Poor, touching, frantic child, making use of it now to strengthen her appeal.
Valentine had no idea whether or not it would be possible for Lonergan to get to Ireland and back within the forty-eight hours of his leave. She supposed that probably it would.
Or he could send for Arlette if there was the least chance that the battalion might not be sailing at once.
She returned to the hall, moving slowly and stiffly as if the intense cold that gripped her was slowly freezing her body into rigidity. Her thoughts worked, with careful impersonality, over the mechanics of the situation.
Lonergan had missed Arlette at the telephone but he said that he had telegraphed to her in the morning.
That message must have reached her quickly enough, or she couldn’t have despatched her own telegram at twenty-five minutes past four.
Perhaps he hadn’t told her what time he would ring up.
Perhaps the old aunt, whom it was so impossible to think of as Rory’s sister, had decided that Arlette must attend the concert, and that another telephone call could be put through next day. But no — that wouldn’t do. There’d have been a message left at Kilronan post-office in that case, surely.
Valentine decided that Lonergan, in his telegram, had announced the fact of his embarkation leave and had said that he would telephone, without specifying the day or the hour. How, indeed, could he have been certain of the hour at all?
Her meaningless speculations and calculations brought Valentine into her own room, the full onslaught of the pain that awaited her still held at bay.
The clock on the landing struck five. Valentine had heard the chiming of all the hours since one o’clock.
As the last reverberation died away, another sound, remote and carefully controlled, reached her. It was that of the hall door being cautiously opened and shut again.
She knew that Lonergan had returned.
Lying open-eyed in the dark, her senses acutely sharpened, she seemed to herself able to follow all his movements accurately.
Now he had passed through the swing-doors and stopped in the hall. Conspicuous on a table at the foot of the stairs lay her transcription of Arlette’s telegram, where she had placed it, clearing everything off the little table so that he could not miss it.
He was reading it now.
There was no further sound.
She lay, expecting to hear him go down the hall again, to where the telephone was. But no movement of any kind reached her.
Valentine remained tense and motionless for what appeared to her a long while.
Presently she glanced at the illuminated face of the travelling clock, old and shabby and reliable — one of her wedding presents, she remembered — that stood in its faded blue-and-gilt folding frame next to her bedside.
Twenty minutes had gone by since she had heard the clock strike, and Rory Lonergan letting himself in at the door. The stillness was absolute.
At last it was broken.
She heard Lonergan’s step on the stairs.
He was walking slowly and with care, as though anxious to make no noise.
At the door of his room he did not stop, nor did the faint, familiar click of the turning handle reach her. He was going straight on, past his own room, to the end of the schoolroom passage where the short flight of stairs led to the top storey.
Valentine waited, sad and bewildered, but she heard nothing more.
No explanation occurred to her. She was too weary to search for one, and presently she fell asleep.
Madeleine’s knock at the door woke her.
Madeleine put down the small tea-tray by the bed and drew back the curtains. It was not quite dark, a chill dawn was breaking and a pearly grey light filtered into the room.
Valentine shivered and lay still.
Madeleine came and stood beside the bed.
“Madame,” she said softly, “the world is all white. It has been snowing.”
Old associations rushed into Valentine’s mind instantly. Her own astonished pleasure, in childhood, at the still purity of the English countryside under snow ... the excited delight of Primrose as a little girl building a snowman on the lawn with Humphrey ... the branches of the trees in the orchard sending up an occasional light flurry of white from snow-laden branches. All came and went in a flash and then she was fully awakened, caught into the realities of the present.
“Is it half-past seven?” she asked doubtfully.
There was a strange stillness over everything, as though Coombe had not yet emerged from the enveloping quiet of the night.
“Seven o’clock, madame — six, in reality,” answered Madeleine. “It has been snowing hard since midnight.”
She indicated the window by a gesture, but it was not yet light enough to see anything.
“It was monsieur le colonel who told me,” Madeleine said, and she fixed her great brown eyes on Valentine’s face with a compelling candour.
“Monsieur le colonel came to find me, madame, at five o’clock this morning and he gave me a letter for madame.”
She laid it on the bed, and as Valentine took it and opened it Madeleine found a pale woollen wrap and placed it over her shoulders.
With astonishment Valentine realized that she had never seen Lonergan’s handwriting before. It was heavy, as though he wrote with a thick-pointed nib, and it bore the appearance of being illegible. But she found that she could read easily the few lines that he had written.
“My Love, my own darling — I’d come to you now but that it’s the middle of the night and I mustn’t make a scandal for you at Coombe. Will you come down to me in the office as soon as you get this? I’ve been out of my mind, since leaving you last night. Nothing matters at all, except that we belong to one another. I love you utterly.”
He had signed it with his initial.
Madeleine stood at the foot of the bed.
“When madame is dressed, I will bring coffee to the little breakfast-room. It is better that everything should be arranged before anyone is downstairs. Monsieur le colonel will be there already, for I called him before coming in here. Madame will forgive me.”
“Ah, Madeleine!” said Valentine, and she smiled although tears were falling from her eyes.
“Madame perceives that I know all. Monsieur le colonel did well, to come and find me so early this morning. He knew that I could help madame.”
She paused for a moment, and then, choosing her words with delicacy and discretion, she said:
“I think madame will find that monsieur le colonel has his car at the door. Madame will need her fur coat, if she decides to go out with him. It is waiting in the hall.”
The fur-lined grey tweed, shabby and shapeless, lay across the back of a chair when Valentine, a very few minutes later, went downstairs to find Rory Lonergan.
He was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs, his dark up-turned face full of the strain and fatigue of the night.
As he saw her, all look of fatigue fled, leaving nothing but the defenceless look of love.
“Rory.”
“Val. My darling. My Val.”
As he bent his black head over hers, he said:
“I was mad, yesterday. Forgive me. There’s nothing and no one but you in the world. Marry me, Val, and let’s make what we can of what’s left to us.”
“I’ll do anything that you want me to do,” she said, and joy rang in her voice.
“Ah, darling — darling!”
“Arlette — Did you find Arlette’s message?” she asked.
“I did, the little poor child! I’ll talk to her on the telephone and see what can be done.”
“Can you go to Ireland?”
“If I go to Ireland,” he answered gravely, “it’ll be with my wife. That’s all that matters to me.”
Madeleine passed through the red-baize door carrying a tray and took it into Lonergan’s office.
“She’s got some coffee for us.”
“Come and drink it, love. You need it. Va
l, will we get away before anyone else comes down? Will you marry me this morning, as soon as the Registrar’s office opens?”
“You know I will.”
She poured out the hot coffee and handed him a cup.
The dream-like sensation that lay upon Valentine like a spell slowly lost its strength.
“Last night,” she said, “I thought that we couldn’t do it. We couldn’t marry. And the things that you said then are still true, you know.”
“They’re true — but not the whole truth,” he answered. “God forgive me for talking the way I did, darling, but I was fit to be tied, the way that sister-in-law of yours had been going on, and I got into a panic. And all the time, I knew very well I was behaving like a lunatic and that whatever the difficulties, we could surmount them together. Forgive me, Val. Forgive me.”
“Anything in the world. Always. If there’s anything to forgive, Rory.”
“Ah, you know there is. There will be again, if we’re allowed any sort of life together.”
Their eyes met over the tragic implication of the words, and they were silent.
Presently Lonergan said:
“Love, you’re quite right. The things I spoke of yesterday are still true — they’ll always to a certain extent be true. I can’t live your life, at Coombe. Can you live mine? Not the way it was before the war — that’s over and done with — but perhaps in London, when I’ll be doing my own job again, drawing.”
“I can,” she answered gently and steadily. “Coombe was for the children, and there are no children any more. Even Jess — she’s going away and she won’t ever live here again while the war lasts. And after that we none of us know what this country will be like, do we? All we know is that our daughters won’t be able to live at home, idle, in houses like Coombe, ever again.”
She looked round the room, already made unfamiliar by the office equipment that had been installed for Lonergan.
She thought of the house and the garden, so closely associated with the whole of her married life and with the childhood of Primrose and Jess, so full of the memories of five and twenty years.
Then she looked again at Rory Lonergan.
No conscious recollection came to her of the young Irish boy with whom she had once shared a true and ardent moment of emotion in youth. She saw in him simply her lover: the man who justified to herself her deepest beliefs for ever.
“You’ve made everything come true,” she said, hardly knowing that she was speaking the words aloud.
“And you for me,” he answered.
When they went out together through the double doors the pale light of the winter’s day was dawning.
The slopes of the park were enveloped in snow, all traces of the winding road buried beneath its smooth and dazzling white.
The outline of every bush and tree was altered and rendered new and unfamiliar.
The strange hush that belongs to the fall of snow lay over everything.
For a moment they looked in silence.
Then Lonergan spoke, very softly:
“Ah, it’s wonderful. What a day on which to find one another!”
“It was early summer, the first time,” she said. “Do you remember?”
“I remember, love. My girl of the Pincio Gardens!”
His hand touched gently the silvery wave of her hair.
THE END
The Shorter Fiction
Exeter, Devon — at the outbreak of World War I, Delafield worked as a nurse in a Voluntary Aid Detachment in Exeter.
THE PHILISTINE: A STORY
Published in Harpers Magazine, May 1926
THE PHILISTINE
He was rather a stolid little boy, but they did their very best with him.
He had, of course, exactly the same treats as the other children, the same pleasures, the same privileges. His toys and presents were better than theirs, if anything, because his aunt, in her heart of hearts, knew him to be less attractive than her own Cynthia and Jeremy and Diana.
For one thing, Colin wasn’t as good-looking as they were, and for another, he was less intelligent. Cynthia, at nine years old, had a vivid, original mind, and the few people — but they were people who really knew — to whom Lady Verulam showed her little poems had seen great promise in them.
Jeremy, a year younger, had thick, tight curls of brown hair all over his head, beautiful, long-lashed brown eyes, and an adorable smile. His manners were perfect. He said things — innocent, naive, irresistible things — about God, and the fairies, and how much he loved his mother.
Lady Verulam’s youngest girl, Diana, was precociously intelligent too, with a delightfully extensive and grown-up vocabulary at five years old. She had straight, square-cut bobbed brown hair like Cynthia, but she was lovelier than either of the others, and her eyes were a pure, deep blue, fringed with long, curled black lashes.
All Lady Verulam’s artist friends wanted to paint Diana, but only Sir Frederick Lorton, the best known portrait-painter in England, was allowed to do so. The portrait was exhibited at the Royal Academy.
Colin was the only child of Lady Verulam’s widowed brother-in-law, and he had been sent home to her from India when his mother died. He had been five years old then, and now he was eight.
He was a dear little boy, and Lady Verulam felt remorsefully that he might have been adarling little boy if it hadn’t been that Cynthia and Jeremy and Diana unconsciously set such a very high standard of charm and intelligence. Intelligence counted for so very much, in that political-artistic section of society in which the Verulams lived. Most children of wealthy parents could be made tolerably pretty, after all, and if they weren’t born with brains and personality they stood little chance of individual distinction.
Not that Colin hadn’t got personality.
Lady Verulam, who was President of the Cult of the Children Society, and had written a little book about child-psychology, had studied Colin on his own merits, as it were. And she quite recognized that he had character, and even imagination, of a sort, although when the children were all taken to see “Peter Pan” and told to clap their hands if they believed in fairies, he was the only one of Lady Verulam’s large party who didn’t clap.
“But Idon’t believe in them, really,” said Colin, rather pale.
“But Tinker-Bell!” protested Jeremy, “She’d have died if we hadn’t clapped!”
“And we do believe in fairies,” said Cynthia firmly.
“Then it was all right for you to clap,” said Colin. “There were enough of you without me.”
But afterwards he was very silent for a long while and looked worried.
Lady Verulam saw that and she changed her seat in one of the intervals and came beside him.
“Do you like it, darling?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, unusually emphatic. But his face hadn’t grown scarlet with excitement, like little Diana’s, and he wasn’t delightfully, stammeringly enthusiastic, like Jeremy. Presently he asked Lady Verulam in rather a troubled way:
“I wasn’t unkind or naughty, was I, not to clap for Tinker Bell?”
“Not at all,” she was obliged to answer. “The children were only asked to clap if they believed in fairies.”
“I don’t really believe in them,” Colin said apologetically. “Do you, Aunt Doreen?”
“Shall I tell you a secret?” she answered, bending her charming, smiling face down to his. “I like topretend that I believe in fairies, little Colin.”
Anyone of the others would have responded to her whimsical fancy — they’d have understood. But Colin only looked up at her with solemn gray eyes staring rather stupidly out of a puzzled face.
“Do you?” was all he said.
“Oh, belovedest, isn’t it marvelous!” said Cynthia, her eyes shining and dancing with sheer rapture.
Well, Colin hadn’t got the same capacity for enjoyment, that was all. And even if he’d had it, he wouldn’t have been able to express it in words.
He was anordinar
y child.
“He’ll never suffer as much as I’m afraid my darlings will, because he’ll never feel as much,” said Lady Verulam to the French nursery governess, who had so many certificates of her training as a teacher, and as a student of psychology, and as a hospital nurse, that she was as expensive as a finishing-governess.
“Probably not, Lady Verulam. But I think they do one another good. Cynthia’s and Jeremy’s enthusiastic ways will help Colin to be less stolid in time. And in one way, of course, it’s a relief that he’s not as excitable as they are.”
The head-nurse said the same.
Diana before a party or a pantomime was positively ill with excitement sometimes. They never dared to tell her of anything until just before it was going to happen.
But Colin never looked forward to things like that. He lived in the present.
“Such a relief,” said Lady Verulam rather wistfully. She couldn’t help wondering sometimes what her brother-in-law, Vivian, would think of his only child, when he came home...But Colin’s mother, whom she had known well as a girl, had been rather stolid, too.
Every day the children went to play in Kensington Gardens. The little procession came out at the front door of the house in Lowndes Square, and Lady Verulam, who adored her children, watched them from the window of the dining room where she was having breakfast after her ride in the Park.
First the under-nurse and the footman, carefully lifting the smart white perambulator down the steps, then Nurse, in stiff white piqué, carrying the rose-colored silk bundle that was the four-months-old baby, and depositing him carefully among his lacey shawls and pillows, under the silk-fringed summer awning of the pram. Then Diana, adorable in a tiny, skimpy frock of palest lemon color, with lemon-colored streamers falling from her shade hat and sandals on her beautiful little slim brown feet. She was carrying a ridiculous little doll’s parasol and walking by herself, just as she always did. There was a certain dainty pride about Diana that never allowed her to accept the nurse’s hand. She walked by the side of the pram, erect and exquisite.
After the nursery party, Mademoiselle and the elder children came down the steps. In the gardens, they would all coalesce, but the nursery party always started first.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 539