“What a pretty bride she made!”
“Quite a love-match, wasn’t it?”
“Oh,” declared Mrs. Rydall archly, “I know them all so well — I can assure you of that! Neither of them has ever looked at anybody else.... Romance is supposed to be quite out of date nowadays, isn’t it, but personally I agree with the poet, you know— ‘All the world loves a lover.’ It’s so true—”
“Isn’t it? So absolutely true.”
“I suppose,” said Mrs. Rydall, her face suffused with heat, and sentiment, and enjoyment, “I suppose, really, we’re all alike at heart.”
THESE THINGS PASS
I
UNFORTUNATE little Mary Merrion sat there — evidently feeling that she was the stupidest, as well as the youngest, person at the luncheon table. Lady Olivia could see her feeling that. If only the little thing could have realized how very little it mattered that she should be stupid, with that complexion and those blue eyes! As for her youthfulness — one could gauge the extent of it, by the mere fact that she so obviously looked upon it as a humiliating handicap.
The corners of Lady Olivia’s hard, still handsome, mouth turned down slightly, in rather sardonic amusement. She kept it strictly to herself, however, for she was a good hostess.
It was as a good hostess that she presently intended to give the conversation a fresh turn — but for the moment, there was nothing for it but to let those two very clever people, Mrs. Jayne and Sir Dennis Calthorp, continue to show how very clever they could be.
They were talking about love. A subject, Lady Olivia thought, about which it is not difficult to be clever, since everybody knows that there is nothing new to be said about it, and therefore it is enough to say things that have been said before, in comparatively new phraseology.
Someone had propounded the old question: which was the better thing — first love, or last love.
“The last love is the best love,” said Sir Dennis, his musical actor’s voice giving great charm to the words. “By the time one has reached the last’ love, all the moves of the game are known. One expects neither too much, nor too little.”
“First love is wonderful — but it hurts,” agreed Mrs. Jayne. “It’s all too tragic, too much inclined to try and plumb the depths of eternity in a teacup, so to speak. First love ends in disillusionment.”
“So does last love, dear Fanny,” gently said Sir Dennis. “The difference is that then, one expects it.”
Laughter rippled round the table.
Only little Mary Merrion’s face was grave and rather doubtful, her blue eyes wide with perplexity.
It was too bad. She was only eighteen, and had been brought up in a convent, Lady Olivia remembered. Even nowadays, these Catholic girls emerged from school marvellously innocent and ignorant.
She wondered who the boy was — for it wasn’t abstract belief in the sanctity of first love that had brought that rather pitiful expression of concern into Mary’s baby face.
Perhaps later on Mary would tell her. It wasn’t ever very difficult to win the confidence of eighteen — especially such a very old-fashioned, unsophisticated eighteen as this. Lady Olivia’s own daughters, both of them very brilliantly married, were extremely modern and sophisticated young women. They had never, at any age, displayed the innocent gaucherie of little Mary Merrion. Lady Olivia admitted frankly to herself that she’d have hated it if they had — but in this ridiculous child, it rather attracted her.
When Lady Olivia followed the humblest of her guests from the dining-room, leaving the men to the slightly over-heated, cigarette-scented room, the table with its disorganized array of little gilt chocolate-dishes, cobweb lace mats, eggshell china coffee-cups and silver ash-trays — she put a cool, friendly hand on the child’s soft, bare arm.
“You must tell your mother how glad I am that she let you come to-day. I’m afraid it’s been dull for you — no one of your own age. We’ll do better when you come down to Chaddock, next month. You are coming, aren’t you?”
“Oh yes, thank you very much! I’m looking forward to it,” stammered Mary. She blushed foolishly and adorably.
Not another woman in the room could have done it, reflected her hostess dispassionately. Either it wouldn’t have shown through the rouge, or else their faces were already slightly glazed by too much food, eaten in a warm room.
As for her own ivory pallor, enhanced by powder, Lady Olivia knew well that it had ceased, many years ago, to register any change in her pulses.
For she was fifty-eight years old.
She had always been of the world in which she lived, assimilating its values, and accepting them as her own.
She appraised Mary Merrion as she would have appraised any girl — at her marriageable value. Good family — no money — the drawback, from an English point of view, of Roman Catholicism — the assets of extreme prettiness, youth, and an evident absence of that dangerous quality, cleverness.
“No Catholic could afford her,” reflected Lady Olivia. “They have to marry money, poor wretches. But for anybody with an income, she’d be a charming wife. I must get hold of a man for her, for the Chaddock party.”
Chaddock was a small country-house, in the heart of the Bicester country. The Durand place, close by, had some years ago passed into the hands of Lady Olivia’s only son, and his American wife. Every year, Lady Olivia entertained a house-party for the Hunt Ball. She had invited Mary Merrion because of her old friendship with Sir Francis Merrion.
“Your father is a very old friend of mine,” she said to the girl, trying to make her forget her shyness. “We used to know one another in the old days, when I went to dances in London. That was before he married your mother.”
“Oh, what a long time ago!” said Mary very naively.
“Yes, wasn’t it?” Lady Olivia returned, without a hint of the slightly sardonic amusement that she was feeling.
What a child!
Really, the men for the Chaddock party would almost have to be selected with a view to their fitness for the society of anything so innocent, so utterly unmodern.
Lady Olivia had the conscience of her world: socially, she could be scrupulous.
She went to see Mary Merrion’s mother.
“Your girl is too sweet,” she said graciously. “I’m so glad she’s coming to Chaddock. Her first house-party, I suppose?”
“Not quite. She’s been to one or two old Catholic friends — cousins and so on.”
Lady Merrion was a shabby, harassed, musical creature, always dressed in black, who almost lived at the Brompton Oratory, and who would secretly have liked to see her daughter a nun.
Lady Olivia could place exactly the old-fashioned, impoverished Catholic houses, scattered over the North of England, in which Mary had stayed, with families all of them interrelated by marriage to one another.
“I see,” she said smoothly. “Such a good way of breaking the ice — though Heaven knows that girls don’t require that nowadays.”
“Mary is very shy.”
“I saw that. Too adorable. It’s simply a question of time before shyness comes in again, too. People are already getting sick of these debutantes who scream Sex at their first dance. It’s been overdone.”
“A convent education makes a girl — different,” said Lady Merrion.
“Of course. Most attractive. Now do tell me, Agnes, is there anyone you’d specially like me to ask for her? The only Catholic I know who’s the least use is Terence O’Halloran, the Irish novelist. Quite brilliant, of course, but he has a good many invitations, and I may not be able to get him.”
Lady Merrion looked frightened.
“I hear that his last book is very much disapproved of by the Church. He’s supposed to have Modernist tendencies.”
“My dear, surely Mary isn’t only going to make friends that the Church approves of?”
“I’d much rather that she did,” said Lady Merrion simply.
Lady Olivia’s shaven eyebrows went up.
&
nbsp; “You realize, of course, that that attitude is going to reduce her chances of marriage quite desperately?”
“She’ll anyhow have to marry a Catholic.”
“That reduces them still further.”
“I know,” said poor Lady Merrion piteously. “But there’s never been a mixed marriage in our family yet, and it would break her father’s heart, and mine.”
“What about Mary’s heart?” said Lady Olivia shrewdly. “She may fall in love, you know.”
“Poor little dear, I believe she thinks she’s in love now. But it wouldn’t do.”
“It?”
“Geoffrey Poole, Arabella’s boy. He’s only twenty-four and hardly any money.”
“A lovely old place.”
“They say he’ll never be able to afford to live there. In any case, they’re both far too young.”
“Well, she’s so pretty, she’s certain to have other chances, and much better ones. Has there ever been anything between them?”
“A little childish nonsense, when they were both in Ireland last summer. He happened to be the first young man that Mary had ever known, that was all. And, of course, he is a Catholic.”
“These things pass,” said Lady Olivia, smiling. “I’ll see what I can do at Chaddock. You realize, though, that we’re not twenty miles away from the Pooles? She’ll meet him at the ball, without a doubt.”
“Well, it can’t be helped,” said Lady Merrion, with the vague philosophy of one whose real interests are elsewhere. “You’ll take care of her, I know. It’s so kind of you to have her.”
Lady Olivia privately thought that it was kind, too. Girls, now that her own were married, were not in her line.
But if she wanted to have a successful party for the Hunt Ball — and none of her parties were ever anything else — she must have the right kind of girl.
Mary, pretty though she was, couldn’t be called that. She was so shy, so young, and so silly, that a man would either fall in love with her straightway, or else ignore her existence altogether.
Lady Olivia, taking no chances, added her own younger daughter, with her husband, to the party, since either could be trusted to talk amusingly, make love or be made love to, play almost all games just well enough, and dance tirelessly. She had two unattached men: Gervais Gilbertson, who was reputed to be making money as a stockbroker, and Derek Mackenzie, a good-looking boy in the Foreign Office. To amuse Gilbertson, she added Sheila Flower, who looked twenty-two and was close on thirty, as dark as little Mary Merrion was fair, and as sophisticated as Mary was innocent.
The remaining guest at Chaddock was John Silverton, M.P. for a southern constituency, Lady Olivia’s own contemporary, and perhaps the oldest and most intimate of her friends. She delegated to him, as she had done at all her parties for years past, the duties of host.
II
When the night of the Hunt Ball arrived, the Chaddock house-party had been assembled three days. The skill of Lady Olivia, of John Silverton, and the bold, dashing familiarity affected by Sheila Flower and the young married couple, had combined to produce the illusion that they all knew one another very well indeed.
Even little Mary Merrion giggled freely, and seemed to be enjoying herself.
Lady Olivia, watching her, as she watched all those of her fellow-creatures whom she noticed at all, saw that men were easily attracted by Mary, but that she could not hold their attention. She was not only inexperienced, but she obviously did not really care whether they admired her or not.
On the night of the Hunt Ball, Lady Olivia understood why.
The Poole boy was there — a tall, good-looking youngster — and Mary, in blue tulle, blushed adorably, if idiotically, at the sight of him.
They danced together almost the whole evening.
Lady Olivia, as usual, had men to talk to her, and an occasional woman. John Silverton never deserted her for long, and she knew every hunting man in the room. But she had an eye on Mary Merrion, even while she amused General Blake, and a bald and sinister-looking elderly man called Keppel, with malicious and satirical stories of their mutual acquaintances. Presently Keppel asked her who was the pretty little girl in blue.
“Agnes Merrion’s girl. She’s just out.”
“Is it a case of love at first sight? I’ve been watching her and young Poole — he’s never left her side.”
“Oh, I believe they’ve met before. Agnes called it boy and girl nonsense.
“Why? Wouldn’t it be quite a good thing? They’re both Holy Romans, aren’t they?”
“No money.”
“A pity.”
“They’ll get over it,” said Lady Olivia, shrugging her shoulders. “The more desperate it is now, the quicker it’ll be finished.”
“I suppose so,” assented Keppel. “Well, I must try and persuade my wife to come home. She can’t stand late hours.”
“Here she is, looking wonderful, as usual,” said Lady Olivia.
She smiled at Mrs. Keppel, and they exchanged the informal intimacies of women who have known one another, and one another’s families, for many years.
Lady Olivia collected her own party, not very long afterwards. She noticed that whilst her own daughter and Sheila Flower masked possible fatigue with a sort of hard glitter, Mary looked more childlike than ever.
Her round face was deeply and warmly flushed, her blue eyes shone, her baby mouth drooped softly at the corners.
“Have you enjoyed it, Mary?”
“Oh yes, I loved it!”
She actually repeated the same thing, when Lady Olivia and she went upstairs.
The other two had drifted to the smoking-room, with the men.
“I did love it, Lady Olivia. It was the nicest ‘dance I’ve ever been to.”
“First love, Mary?”
“Oh!” A startled pair of eyes met Lady Olivia’s cold smile.
“How did you guess?” faltered Mary.
“It wasn’t very difficult. Do you two little children consider yourselves engaged?”
“We want to be, but Papa and Mamma won’t let me,” said Mary, for all the world like the heroine of a Victorian novel. “I thought that perhaps — perhaps you’d help me. Papa would listen to anything you said.”
It was years since Lady Olivia had listened to such confidences. She had, indeed, supposed them to be as much out of date as nightly curling-pins — and nearly as indecent.
“Come into my room, child,” she said, and she dismissed her maid, and sat down by the fire, and allowed Mary Merrion to flop upon the white bearskin at her feet, although hoping that the girl would have enough sense not to lean against her knee, in the approved attitude of a stage ingenue.
“I’m very, very happy,” said Mary earnestly, “but I’m terribly miserable as well.”
And she burst into excited tears.
“Well, well,” said Lady Olivia, “what is it all about?”
“Geoffrey and I — it’s so difficult to explain, but it really and truly is, the real thing” solemnly declared little Mary Merrion. “We shall neither of us ever care for anybody else. Until I knew Geoffrey, I never had the least idea that life could be anything like this — and neither had he. It’s the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened. The whole world seems different now.”
She paused, clasping her hands, her eyes rapt. “Yes?” Lady Olivia encouraged her.
There was only one thing left for Mary to say, and Lady Olivia felt perfectly certain that she was going to say it. She did.
“I should like everybody else to be as happy as I am. But it would be impossible. Nobody could be. At least — if only we could get Papa and Mamma to consent! Geoffrey says his mother would, he knows.”
“And what shall you do if yours won’t?”
“We shall wait — years and years, if necessary. Neither of us could ever change. But I can’t marry against their wishes — it would be wrong.”
“You’ve been well brought up, Mary.”
“I was brought up
at the convent,” said Mary simply. “But, oh, Lady Olivia, if I mayn’t be engaged to him, I think we ought to say Good-bye. And if we do, I — I think it will break my heart.”
Lady Olivia’s mouth twitched very slightly. “What do you want me to do, child?”
“If you would only persuade Papa and Mamma to let us be engaged. They listen to what you say — everybody does. And you know Geoffrey’s people, and everything, and after all, there is no reason why we shouldn’t — one day — he’s a Catholic and everything — it’s only that we’ve neither of us got any money — and after all, what does money matter?” said Mary with infinite scorn in her small, excited voice.
“It matters quite a lot — later on,” Lady Olivia answered, levelly. “But not to first love. Go to bed, little child, and don’t fret. I’ll go and see Mrs. Poole to-morrow, and perhaps when I’ve talked to her, I shall be able to write to your father.”
“How good you are! Oh, you are an angel!”
“No, I’m not. Now run along.”
Mary went, and her eyes, between tears and radiance, and innocent infantile sleepiness, were more like stars than ever.
And Lady Olivia went to bed, not sleepy, since she only slept a few hours in every night, and not, truth to tell, much concerned with Mary Merrion’s love affair. She read part of a new novel by a celebrated and rather scandalous French writer, and then turned off the light. But she never forgot a promise, and the next morning she deputed John Silverton to look after her guests, and went herself to call upon Geoffrey Poole’s mother.
The visit confirmed her own views — that Geoffrey was an excellent young man, that his mother earnestly desired his happiness, wished him to marry a Catholic girl, thought Mary entirely charming, and was sufficiently unworldly, or sufficiently sentimental, to feel that, in comparison with her son’s happiness, money mattered very little.
“Then it’s only the Merrions,” thought Lady Olivia, and she smiled. She could manage Sir Francis Merrion, always — he had been harmlessly in love with her for years — and Agnes Merrion didn’t really count. She wasn’t sufficiently interested, in questions of marrying and giving in marriage, to set up any very determined opposition. It was only that Mary hadn’t known how to manage them, poor little thing. Another type of daughter would have been formally engaged, with their full approval, to her Geoffrey by this time.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 557