The recognition escaped from Sophie almost involuntarily. The old woman peered out of the soft gloom of the hall into the sunlight.
Then she said quietly, speaking English with a foreign accent:
“You are Sophie Fitzmaurice.”
“Yes. I remember you quite well; you were so kind to me when I was little. This is my — this is Lucien Marley.”
“Come in,” said Catiche. She looked keenly at both of them, making no movement to shake hands.
“Do you think that I may see my grandmother?” Sophie asked.
Instead of answering, Catiche walked across the hall, and tapping at a closed door, at the same moment opened it and called gently:
“Monsieur Cliffe!”
The summons was immediately obeyed, and the neat form and anxious face of Cliffe Montgomery appeared.
Catiche murmured to him in rapid French, and then disappeared into the room that he had left.
Little Montgomery advanced towards the visitors.
“How do you do?” he said gravely.
Sophie, through instinctive knowledge of Lucien’s mental processes rather than through any channel of the senses, caught his barely murmured “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” as they both went forward and exchanged greetings.
She kept her eyes steadily on Cliffe Montgomery.
“Lucien has brought me here. I wondered if I might see my grandmother — and my aunt. If they wouldn’t mind?” said Sophie.
“No — no — of course.” Montgomery’s anxious eye travelled past Sophie to Lucien Marley.
“I brought her,” said Lucien gently. “We’ve been lunching with the Kings. Shall I stroll down the hill again, or may I also pay my respects?”
“Come in,” said Cliffe, with gloomy acquiescence in his tone. “Come in. The Princesse has been hoping to see — Sophie.”
He had hesitated before making use of her first name, but his saying of it implied an acceptance. Sophie shot a glance of relief at Lucien, and he smiled back at her.
They followed Cliffe Montgomery into Miss Silver’s sitting-room.
Although the day was so hot, the Princesse sat over a small coal fire. She was, as usual, doing nothing and — also as usual — mysteriously produced an effect of being as fully occupied as it was necessary for anyone to be.
Her daughter Alberta sat on the broad, low window-seat, decorating small cards, that bore representations of sacred subjects, with minute flourishes and convolutions, produced from the point of a mapping-pen dipped in Indian ink. It was an accomplishment that Sophie, at any rate, instantly recognized as having been learnt in a French convent school.
“Sophie Fitzmaurice is here,” said Cliffe, in his flat, unastonished voice, that held always a hint of resignation.
There was a smothered exclamation from Alberta, but the Princesse, without saying anything, rose to her feet, and after looking at Sophie for a moment, took her hand and kissed her.
“I’m so glad you’ve come. I did want you to come!” she murmured, and something in the generous candour of the childish phrase brought back to Sophie, with a swift rush, a host of half-forgotten memories. It was that quality of impulsive, spontaneous warmth that had been so utterly-lacking, in all the years spent with Clarissa, under the yoke of Clarissa’s bounty.
“Tell me, my little darling, do you remember us at all? Do you remember Alberta, or Cliffe? — Catiche?”
“I remember that clock!” exclaimed Sophie almost involuntarily, as the chime of the elaborate French clock rang out, and the little gilt figures that had entranced her babyhood days performed their appointed antics.
Nothing could have been more transparent than the delight of the Princesse.
“Of course!” she exclaimed triumphantly, even as she turned to Lucien with extended hand, and as she met his gaze, it was to him that she addressed herself.
“One remembers things like that so well. I myself came here partly because it held recollections of my childhood — I picked a crocus on the lawn when I was five. I remember it perfectly. How good of you to bring her to me!”
It was evident that she perfectly realized his identity, and she at once presented him to Alberta, who held out a hand that was limp, Lucien instinctively realized, only because of her complete lack of magnetism, and not from any desire to show herself unfriendly. Indeed, she invited Lucien by a gesture to take his seat beside her on the window-seat, although with a quick, self-conscious movement, characteristic of the neurotic’s pervading fear of self-betrayal, she swept a covering sheet of paper over her pen-and-ink work.
Cliffe Montgomery sat on an upright chair, opposite the sofa to which the Princesse had taken Sophie.
Strangely, and yet very naturally, they were all, except Alberta, presently joining in a queer, unforced and comfortably disjointed conversation, in which the ejaculations and inquiries of the Princesse were mingled with her many irrelevant recollections. She several times referred to Sophie’s mother, usually appealing to Cliffe Montgomery for confirmation, and invariably receiving it. No single reference, however, was made to Fitzmaurice or to Clarissa, although the talk presently drifted to the neighbourhood round Mardale.
The Princesse appeared to be delighted with everybody who had called upon her, and gave a wildly exaggerated, totally unmalicious, account of her impressions of Miss Fish. She hoped that Miss Fish would come again, often, and when Sophie told her that Miss Fish had pronounced her to be charming, a faint flush of unmistakable gratification stained the pale ivory of her grandmother’s face.
“Did she really? I’m glad she liked me.”
There was a movement, instantly repressed, from Alberta. It was as evident as possible that almost everything that her mother said or did exasperated her. Resentment smouldered in her large, haunted dark eyes, and a kind of sombre self-reproach that translated itself into an occasional phrase of bitter self-depreciation. For the most part, however, she was silent, and indeed her mother’s charming low voice, broken by frequent and amazingly youthful laughs, continued almost without ceasing.
At last Sophie murmured that it was time for them to go — the Kings were expecting them, and they must afterwards drive home.
“You’ll come again?” begged the Princesse. She had risen to her feet, and was looking round the room as though in search of something.
“Yes, I should love to come again,” Sophie said, and it struck her that the conventional little phrase that she had used so often was this time entirely true.
The Princesse was vaguely picking up ornaments and putting them down again.
“Are you fond of books, Sophie?”
“I don’t read much,” Sophie confessed.
The Princesse despairingly threw down a large volume, beautifully bound in morocco.
“I wanted to give you something. Here, take this, darling.”
She pulled off one of her rings and put it into Sophie’s hand.
“It’s a really beautiful one,” she added naively. “One of the few good stones I have left. Take it, my precious little thing.”
It was evident that a refusal, or even a protest, would have disconcerted and disappointed her. Sophie put her arm round her grandmother’s neck and kissed her, murmuring thanks, and softly exclaiming over the beauty of the rubies in their heavy, old-fashioned setting.
“You won’t be able to wear it yet, but when you’re a little older, or when you marry. I’ve worn it for more than thirty years” — and she added candidly, “though not all the time.”
Alberta was frowning heavily, and Lucien, watching her, wondered for a moment if she resented the passing of the jewel into Sophie’s possession. He divined, next moment, that it was her mother’s reckless and unconventional generosity, and the unrestrained expression of it, that had outraged Alberta’s sense of reticence — that sense in which the Princesse was so strangely and conspicuously deficient.
On making his own farewells, Lucien was thanked by the Princesse for bringing Sophie to see her, and ask
ed to come again. He promised to do so, and Sophie’s exclamation of pleasure and gratitude rewarded him as they walked back together down the hill.
“Pd forgotten,” said Sophie, “that she was like that. But I remember now. She used to fascinate me when I was tiny — so affectionate and generous, and — and — sort of fantastic. Not like a real person at all.”
“Not at all,” Lucien agreed. “If it comes to that, none of them are. They’re utterly fantastic — your grandmother and Alberta and the elderly Carruthers, and the queer ghost in the black shawls who opened the door.”
“But you liked them, Lucien?”
“Terribly. I want to go there again. It’s like stepping into a volume of French memoirs, only not so improper.”
“Not improper at all.”
“No,” said Lucien with a sudden sigh. “Mardale supplies that element if we want it. How vulgar it is to be rich now. And yet, what a terrible mess you and I would make of being poor.”
Sophie glanced up at him, but did not speak.
“Can you even imagine being poor, Sophie?”
“Not very well,” she confessed.
“Nor can I. Having to do without things because one couldn’t afford them... not being able to travel, or have a decent car.”
“Or clothes,” said Sophie seriously.
“The right kind of clothes,” he corrected her. “You and little Mrs. King, just about at the opposite ends of the scales — and yet she’s pretty, and not yet middle-aged.”
Sophie looked troubled, glancing down at her blue-and-white frock that Clarissa had seen in a Bond Street window and had ordered without asking the price.
As usual, Lucien seemed to guess her thought.
“Never mind, darling. I’m perfectly certain it gave Mrs. King and everybody else pleasure to see anything so pretty and adorable. The one with the voice — Elinor something — couldn’t take her eyes off you at lunch. I wonder if she’s still there?”
She was not, and Sophie and Lucien had tea alone with the agent and his wife. Again, it was noticeable that although they spoke of Mardale, and the people living on the estate, Clarissa was not mentioned by anybody. Sophie and Lucien themselves, driving home, talked only about the day that they had just spent, and the people with whom they had spent it.
As they turned in at the stone gates of Mardale, however, Lucien spoke with even more than his habitual absence of emphasis:
“Remember, you’ve got to lie if necessary. We agreed upon that when I said I’d take you to the Treacle Well.”
“I remember. But why Treacle Well?”
“Alice in Wonderland. Alice said about treacle-wells ‘I dare say there may be one,’” quoted Lucien. “There might, perhaps, be one of your grandmother’s establishment. But certainly not more. We’re going back there as soon as possible, just you and I — but for the moment, I fear, we’re back in real life.”
He stopped the car at the door, just as Clarissa came out on to the steps, waving a telegram. Her face wore a triumphant expression familiar to them both. It was one that always denoted the achievement of a favourite ambition.
“Bat Clutterthorpe wants to come here!” she cried, as Sophie came up the steps towards her. “I asked him for my first week-end party, and he’s wired to accept, and to ask if he may turn up on Friday instead of Saturday.”
“Why?” asked Lucien coldly.
“What does it matter why? He doesn’t say, either. If you’re the richest unmarried young man in London,” observed Clarissa, “you don’t say why. You just turn up, or not, as the case may be. He’s too terribly amusing, of course, and if he comes, it means the party’s bound to go well. I suppose it would be altogether too obvious not to ask any other girl at all — just let Sophie be the only one.”
“It sounds a shade blatant,” Lucien murmured.
They went indoors.
Clarissa was in high spirits, too much excited by the prompt acceptance of her most desired, and least expected, guest to make any inquiries of Sophie or Lucien concerning their expedition.
Presently Fitzmaurice lounged in. He always looked, if possible, more completely désoeuvré in the country than in town, and his enthusiasm at the prospect of a houseful of visitors was in proportion to his boredom with the domestic circle.
“Bat coming! Good. He’s a cheery fellow. Damned amusing, too. But I thought he was always booked up months ahead.”
“So he is,” Clarissa answered quickly. “I hadn’t a hope when I wrote — not a hope. He’s chucked something else, of course.”
“Jolly for the people who are counting on him to make up their numbers,” Lucien said.
“Hostesses have to take that risk with young men nowadays,” his mother returned curtly. “Ask three times as many men as you can house, always, and then you’re fairly all right when half of them chuck at the last moment, or don’t answer at all. Remember that, Sophie.”
Sophie smiled.
“I’m not laughing,” Clarissa said sharply. “It’s absolutely true. You girls haven’t the least idea what your mothers have to contend with, so that you may have someone to play about with. And you give me less help than any girl I’ve ever known, Sophie.”
Reggie Fitzmaurice moved uneasily. His wife shot him an angry glance, and he pretended to be occupied in examining the carving on the oak panelling.
“The next question is, what girls — or girl. One’ll be quite enough. Lucien?”
“Mary Sampford,” said Lucien, entirely at random.
“They’ll be abroad. Besides, she’s a flirt.”
“Bat likes that sort, “Lucien returned maliciously. “That’s nothing to do with it. Sophie will have to amuse Bat. I shall ask Delphine Wingate.”
“Quite the dullest girl in London. I think you might rate Sophie’s charms rather higher than that, you know, and give her a worthier rival.”
“Don’t be silly. And if you won’t suggest any dancing partner of your own, Lucien, you must do the best you can with Leila Delmar. The husband doesn’t care what she does, and she’s much more amusing than any unmarried girl, and turns herself out too beautifully. I wish to God you had half her knack with clothes, Sophie.”
“There’s nothing much wrong with Sophia’s clothes, that I can see,” Fitzmaurice remarked.
“Of course there isn’t, as I choose them myself, and take dam’ good care where I take her for them too. But she hasn’t learnt how to wear them yet. Look at you now, Sophie! Your belt is all twisted, and your nose is shiny. It wants powdering.” Sophie rose.
“Go and repair the ravages of time, my dear,” Lucien gravely advised her, as he held open the door.
Something in Sophie’s expression, as she smiled her thanks, caused him to follow her, shutting the door behind them.
“Sweetheart, you aren’t minding my ridiculous parent? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, truly.”
“Yes, there is. It’s Clarissa — is she bullying you about anything?”
“No, no. Only — it’s after the heavenly day we’ve had, I think. All those nice King people — so kind and friendly — and then—”
“The Treacle Well. I know,” Lucien said gravely. “It’s a bit of ajar to come back to Clarissa’s world, isn’t it? Never mind, we’ll escape together again to-morrow.”
“That’ll be lovely, Lucien. I only wish the miserable party wasn’t coming so soon. One thing is, if Bat’s here, he’ll save me any amount of trouble. He amuses everyone.”
“With one exception, my angel. However, I’ll forgive him a great deal if he takes trouble off your hands.”
“Why don’t you like Bat?”
“He’s harmless enough,” Lucien said, “as mountebanks go.”
IX
THE MOUNTEBANK
LORD CLUTTERTHORPE was always called Bat. It had been his nickname at Eton. All the people whom he knew had either been with him at Eton, or were related to those who had been with him at Eton. He neither sought nor achieved con
tact with anyone who did not come within one category or the other.
His reputation as a wit and a farceur was immense. In addition, he was noted for his musical talent. Bat could vamp an accompaniment to any popular song, and sing in a small, high tenor voice.
The question of whom Bat would marry exercised the minds of many people in his world, for he was already very rich, and would be even richer when he succeeded his father. It was part of his reputation that he never fell in love with women of his own social standing, and although he went to dances and stayed in country-houses and called girls by their Christian names, he did not ever make love to them.
The day before he was to arrive at Mar dale, Clarissa came to find Sophie in her room.
“Darling, I want to see your frocks,” she commanded.
Sophie obediently displayed them, but after a very short inspection and a curt injunction or two, Clarissa dismissed them to the wardrobe again. Then she sat down upon Sophie’s bed.
“Look here, my child, I want to have a very, very frank talk with you.”
Sophie’s heart sank slightly. Clarissa’s frank talks were, at best, always uncomplimentary, and at worst, they usually imposed upon Sophie obligations that she found it troublesome to meet. Just lately, the new and strange freedom of her days, spent with Lucien in going round the countryside, seemed to make it even harder to find in herself any adequate response to Clarissa’s energetic urgings.
“What’s it about, mummie?”
“About the only thing that ought to be of any interest to you at the moment, and that’s your chance of making a decent marriage. Do you realize that girls younger than you are, and without my money to help, are getting settled every day? It’s absolutely time you pulled yourself together, Sophie.”
“I know, mummie.”
“Now I’m going to be quite brutal, my dear, entirely for your own sake. We’ve got to face the fact that you’re not desperately attractive to men. Your looks are all right — and your clothes, thanks to me — and you can dance and play games, but you’ve just not got sex-appeal. (I’ve got too much of it myself, and that’s why men still fall for me, right and left, even at my age. Not that I don’t look young — as Foster says, my figure is a great deal better than that of most girls of twenty.) But you’ve never really had an affair since you came out, Sophie.”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 329