Within a few yards of the hotel, Flora met Quentillian.
He turned and accompanied her to the door.
“David didn’t take his own life, Owen. It was what they said — he must have been taken ill suddenly.”
“You know for certain?”
“For certain.”
He told her that he understood her relief, but his next words were:
“And do you still think you were right, about going alone to this woman?”
“Whether I was right or not, I’m thankful I did. She would have broken my father’s heart. She was a sort of — emotion-monger. She’d have spared him nothing.”
“She spared you nothing, then, Flora?”
“It’s different, for me. I would do anything in the world, for my father’s sake. That’s my only excuse, possibly, for deceiving him.”
“Do you want excuses?”
“No, I don’t. You’re right,” she said gravely. “I’ve planned it all deliberately, and I’ve got to see it through.”
“I think you’re wrong, all along the line, and I want to talk it over with you. It will be a bitter disappointment to the Canon to be told that he has missed seeing Mrs. Carey.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re going to leave it at that?”
“Yes, more than ever. Owen, when do you go to Stear?”
“As soon as possible.”
“Then could you travel down with us tomorrow? We go by the three o’clock train. I think it may do him good, to have you, and you see, he’ll be thinking that the whole expedition has been a failure. It will be easier for both of us, if you’re there.”
“Very well, I’ll come.”
They parted, and Flora went to seek her father. Except from a certain curiosity, it could not be said that Quentillian looked forward to an agreeable journey.
By the time that he joined Canon Morchard and his daughter at the railway station, he was beginning to feel as though the whole of the involved deception perpetrated with such a conviction of righteousness by Flora, must have been a figment of imagination. One glance at the Canon’s sombre and pallid face dispelled the illusion.
Flora looked pallid also, but her expression was one of rapt intensity, as though only her own strange vision, that Quentillian felt to be so singularly perverted, were before her. She had, undeniably, shielded her father from knowledge that must have appalled him, and in that security, remained calm.
The Canon, out of his lesser awareness, had not, however, remained calm at all.
“I have been angry, Owen,” he admitted, as they paced the platform together, at the Canon’s own invitation. “My disappointment has been very bitter. This lady, this Mrs. Carey, the friend of my dear boy David, left for Scotland last night. I went to her house this morning, only to find her gone. Flora, whom I trusted, had made a mistake of incredible carelessness. I could not have believed it, in a matter which must touch us all so nearly, which lay so close to my own heart. Poor child, she has been highly tried of late, and I have thought her looking ill. I should not have trusted to her accuracy. Lucilla, who has been my right hand, my secretary ever since her childhood, could never have failed me thus. I forgot that her sister was younger, unaccustomed to the task, less to be relied upon. But it has been a cruel disappointment, and I vented my first grief upon the culprit. Is there no stage of the journey, Owen, when one can see the undisciplined impulse driven underfoot, the hasty word bridled? I, who have striven all my life, I have again shown anger and violence — to my own child!”
The Canon’s peculiar predilection for making an amateur confessor of Quentillian, was by force of repetition ceasing to seem anything but natural.
Quentillian said: “Flora looks overwrought, sir,” and inwardly hoped that the train would arrive shortly.
“Aye, poor Flora! She was David’s especial favourite, his best correspondent. This stroke has fallen heavily upon Flora, Owen. And I, who should have made all allowance, I turned against her! In my sharp disappointment, I uttered those strong expressions that come back to one, when the moment’s passion has cooled, as they must have sounded to the unhappy sinner by whom they were provoked.”
It was the same piteous round of self-reproach, remorse and profound depression to which Owen had so frequently listened. He hoped that he might be of some assistance, however, incomprehensibly to himself, in listening yet once again.
“I have written to Mrs. Carey. She must indeed have thought my behaviour strange, ungrateful, unnatural even. That matters little enough, yet it adds its feather weight to the burden — its feather weight to the burden. That I should have appeared careless, indifferent, where news of David was concerned! I, who would have given my heart’s blood, for one hour’s intercourse with him since he left us for the last time! Ah, well, it does not bear dwelling upon.”
Nevertheless, the Canon dwelt upon it until it became necessary to rejoining Flora and enter the train.
During the journey he remained silent, with a profound and unhappy silence. His manner towards his daughter was peculiarly gentle and melancholy.
Presently he leant back in the corner, the sad lines of his face relaxing, and slept.
Flora spoke to Quentillian in a low voice.
“I’m so glad he’s asleep. Last night I heard him walking up and down his room for such a long while.”
“He is very much distressed,” said Quentillian severely.
“I know.” She acquiesced apathetically in the truth of the statement.
“Do you know that he has written to Mrs. Carey?”
“Yes.”
“How are you going to prevent her replying, and exposing the fact that you have seen her?”
Flora whitened perceptibly, but she answered him with sudden spirit.
“You have no right to question me, Owen, or to demand explanations from me in that tone.”
“I have this right, that you have made me a passive partner in your extraordinary schemes.”
Owen, too, was conscious of a rising anger.
“I feel like a traitor to your father, Flora. What are you going to do next?”
“I am going to see it through,” said Flora doggedly. “At least you will admit that to do a thing like this by halves, is a great deal worse than useless. I have saved my father from what must have broken his heart.”
“You have done evil that good may come,” he quoted grimly.
“If you like to put it so.” Flora was inexorable.
“He has suffered too much already.”
“You mock your own God,” said Quentillian, with sudden, low vehemence. “You profess to believe in Him, to trust Him, and yet you deceive and manoeuvre and plot, sooner than leave your father to his dealings. I have small belief in a personal God, Flora, but I can see no justification in endeavouring madly to stand between another soul, and life.”
She gazed at him piteously.
“Do you think I am not unhappy — that I have not been torn in two? He was angry, Owen, when he thought I had made a mistake about the appointment, and oh, the relief of it! I should have welcomed it if he had hit me — I deserved it all, and far more besides. If I am doing wrong, I am suffering for it.”
Quentillian, looking at her haggard, tragic face, felt sure that she spoke literal truth.
“When does Lucilla come home?” he suddenly asked. “I don’t know. Soon, I hope.”
Quentillian hoped so too. It seemed to him that only Lucilla’s normality could adjust to any sort of balance the mental atmosphere of St. Gwenllian.
Flora gazed at her father.
“Think what it would have been to him to know, now, that David had sinned, even that he contemplated going through the form of marriage, with that poor thing! The world’s standards of honour are not those of my father.”
“Nor yours either,” Quentillian had almost said, but he checked the cheap retort as it rose.
An impulse made him say instead:
“Promise me at least, Flo
ra, that if this becomes too much for you, if it all breaks down, you will let me share it with you. You owe it to me, I think, having let me be partly responsible. Will you promise?”
“You are very good,” said Flora, her mouth quivering for the first time. “But I don’t mean to fail.”
It was evident enough that her whole being was strung up to the accomplishment of her purpose, and that she was incapable of seeing beyond it.
Quentillian, at his own station, parted from Canon Morchard and his daughter with the direst forebodings. Insensibly, he, too, had almost come to feel that anxious preoccupation with the Canon’s peace of mind that exercised the Canon’s daughters.
Within a fortnight of his return he went over to St. Gwenllian and found there no trace of catastrophe such as he had half expected, but the usual atmosphere of calm melancholy.
He had no conversation with Flora, but she told him briefly that there would be no correspondence between her father and Mrs. Carey, and Quentillian was left to surmise by what peculiar methods Flora had achieved her ends.
On the whole, he preferred not to dwell upon the subject. He had a certain unwilling respect for Flora, even if none for her casuistries, and he had no wish to dwell either upon her astonishing machinations or his own complicity.
IV
In the spring Lucilla came back to St. Gwenllian.
The first time that Owen saw her was in the presence of the Canon.
In his relief at her return, Canon Morchard had evidently forgotten that he had thought it undutiful of her to go.
“You see I have my right hand once more,” he said fondly. “Owen here can tell you that you have been sadly missed, my daughter. Little Flora did her best, but she is not my housekeeper, my experienced secretary. Neither she nor our poor Valeria can equal Lucilla there.”
Quentillian took his advantage and asked Lucilla for news of Valeria. The Canon, habitually, seemed only too much inclined to view any mention of Valeria and her husband as a rank indecency in the presence of her quondam betrothed.
“Val is very well and very busy,” said Lucilla. “George is doing well, on the whole, though it’s a struggle, but the land there is wonderful. I should like to show you the photographs of their little farm, and the children.”
“Lucilla is our photographer,” said the Canon forbearingly, as though in extenuation of what Quentillian felt certain that he regarded as Lucilla’s indiscretion.
Not for the first time, Quentillian suspected that Lucilla was the only one of the Canon’s children able to contemplate the Canon by the light of a sense of humour, that detracted not at all from her affection and respect.
“They are not thinking of a visit to England, I suppose?”
“No. Expense is a consideration, and there are the children.”
“My grandsons!” said the Canon. “I should like a sight of my grandsons, but there could not be unalloyed joy in the meeting. Nay, I ask myself sometimes if there can be any unalloyed joy here below. Are not the warp and woof intermingled even in the nearest and dearest relationships? And the manner of poor Valeria’s leaving home was such as to make one’s heart ache, both for her and with her. But enough of reminiscences, my children. I am in no mood for them tonight. I wish to rest, and perhaps read. You may some of you remember a very favourite old story of mine,” said Canon Morchard genially. “That of the famous saying, ‘We are none of us infallible, not even the youngest’”
This terrible pronouncement, however historical, seldom amused the juniors of its raconteur, and Flora and Lucilla only accorded to it the most perfunctory of smiles. Owen Quentillian remained entirely grave.
“No one has more admiration than myself for the quality of infallibility,” the Canon continued, humourously “(always provided that it is not that which is claimed by the Pope of Rome), but I must confess that I am not amongst those who take the modern craze for youthful intellectuals very seriously. This being so, dear Owen, you will forgive me in that I have not yet read anything of yours. Tonight I have a free hour — a rare treat — and I am going to rectify the omission. Will you read aloud to us of your work, or is that too much to ask?”
It was indeed too much to ask, Owen felt.
He could have read his own work aloud with comparative complacency to any critic capable of taking it seriously, but to Canon Morchard the slight, cynical epigrams, the terse, essentially unsentimental rationalism of Owen’s views upon God and man, must come either as wanton impertinence, or as meaningless folly.
It was impossible to suppose that the Canon would keep either opinion to himself, and Quentillian felt it unlikely that he would either find himself capable of listening to him tolerantly, or be given an opportunity for demolishing his views.
“I think I had rather not inflict my trivialities upon you at all, sir,” he remarked, with truth, and yet with an absence of sincerity of which he felt that Lucilla, at all events, was quite as well aware as he was himself.
“I assure you that I’m not worth reading.”
“I shall judge of that for myself,” said the Canon kindly. “Was there not something in that Review that was sent to you, Flora?”
“Yes,” said Flora unwillingly.
“Fetch it, my dear.”
Quentillian cast his mind over his more recent productions, and was invaded by a grim dismay.
His opinion of the Canon’s literary judgment, where writings not directly connected with Church matters were concerned, was of the slightest, but he disliked the thought both of the pain that the elder man would feel in reading that which would offend his taste, and of the remonstrance that he would certainly believe it his duty to make.
It was a relief to him when Flora returned without the Review, and said:
“There is someone who wants to speak to you in the hall, Father. I’m so sorry.”
The Canon rose at once.
“The man who wants me is the man I want’,” he quoted, and left the room.
When the door had closed behind him, Flora said to her sister, with a certain ruthless disregard of Quentillian’s presence that at least established the earnestness of her concern:
“What shall we do?”
“Nothing,” said Lucilla laconically.
“But we can’t let him see that ‘Review. Adrian sent it to me — it’s got something in it by that man Hale. Father would hate the whole thing.”
Lucilla looked at Quentillian.
“He won’t like my article, and I should very much prefer him not to read it,” said the author candidly.
She smiled slightly.
“It’s the one on the Myth of Self-Sacrifice?”
Owen nodded.
“It might have been worse,” said Lucilla. “It might have been the one in which you said that the parental instinct was only another name for the possessive instinct. And now I come to think of it, that one was called The Sanctification of Domestic Tyranny, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” said Quentillian, in a tone .which struck himself as being rather that of a defiant child to its nurse.
“Well, Father would have liked that even less than the Myth of Self-Sacrifice, I imagine.”
She spoke without acrimony, without, in fact, any effect at all of personal bias, but Quentillian said dispassionately:
“You dislike the modern school of thought of which my writings are a feeble example. May I ask why you read them?”
“But I don’t dislike it, Owen,” she returned with a calm at least equal to his own. “As for what you write, I think you’re very often mistaken, but that doesn’t prevent my being interested.”
Quentillian was slightly taken aback at being considered mistaken, and still more at being told so. He had always respected Lucilla, both morally and intellectually, and he would have preferred to suppose the admiration mutual.
“Owen, haven’t you got anything else that he could have to read?” broke in Flora.
“Nothing that he would — care for,” answered Quentillia
n, who had very nearly said “Nothing that he would understand.”
“Father has asked for the Review, Flossie, and you’d better get it. You needn’t work yourself up about it. He knows it’s general character quite as well as you do.”
“I don’t think he ought to be allowed to make himself needlessly unhappy,” said Flora obstinately.
“You can’t prevent it.”
“I suppose it would be wrong to say that I don’t know where the Review is?”
“It would be foolish, which is worse,” said Lucilla curtly. Her un-moral pronouncement closed the discussion.
Flora, looking grave and unhappy, left the room, and presently returned with the instrument of destruction, as she evidently regarded the production.
“Let us hope that Canon Morchard will continue to be detained,” said Quentillian, not altogether ironically.
Flora made no reply.
In less than a quarter of an hour’s time, the Canon came back again, picked up the Review and made a careful scrutiny of the table of contents.
“The Myth of Self-Sacrifice?” he enunciated, with a strongly-enquiring inflexion in his tone, as though prepared to receive the writer’s instant assurance that he was not responsible for so strange a heading.
Owen desired to leave the room, but was mysteriously compelled to remain in it, glancing at intervals at the all-too expressive face of his reader.
The Canon read very attentively, pausing every now and then to turn back a page or two, as though comparing inconsistencies of text, and sometimes also turning on a page or two ahead, as if desirous of establishing the certainty that a conclusion was eventually to be attained. His eyebrows worked as he read, after a fashion habitual with him.
There had been evenings when Flora had made the slightest of pencil sketches, hardly caricaturing, but embodying, this peculiarity, for her father’s subsequent indulgent amusement. But no such artistic pleasantry was undertaken tonight. The atmosphere did not lend itself to pleasantry of any kind.
At last the Canon closed the volume, laid it down, and removed his glasses with some deliberation.
“Dear lad, I am disappointed.”
“I was afraid you would be.”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 232