Could futility go further, I ask you? You reply at once: No, undoubtedly not. There is yet hope for you, then.”
On this optimistic pronouncement Aunt Clo met at last with the interruption that her niece, fascinated by so much candour, had been unable to offer.
Nicholas Aubray entered.
“Well, well,” said he cheerily, “the Female Parliament sitting?”
The trivial pleasantry was received in perfect silence, and Nicholas cast a sudden, shrewd glance round the room.
“What on earth?”
“Niente!” said Aunt Clo vivaciously. “A few words, amico mio, of counsel to the young — the very young, I may say.”
“Is that Lily?” asked her husband, with a rather puzzled smile.
“But no! Our Lily may be young in years, but in wit, in understanding, she is delightfully mature. But the little Dickenson there — sans rancune, hein, my Dickenson?”
Miss Dickenson’s heavy face, from red, had become white.
She looked at Miss Stellenthorpe, with the concentrated hatred that only embittered vanity can engender.
“I am going to leave the house,” she said thickly. “I shan’t stay in a house where I’ve been insulted.”
“Who has insulted you in this house?” demanded Nicholas, half smiling.
Doris made a dumb gesture indicating Miss Stellenthorpe.
“Nonsense!” said Nicholas brusquely. He put his hand on the girl’s arm.
“What’s all this about? You’ve misunderstood something. What is it?”
“Rien de rien!” declared Aunt Clo contemptuously. “For the little Dickenson’s own good, mon ami, I take it upon myself to point out certain wearisome tricks that our Lily has borne far too long, and hence comes this talk insult. Enfantillage!”
Aunt Clo’s cigarette described a parabola that dismissed the subject as being one of no further importance. Nicholas turned to his wife.
“Lily — of course Miss Dickenson mustn’t dream of leaving us. We should be most distressed.”
Lily looked at Doris.
She had neither the courage to persuade her to stay, nor to encourage her to go.
“I shan’t stay,” said Doris obstinately.
Nicholas frowned, looked at his wife appealingly and then at Miss Dickenson with evident concern.
It came to Lily, with a slight sense of shock, that Nicholas could not be depended upon in a crisis. He was uncertain.
Doris was staring at him with smouldering eyes, and both were silent.
It was Aunt Clotilde, high-handed to the last, who carried off the situation.
She uncrossed her amazing length of limb, rose to her feet with a swinging movement, and flicked the ash off her cigarette with considerable elegance of gesture.
“You have said well, my Dickenson,” observed Aunt Go. “You will remain here no longer. Go, then; and on no account forget what I have said to you. Speak less, eschew’ slang, learn to place your words correctly, avoid clichés that mean nothing, and above all, cast from your mind for ever the delusion that the art of conversation consists in the dropping of detached pieces of information concerning yourself.”
XIX
“I’M very sorry you’re going, very sorry indeed,” said Nicholas.
He was purposely speaking with restraint of manner.
“I couldn’t stay after a row like that,” said Doris candidly. “I couldn’t possibly.”
The word vexed him.
“I hope there are no such things as ‘rows’ in my house,” he said, deliberately repressive.
“Of course, I wasn’t going to say anything upstairs with Mrs. Aubray still weak as she is, but if I don’t say anything, it isn’t because I don’t feel. Miss Stellenthorpe was most insulting.”
They stared at one another.
“I’m very sorry,” said Nicholas uncomfortably.
“Please don’t think that I think it’s anything to do with you,” said Doris, with some formality. “You and — and Mrs. Aubray, of course — have always been very kind, and of course, I have done my best, and I can’t help knowing I’m a good nurse.” She paused.
“Of course you are. It’s made all the difference having you here.”
Nicholas spoke eagerly, both from sincere conviction and from the desire to gratify her.
“Miss Stellenthorpe didn’t seem to think so. I don’t know what she knows about nursing. I’m sure, but from the way she spoke you’d thing she was matron-in-chief and all.”
Nicholas wished that Miss Dickenson had contrived to pass through her hospital training without incorporating into her being quite so many slightly common turns of speech. The matter of Aunt Go’s accusations, whatever the manner of them, might not have been altogether without justification.
“She’s very artistic and highly strung, you know,” he urged in extenuation of Aunt Clotilde. “She — she really is a very splendid person, you know. I’m sorry you and she haven’t hit it off.”
“I’d better go upstairs and pack, I suppose,” said Doris.
“Don’t be in a hurry, please don’t. Anyhow, one of the maids will see to all that for you, if it’s really necessary. Won’t you have a talk with Lily first?”
“I don’t want to worry her. Besides, she could have stopped Miss Stellenthorpe saying all she did, if she’d wanted to. I don’t know what I shall do now, I’m sure.” Nicholas began to walk up and down, very much perturbed, and Doris dropped into a chair.
“I oughtn’t to be bothering you, I suppose,” she said presently. “My rotten affairs don’t really matter to anybody but myself.”
“Please don’t say that — please don’t. I simply hate to hear you say a thing like that. I thought it was agreed that you were to look on us as real pals.”
His kind-heartedness seriously perturbed, he stopped in front of her.
“Don’t you remember the agreement?”
“Did you really mean it? I’d be awfully glad to have you for a pal. You always strike me as being so awfully dependable and — and strong.”
Nicholas, unconsciously accepting her transition from the first person plural to the third person singular, threw out his chest with the old, satisfied gesture.
“It’s very nice of you to feel that. I think I am to be depended on, Miss Dickenson, where my friends are concerned, and I’m very glad you feel that. Very glad. As for strength — well, I’m certainly not a weak man.”
He laughed a little, very much pleased, as is a man who meets with reassurance upon a point about which he is sometimes secretly dubious.
“My shoulders are quite broad enough to bear your troubles as well as my own, I think, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do. Rather. But it seems a shame—”
“Why? You know I’m interested in anything that concerns you. Of course I am.”
His candid, solicitous eyes were fixed upon her opaque, unrevealing gaze.
“Thank you, awfully,” said Miss Dickenson slowly. “I get a sort of devastating feeling, sometimes, you know.”
“Tell me what you mean,” Nicholas sympathetically invited her.
“Oh well, things are a bit difficult all round, you know. I can’t live at home, I simply can’t. It’s too devastating. That’s what really made me take up nursing — to get away from home.”
“But your father is so proud of you — you should have heard him speaking of you, as I did the other day. I can assure you he quite appreciates your pluck and — and spirit.”
“Oh. I daresay. It really isn’t so much Father as my aunts and people, and my married sister, and even the two girls. They’re always sort of talking at me.”
Her voice grew angry.
“I can’t have a friend, or go anywhere, or do anything, without them interfering. My aunts are always hinting that I don’t know how to take care of myself.”
“But I’m sure you do,” Nicholas said gently.
“Of course! It’s all old-fashioned, devastating nonsense, that’s what it i
s. Because men like talking to me. There isn’t anything in it — I’m not even pretty.”
She scarcely made a pause, but it was not in Nicholas to refrain from a meditative interpolation: “I don’t know so much about that!”
“It’s quite true I’ve got a lot of men friends, or at least I had. I’ve given up men now, since the one I was engaged to treated me so badly. You know, I told you about him.... When that happened I said. Thank you, that’s enough for me, I said. I know what men are now, and I shan’t have anything more to do with them.”
“But it’s not like you to be bitter,” Nicholas said, in a gentle, puzzled way.
His ear and his trained mind alike noted the futility of her speech, but his masculinity was all the while increasingly aware of that in her which, for want of a better word, he could only describe as animal magnetism.
In her, it was extraordinarily powerful.
“Sometimes,” declared Doris inconsistently, “I just think I’ll marry the next man that asks me.”
The suggestion, for reasons that he did not attempt to analyze, somehow affected Nicholas disagreeably.
“Oh, I don’t think I should do that if I were you,” he gravely objected.
“Why not? Men are all rotten, anyway — it doesn’t make much odds which of them one takes in the end.”
Her cheap cynicism made Nicholas vaguely uncomfortable. He looked at her without speaking.
As though Doris, by means of some odd intuition of her own, had guessed his disapproval, she changed her tone suddenly.
“Of course I don’t really mean half I say — you mustn’t think I mean it all, really you mustn’t. I’ve known some awfully nice men — men who really were nice, I mean. Most of my pals have been men — not flirting, I don’t mean, or anything like that. Just friends.”
“I hope you’re going to add another to their number,” said Nicholas, smiling suddenly.
“Really?”
Her blue-green eyes, neither large nor lustrous, fixed themselves upon his face with a sudden intensity that was somehow alluring.
“Of course, really,” Nicholas declared readily.
She sketched a movement that yet was not actually one, and Nicholas found himself ratifying his avowal of friendship with a handclasp.
“I don’t want you to feel that all this makes a bit of difference,” he said earnestly. “If you ever want a friend- well, here I am, very much at your service. And don’t you go and do anything impetuous with your life. I should be very, very sorry to see you make a mistake.”
“Thank you,” said Doris.
She added after a moment, in the low, half-sullen tone that she sometimes adopted:
“I must say, it’s nice to know that somebody cares.”
“Of course I care,” Nicholas vigorously replied.
He released her hand with a final hearty pressure. “Now supposing I have a little chat with Miss Stellenthorpe, don’t you think we could put this right? I can’t bear you to go away from our house like this.”
“Oh, it’s all right. Mrs. Aubray really is awfully much better now. I don’t think she needs me any longer. Her maid can quite well give her all the help she needs now and — I expect I’ve been here long enough, anyway.” From this attitude Nicholas could not move her, and indeed he had no very urgent desire to do so. It did not need Aunt Clotilde’s eloquence to inform him that Lily shared Miss Dickenson’s own estimate of her visit, and thought that she had been there long enough.
“You ought to have told me, my dear child, if you found that she was getting on your nerves,” said Nicholas frowningly to Lily.
He was vexed that Lily had not told him, vexed that he had not perceived it for himself, vexed, indefinably, that Miss Dickenson should have been found wanting, and vexed that she should leave the house under the weight of a grievance.
“I’m sorry you and Miss Dickenson didn’t quite hit it off together,” he said to Miss Stellenthorpe, with a hint of rebuke in his voice.
Aunt Clo was quite impenitent.
“The day will come,” she remarked with an air of detached omniscience, “the day will come, when the little Dickenson will remember my words with gratitude. But at present she has a skin like a rhinoceros hide. I assure you, cher ami, that it was necessary for me to put dots upon my i’s with her.”
“That you certainly did,” said Nicholas, with a certain grimness.
“Et Alors” said Miss Stellenthorpe coldly.
Nicholas had a perfectly genuine admiration for her, and would not pursue the point.
He bade Doris Dickenson farewell with renewed assurances of friendship, and on the day she left, his lantern- jawed face unconsciously grew lengthier than ever, and his voice very grave. If, subconsciously, Nicholas waited to receive comment upon these phenomena, he was destined to disappointment.
Miss Stellenthorpe’s concern was wholly for her niece.
“The little one requires distraction,” she authoritatively informed Nicholas. “She is regaining strength just now’, and we do not want her to brood. Encourage her to go out, to see her friends, de se distraire, enfin!”
Nicholas begged Lily to follow Aunt Clo’s advice, and was delighted when Aunt Clo herself, with her usual ceremoniousness, enquired whether he would permit the Marchese della Torre to call upon them.
“But of course! Splendid fellow, della Torre! He’ll remind us of our courting days, eh, Lily? What on earth does he want to ask permission for? Why doesn’t the fellow drop in one day? I didn’t even know he was in England.”
“Nor I,” admitted Aunt Clotilde. “We met by chance, entirely.”
“‘We met ‘tw-as in a crowd,’ eh?” said Nicholas. “Well. Lily, will you write and ask him to dinner? I should like to do something for him.”
In the weeks that followed, it might have been said with truth that Nicholas did a good deal for the Marchese della Torre. Always hospitable, he was whole-heartedly grateful to the young man who had rendered his long-ago stay in Rome agreeable, and he had conceived one of those innocent admirations for the Italian’s range of erudition that made up part of his child-like singleness of vision.
The Marchese, more exquisitely dressed than ever, was as full of urbanity, as well informed and as imperturbable as of old, and only one change was to be remarked in him. A true Italian, the merely perfunctory admiration accorded by him to Lily Stellenthorpe as a young and pretty English girl, and a Protestant, became lively and acute directly he met her as the wife of another man.
He kept his dark eyes reverently fixed upon her face, and did not venture upon personalities until he had many times seen both Lily and her husband. Then one evening at the theatre he said to her, “You have changed a great deal, in these few years. Although your face is as young as ever, the soul that looks out of your eyes is that of a woman — no longer that of a child.”
Lily was startled, but she was too young and too disconsolate to reject the subtle flattery.
“I feel very old, sometimes.”
She felt afraid for a moment that he might laugh at her, kindly, as Nicholas would have done, from the height of the years that separated them. But della Torre said quickly:
“I know. People laugh a little, sometimes, when one says that, but it is only because they themselves have either never grown up at all, or have done so insensibly. They do not know anything about the short cut to knowledge that is traversed by some of us.”
“What is that short cut?” said Lily.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“I am afraid, generally — suffering. But why do you ask? You know it as well as I do — perhaps better. You are a woman, and highly strung.”
“Sometimes I’ve wondered whether I mind things more than other people do,” said Lily, divided between the yearning for self-expression and the old, inculcated idea that only impersonal channels can be altogether safe ones in conversation between a man and a woman.
The Italian raised his eyebrows.
“Of cour
se! How can you wonder? Your capacity for emotion of every kind is written on your face. Not for all to read, certainly: but for those who know, to recognize. You are not happy.”
“Yes, I am,” said Lily quickly.
“Forgive me. You say that because you think I have no right to speak so — and perhaps I deserve it. I am sorry.”
The humility in his voice caused her a moment of compunction.
“Don’t be sorry,” she said, smiling. “I suppose no one is exactly happy, once the happiness of childhood has been left behind.”
“Childhood!” exclaimed the Italian scornfully. “The happiness of childhood! What does childhood know beyond the happiness of eating too many sweets, the happiness of a little animal? It is only men and women who experience real happiness, and real suffering. You — you have never yet been happy, and you are beginning to realize it. Is that true?”
“Yes,” said Lily very low.
He betrayed no least quiver of triumph at having won the admission from her.
“You are eternally seeking something — perhaps you hardly know what... desires and vague wishes within yourself frighten and disturb you sometimes — then you think that you are ungrateful and discontented, and you blame yourself. Non e vero?”
“Yes, it’s true,” said Lily. She felt a thrill of wonder that anyone should understand so well. The lights in the theatre were lowered again and the orchestra playing the opening bars of the Intermezzo of Cavalleria Rusticana, with its eternal appeal.
All the emotionalism in Lily responded to the age-old lure of the music.
She turned her head and looked at the Italian. His dark eyes were bent upon her, with a look so tender, so concerned for her sadness, that her own eyes suddenly filled with tears.
“Poverina!” he said with great simplicity. “And you English women have no religion! In Italy the sad ones go to the church, they burn little candles and think that their wishes will come true, or they find comfort in their own virtues and resignation to the will of God. But you? What have you?”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 209