“Is this quite worthy of you?”
Owen felt that a reply either in the affirmative or in the negative, would be equally unsatisfactory, and made none.
“You have adopted the tone of the day to an extent for which I was by no means prepared,” the Canon said gently. “I am sorry for it, Owen — very sorry. I think you have heard me speak before of my dislike for the modern note, that emphasises the material aspect, that miscalls ugliness realism, and coarseness strength. Forgive me, dear Owen, if I hurt you, but this — this trivial flippancy of yours, has hurt me.”
Owen had no doubt that Canon Morchard spoke the truth.
“How emphatically he belongs to the generation that took the errors of other people to heart,” Quentillian reflected.
He felt no great sympathy with such vicarious distresses.
“There is so much that is sad and bad in life, that one longs to read of happiness, and hope, and beauty,” said the Canon. “Why not, dear Owen, seek out and write of the ‘something afar from the sphere of our sorrow’?”
“Because to my way of thinking, only first-hand impressions are of any value. The only value that any point of view of mine can lay claim to, must lie in its sincerity.”
“Words, words! You delude yourself with many words,” said the Canon sadly, rousing in Quentillian a strong desire to retort with the obvious tu quoque.
“Do not misunderstand me, dear fellow — there is talent there — perversely exercised, if you will, but talent. I cannot but believe that life has many lessons in store for you, and when you have learnt them, then you will write more kindly of human nature, more reverently of Divine.”
Hope was once more discernible in the Canon’s voice and on his face, and as he rose he laid his hand affectionately upon the young man’s arm. “Hoping all things — believing all things,” he murmured, as he left the room.
Quentillian was left to the certainty that his brief exposition of his literary credo had entirely failed to convey any meaning to the Canon, and that the long list of the Canon’s optimistic articles of faith now included his own regeneration.
V
“Father, I think Flora looks ill.”
Canon Morchard gazed with concern at Lucilla as she made the announcement, and at once devoted himself to the anxious analysis that he always accorded to any problem affecting one of his children.
“I have thought her altered myself, by the great grief of last year. Spiritually, it has developed her, I believe. But there is a sustained melancholy about her, an absence of all hopeful reaction such as one looks for from youth, that is certainly not wholly natural. You, too, have observed it?”
“Yes.”
Lucilla had observed a great deal more besides, and she was at a loss for a definition of her secret, latent fears.
“Flossie has become very irritable,” she said at last, voicing the least of her anxieties.
“My dear, is that perfectly kind? Flora has had much to try her, and your own absence in Canada threw a great deal for which she is scarcely fitted, upon her shoulders. I do so want you to overcome that critical spirit of yours, dear Lucilla. It has very often disturbed me.”
Lucilla thought for a moment, and decided, without resentment as without surprise, that it would be of no use to say that her observation had not contained any of the spirit of criticism at all. She said instead:
“She doesn’t sleep well, and she is always up very early.”
“She is always at the early Celebration, dear child,” said the Canon tenderly. “Our Flora’s religion is a very living reality to her — more so than ever, of late, I think.”
“It’s a pity that it should make her unhappy, instead of happy.”
“What are you saying, Lucilla?” the Canon enquired in highly-displeased accents.
“It is perfectly true. She is very restless, and very unhappy, and the more she goes to church, the less it seems to satisfy her.”
“And who are you, to judge thus of another’s spiritual experiences? You mean well, Lucilla, but there is a materialism about your point of view that has long made me uneasy — exceedingly uneasy. You were encumbered with household cares very young, and it has given you the spirit of Martha, rather than the spirit of Mary. Leave Flora to my direction, if you please.”
“I should like her to see the doctor.”
“Has she complained of ill-health?”
“No, not at all. She resents being asked if she is well.”
“Most naturally. She is not a child. You take too much upon yourself, Lucilla, as I have told you before. Leave Flora’s welfare in Higher hands than ours, and remember that it is not the part of a Christian to anticipate trouble. Where is your faith?”
Lucilla was not unaccustomed to this enquiry, and did not deem any specific reply to be necessary. Whatever the whereabouts of that which the Canon termed her faith, it did not serve in any way to allay her anxiety.
She watched Flora day by day.
She saw her increasing pallor, her gradual loss of weight, the black lines that deepened beneath her eyes. Above all, she saw the mysterious sense of grievance, that most salient characteristic of the neurotic, gather round her sister’s spirit.
After a little while, she ceased to talk of her visit to Canada, of Valeria, and Valeria’s children, because she saw that Flora could not bear these subjects.
“She’s jealous “ thought Lucilla, with a sick pang of pity.
“I’m sorry for poor Val, living right away from civilization, and absorbed by commonplace things all the time,” said Flora.
She went to church more frequently than ever.
Lucilla wondered very often if anything had happened while she was away.
One day she asked Owen Quentillian.
“There was the shock of David’s death,” he said rather lamely.
“Yes. Father says it affected Flora terribly for a long while.”
“Do you find her much changed, then?”
“I find her very unbalanced,” said Lucilla with her usual directness.
“I think she is an unbalanced person,” Quentillian assented, levelly.
“I wish she could leave home for a time.”
But Flora, when this was suggested to her, said that she did not wish to leave home. Her manner implied that the suggestion hurt her.
At first the Canon was pleased, assuring Lucilla that the pleasant home-life at St. Gwenllian, even if robbed of its old-time joyousness, would best restore Flora to herself. But after a time, he, too, watched her with anxiety.
“Little Flora is not herself,” he began to say.
“Let me send for the doctor, Father,” Lucilla urged. “We will see, my dear, later on. The unsettled weather is trying to us all just now — no doubt things will right themselves in a day or two, and we shall smile at our own foolish, faithless fears.”
Meanwhile, however, no one at St. Gwenllian evinced any desire to smile at anything, and Flora became subject to violent fits of crying.
Her dignity and her delicate reticence seemed alike to have deserted her. She cried in church, and sometimes she cried at home, regardless of the presence of her father and sister.
“My dear, what is it?” the Canon enquired at last, long after Lucilla had given up asking the same question in despair.
“Nothing,” said Flora.
“It is not right to prolong your sorrow for your dear one in this fashion,” said the Canon. “Can we not trust dear David to the Everlasting Arms, and fulfil our own appointed days here below?”
His daughter made no reply.
“This is reaction, Flora,” said Canon Morchard decisively. “When this heavy blow first fell upon us, you were my courageous daughter, my comforter — so far as that was humanly possible. Do not falter now — remember that whom He loveth, He chastizeth.”
“I do remember,” she said, her face a mask of misery. “You are not well,” said the Canon tenderly. “I shall no longer allow you to exert yourself as you have been doing. Lu
cilla here will arrange that your class shall be temporarily given over to other management, and no doubt she can herself arrange to replace you at the choir-practices.”
“I can arrange it,” Lucilla said, “but—”
She looked at her sister.
Flora broke into a tempest of tears.
“Don’t take away what work I can do,” she sobbed out. “My life is useless enough, in all conscience.”
“Flora!” the Canon thundered. “Have a care! Such a thought is perilously near to being a blasphemous one.”
She hid her face in her hands.
‘‘You are unstrung, my poor child,” said her father. He took to treating her almost as an invalid, and failed to perceive that his watchful and incessant solicitude produced upon Flora’s nerves an effect that wag the very reverse of soothing.
“She ought to go right away from home,” said Lucilla to Quentillian. “But it’s difficult to suggest it again, she was so much upset when I spoke of it before. Will you try what you can do, Owen? She is a great deal more likely to listen to someone who is not one of the family. It’s one of the symptoms.”
“Symptoms of what?”
“Of hysteria,” said Lucilla succinctly, facing the word as she had already faced the fact.
Quentillian admired her directness, but it did not breed in him any desire to adopt the measure suggested, and speak to Flora.
At last, however, he did so. They had scarcely been alone together since the day when she had told him of her visit to Mrs. Carey.
“Is that business on your mind, Flora?”
He had thought for some time that it might be. “What?”
“Mrs. Carey, I mean.”
She coloured deeply.
“I did what I thought right at the time, Owen. Is there any necessity to discuss it again?”
“Not if you don’t wish to, certainly. I had an idea that it might be a relief. I suppose no one knows besides ourselves?”
“No one. She never wrote to me, you know, and I feel sure she never will. She was the sort of person to be thoroughly absorbed by her impressions of the moment. I sometimes wonder what happened to her, in Scotland.”
“It is not very difficult to guess what will happen, sooner or later, from what you told me. People like Mrs. Carey live from one emotional crisis to another.” She gave him a curious look.
“At least it’s living — not stagnation. That interview with Mrs. Carey seems like a dream, almost, nowadays — something quite apart from the rest of my life. I suppose it’s because it’s the only thing I’ve ever done entirely by myself, without any of the family knowing about it. I’ve never even seen anyone else at all like Mrs. Carey — it was impossible to get into touch with her, really. She was like a painted cardboard figure, with no back to it — nothing solid.”
“But you’ve turned down that page, now — it’s finished with?”
“Yes,” she said, looking down.
He had wondered whether that which he sometimes thought of as Flora’s Jesuitical plotting had come to prey upon her mind.
Evidently, if it did, he was not to be told so.
In the end he could think of no more subtle enquiry than:
“Why are you unhappy?”
“I don’t know,” she said with a trembling lip.
“I feel I’m of no use in the world. Wouldn’t you be unhappy, if you felt like that — that nobody really needed you in any way, and you had nothing to do?”
“Not in the least,” said Quentillian reflectively. “I am quite sure that nobody does need me, and it doesn’t distress me. As for having nothing to do, I imagine — if you will forgive me for saying so — that one can always find something if one looks far enough.”
“It’s different for a man.”
“Perhaps.”
Quentillian went away still undetermined whether Flora’s conduct of the affaire Carey was the cause or the result of her present deplorable condition.
That she had all the makings of a fanatic, he had long suspected, and the Canon’s determination to treat her as an invalid, in need of rest and complete inaction, seemed to him to be a singularly ill-advised one.
In spite of his disapproval of her methods, Quentillian had come to feel a certain affection for Flora, and he could not avoid a sense of complicity that drew him to her, even while it chafed his self-righteousness.
With an entire lack of originality, he informed Lucilla that he thought her sister would be better away from home.
“Well, so do I. But even to go away for a few weeks would only be a half-measure. Owen, I’m frightened about Flora — far more than I’ve ever been about anyone before.”
He could partly apprehend her meaning.
“Don’t you think that perhaps this — phase — is only another manifestation of the same spirit that made Val want to go and work somewhere?”
“In a sense, yes. You see, all the intellectual interests, and the mental appreciations, to which we were brought up, although those things did fill our days — at least before the war — were only superimposed on what Val and Flossie and Adrian really were, in themselves. Not essentials, I mean, to either of them.”
Quentillian wondered what Lucilla’s own essentials might be. She had given him no hint of them, ever, and yet he suspected her of an almost aggressive neutrality with regard to the imposed interests of which she had spoken.
The odd contradiction in terms seemed to him expressive of the difference that he felt certain existed between Lucilla’s daily life, and the personal, intimate standpoint from which she all the time regarded that life.
Something of the same ruthlessness of purpose that had once characterized Flora, he had always discerned in Lucilla, but he felt very certain that her essential sanity and humour would have kept her for ever from the strange and tortuous means adopted by Flora to safeguard those interests of which she apparently felt herself to be a better judge than her Creator.
Lucilla would neither juggle with fate, nor see any justification for tampering with other people’s correspondence.
“Flora thinks, now, that she doesn’t want to go away from home.”
“It’s a pity, perhaps, that she didn’t go to Canada instead of you.”
“Yes, but you see Father didn’t really want either of us to go, and Flossie wouldn’t have disobeyed him.”
Flora’s conscience! Owen felt as impatient at the thought of it, as he had frequently felt before. He had, however, long ago sufficiently assimilated the atmosphere of St. Gwenllian to refrain from pointing out that Flora had been for some years of an age to act for herself, independently of the parental sanction. He did not, indeed, suppose that Lucilla needed to have anything so self-evident put before her.
“Do you think Flora would consent to see a doctor?”
“No.”
Miss Morchard’s unvarnished No-es and Yes-es always took him slightly by surprise, especially after any time spent with the Canon.
“The fact is,” said Lucilla vigorously, “that Flora needs something to occupy her mind. She is preying on herself, and unless something happens to take her out of herself, Owen, I think she will go mad.”
He instinctively paid the homage due to her habitual precision of expression, by taking the startling phrase literally.
“Have you told anyone?”
“Not yet.”
“But you must. If you really think that, you must tell the Canon so.”
“I know.” Her voice was rather faint, but she repeated, more strongly and with entire acceptance in her voice, “I know I must.”
It reminded him of the long past days when one of the St. Gwenllian children had been naughty, and the task of taking the culprit before the Canon had invariably, and as a matter of course, devolved upon Lucilla.
VI
“Flora is treading the thorny way that saints have trodden. If your own spirituality, which is in its infancy — in its cradle, I may say — does not enable you to understand that vi
a dolorosa, at least refrain from trivial interpolations and misrepresentations, Lucilla, I beg.”
Canon Morchard’s tone rather suggested commanding, than begging, and his large eyes seemed to flash with indignation as they looked, from beneath corrugated brows, at Lucilla.
She was rather paler than her usually colourless wont.
“I am afraid that Flora is suffering from a very common form of hysteria, father, and I thoroughly distrust any inspiration of hers in her present state of health.”
“She has told me herself that she is in her usual health, and that she positively objects to the idea of seeing a medical man. I see no reason for disbelieving her own statement.”
“Well, I do.”
“Lucilla, you forget yourself.”
Lucilla and the Canon looked at one another, each seeming momentarily to despair of the other.
At last Lucilla said:
“A little time ago, you thought she was ill, too.”
“Mind and body react upon one another, no doubt, and our little Flora is highly strung. I do not recognize it as being in any way incumbent upon me to explain to you my treatment of any soul in my charge, Lucilla, but I may say that I have now come to the conclusion that Flora’s malady was of the soul. With that, you must rest content.”
Lucilla did not rest content at all.
A philosophical acceptance of the inevitable had long been part of Miss Morchard’s life, but in the weeks that followed she came nearer to the futility of the spoken protest than ever before.
From seemingly eternal weeping, however, Flora presently passed to a tense exaltation of spirit that found its culmination in long hours spent upon her knees.
Lucilla made only one appeal to her.
“Flossie, won’t you tell me what’s happening? I can’t help knowing that you’ve been very unhappy.”
“I’m not unhappy now,” said Flora quickly. “At least, not like I was before. You know I’ve put myself absolutely under father’s direction, Lucilla? How wonderful he is!”
“He has made you happier?”
“Not he himself. He has shown me where to find peace, at last.”
“If you mean Church, I should have thought you’d known about it ever since you were born, very nearly.” If the faint hint of impatient derision latent in her sister’s tone was perceptible to Flora, she showed no resentment at it.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 233