided making direct use of the word.
“Half-past two, the day after to-morrow. That gives her family, who are very much scattered about the world, time to get here.”
“Would Janet and Sylvia like me to go and see them to-morrow, do you think, Father?”
“Yes, my little pet. Janet says that your Cousin Ethel would like to see you, too. They think it’s a comfort to her to talk. It’s been a terrible shock, of course.”
“Very sudden.”
Lily knew by the way in which Nicholas spoke that he was making conversation, and that he would secretly have welcomed a change of subject.
“Very sudden indeed. He was apparently in his usual health, and perfectly cheerful, until Sunday evening, when he complained of a pain in his side. They none of them thought anything of it — he didn’t himself — but he went upstairs early. He’d only been out of the room a few moments when they heard the sound of a fall. The maid heard it from the dining-room and went upstairs, and there she found him on the floor, unconscious. Most mercifully it wasn’t your Cousin Ethel herself who found him there — the shock was terrible enough as it was. The doctor was there inside half an hour, but he couldn’t do anything at all. It was all over by ten o’clock, and he never recovered consciousness at all.”
“Heart, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
The Hardinges themselves told Lily these details all over again, each one repeating the same things over and over again in different words.
Janet and Sylvia sat forlornly in the schoolroom, in old black serge skirts and new black blouses hastily made up by the village dressmaker. They had nothing to do.
An uncle and aunt had arrived and the aunt was upstairs with Ethel. The uncle had gone down to the church “to see about things,” they said.
“Oh, Lily, if only it hadn’t been so awfully, awfully sudden! We’d all had dinner together, you know, just as usual, and he only stayed in the drawing-room a few minutes, and then said he thought he’d go to bed early.”
“He did say he’d a pain in his side; he told Mother so — but we never though it was anything” said Sylvia.
“No. And then he went upstairs, and we were all sewing, just as usual, and we never heard anything. It was Emily who heard, from the dining-room, clearing away dinner. And she went upstairs and his door was open, and she saw — oh, Lily!”
Tears choked Janet’s utterance.
Both girls had cried until their eyelids were swollen and discoloured and their faces white from exhaustion.
“Has there been time to hear from Dorothy?” Lily asked, for the sake of saying something.
“Not yet. The cable might come any time, now. We cabled to Frank, of course. And he was so pleased about Dorothy’s baby and everything, and now — now he’ll never see her.”
They sobbed and cried.
“The baby will be a comfort to Dorothy.”
“Yes, oh yes. And to Mother too, later on.”
A bell rang, and Janet said:
“That might be the cable.”
Waiting for the Indian cable seemed to be the nearest approach to an occupation that was possible.
“Uncle has sent up the announcement to the papers, so to-morrow I suppose there’ll be telegrams and things,” said Sylvia, shuddering. “But the Indian cable ought to be here to-day.”
The cable came at last and Janet took it upstairs unopened to her mother’s room, and Sylvia and Lily remained in the schoolroom, where the clock hands moved so slowly that they often seemed to have stopped altogether. Lily held Sylvia’s hand, and spoke from time to time, trying not to think that her platitudes were utterly meaningless.
“He couldn’t have felt anything at all — it would have been so much more dreadful if he’d had to suffer... and now he — he’s so much happier.. he’d want you to be brave....”
She wondered desperately, as she spoke, whether she really believed what she said. Was Cousin Charlie happy now, with some incommunicable bliss? Was he really capable any more, of wishes and hopes concerning those left behind?
Sylvia cried on, softly and drearily, and the hands of the clock crawled slowly round.
Presently Janet came back again and said that the aunt and uncle were downstairs.
“It’s so dreadful to have to think of meals and things, just the same,” she said.
“Mother is staying upstairs, Lily, but she’d like you to come and see her this afternoon. I think it’s a comfort to her to talk.”
Cousin Ethel was very brave, and it seemed, as Janet and Sylvia had said, to comfort her to talk.
“He was so good, Lily — that’s such a comfort to me. Twenty-five years married, and I never had a cross word from him f I like to think that the children will all be able to remember that. He was such a kind father, too, so devoted to his girls. Do you remember how he used to call them ‘kiddie-widdies’?
“After all, Lily dear, one of us had to go first — it’s only a very, very few that are allowed to slip away together — and I couldn’t have borne to think of him left without me. He’s happy now, for ever and ever, and I don’t suppose it’ll seem more than a flash of time to him, where he is now, before we meet again.”
Cousin Ethel cried, too, but it was evident that she found consolation in the thought of an Eternal Life holding the certain promise of ultimate reunion.
Lily went away and promised Janet and Sylvia that she would come again the following day.
“The Hannigan aunts are arriving to-night, and Uncle Bob and Aunt Mary. I think perhaps it’s easier, when there are people there,” Sylvia whispered.
Lily was glad to think that they would have the occupation of preparing for, and receiving, the visitors. Anything would surely be better than sitting, sick with crying, repeating over and over again all that they had said already.
She felt very tired, and full of remorse for her own inadequacy. She knew that there had been no conviction behind any of the commonplace utterances with which she had striven to convey consolation. Only her sympathy with their sorrow had been real. Even sympathy, however, seemed to fail her when Philip Stellenthorpe spoke of personal loss to himself.
“Our very nearest friend, poor Charlie,” he observed sorrowfully. “There are very few left now, my little Lily, whom I know as I did your poor Cousin Charlie. We’d been friends for many years and I thought very highly of him — very highly indeed.”
Lily, against her own will, knew that during Cousin Charlie’s life-time Philip had not thought highly of him at all. They had not been intimate friends — Philip had no intimate friends — and it was Charlie Hardinge, not Philip, who had taken for granted that a good-fellowship, at all events, existed between them. Philip had very often resented Charlie’s officious interest in his affairs, and his reiterations of unwanted advice.
“Well’ said Philip with a heavy sigh, “our loss is his gain, poor fellow, no doubt.”
Then he, too, believed, or affected to believe, that Cousin Charlie was now in a region of undimmed happiness, a disincarnate spirit in the presence of his Creator.
Lily deliberately tried to imagine the operation of such a transformation.
Cousin Charlie, interested in his garden, in the arrival in India of a little granddaughter, in the successful solution of a chess problem, utterly without premonition, so far as one knew, of any kind. Walking upstairs, perhaps thinking quite casually of the little pain in his side that they all knew was nothing at all, perhaps occupied with some trivial reflection about the lamp in the passage. He was always particular about the trimming of the wicks....
And then in one instant, unconsciousness. They had found him on the very threshold of the dressing-room, where he must have fallen just as he entered it.
There had been no flicker of consciousness. He had been dead -within one hour from the time of his seizure.
And what after that?
Cousin Charlie, awakening in a new world, a world where presumably all his old interests held little or no meaning, confronted with a Supreme Being to whom he had paid a more or less perfunctory homage on Sundays, and told that he had earned, in his comfortable, easy-going, perfectly honourable fifty-eight years upon earth, an eternity of perfect happiness.
It was only less unthinkable than was the alternative of kindly, active Cousin Charlie consigned to an eternity of misery and punishment.
Perhaps there was no afterwards at all, and Cousin Charlie’s spirit had flickered out when the machinery of his physical body failed. Then there would never be any reunion, such as his wife, who loved him, looked for so confidently.
Lily could not believe it.
Love, at least, must be a thing that went on. Love was part of God.
She remembered, with a great sense of relief, the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory. A place where the souls of the dead awaited. The suggestion of a place of existence upon which the spirit might learn, and be prepared gradually for transformation, seemed to Lily to carry a sense of possibility with it. The other alternatives, quite simply, appeared to her to be incredible.
Her mind was very much occupied with such thoughts, and she found it difficult to speak of other things, as Nicholas was obviously desirous of doing.
Nevertheless, she seconded the efforts of her husband when her father persisted in discussing the funeral arrangements of the fo
llowing day.
“What a ghoulish sort of pleasure your father seems to take in this business,” Nicholas remarked pensively when they were alone together. “I quite agree that it’s sad enough, but it needn’t pervade the whole conversation, surely.”
“I suppose after to-morrow he’ll be all right,” said Lily.
She was faintly shocked at the criticism of Philip, although her reason admitted its justice.
“You do like Father, Nicholas dear, don’t you?”
“My dear child, because one likes a person it needn’t make one blind and deaf and dumb to their shortcomings,” said her husband cheerfully.
Lily assimilated in silence the obvious common sense of the dictum, that all the same came to her as something almost new, and entirely revolutionary.
The next day, they attended Charlie Hardinge’s funeral. Lily retained confused impressions of the smell of new crape, of the sound of decorous murmuring in the church, and then of stifled sobbing as Janet and Sylvia took their places. Ethel Hardinge’s thick veil fell over her face, but Lily did not think that she shed tears.
The organist struggled with unusual music, obviously beyond the capabilities of the player, and presently to familiar strains the choir sang:
“Light’s abode, celestial Salem.
Visions whence true peace doth spring, Brighter than the heart can fancy....
There for ever and for ever Alleluia is out-pour’d....
All is pure and all is holy That within thy walls is stored.”
Lily knew the choice to be Ethel’s.
The insistence upon abrupt translation from life on earth into a world of perfect joy and peace, where “all is pure and all is holy,” again bewildered and almost distressed Lily.
Could such violent dislocation as was implied really take place?
A child did not, in the space of a night, become a man. Learning, even on the lowest plane, was not acquired in an hour. Did God, then, reverse all His laws as manifested upon earth, whenever a soul left its body?
If so, the spirit now in heaven was not Cousin Charlie at all. It was somebody quite else, with understanding and aspirations that had never been his; one to whom new revelations had been made, that must of necessity transform the soul that received them.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 205