She adjusted her silver-tissue turban in front of the glass, frankly passed her lipstick across her mouth, and exchanged with Mrs. France the meaningless contact of cheek that their constant association in society, and long-standing intimacy, appeared to demand.
“Is it Paris?” said Mrs. France, laying a delicate touch on the short, transparent frock of lace, that fitted close to Lady Maddox’s still slim figure.
“Paris. The divine Jean, of course. I couldn’t resist it, but Heaven alone knows what Charlie will say when he sees the bill.”
Mrs. France’s smile savoured of irony.
She did not suppose that Maud felt the least anxiety on the score of Charlie. Most probably he would never see the bill at all. Maud had her own methods of meeting her liabilities.
“Good-bye, darling, and do forgive me.”
“Good-bye, Maud. Of course there’s nothing to forgive.”
Mrs. France rang the bell.
She took her guest as far as the landing, and watched her go downstairs, drawing on her white kid gloves.
The parlour-maid — mauve-and-white, capless, and silk-stockinged — opened the hall-door, and remained beside it whilst Maud stepped into her landaulette.
Mrs. France went back to her drawing-room with, as always, a subconscious appreciation of the shining expanse of parquet flooring, the deep, dim colouring of the Persian rugs, and the exquisite sobriety of the few, entirely adequate pieces of Chinese Chippendale collected by her husband in the last ten years preceding his death.
She looked at the small, jewelled clock that, characteristically, stood at one corner, and not in the middle, of the mantel above the wide open hearth.
It was half-past three.
Belgrave Square was quiet, even in June. She had no engagement until six o’clock, and she decided to wait and see Baba, who was to be home at four, if she did not telephone a change of plans.
Baba was being talked about.
She couldn’t afford that, of course.
She might be lovely, but she wasn’t clever, poor little thing, and she hadn’t really a great deal of personality. Not enough to carry off a scandal, certainly. Myra, perhaps, might have done so, but then Myra hadn’t been pretty, particularly. Isobel had done everything for her that education — of the right sort, not the academic kind — and clothes, and money could do, but in secret she agreed with Maud Maddox, that it had been wonderful of her to marry Myra, so young, to George St. Blaise. She admitted, justly, that Myra herself had helped, in a way that little, foolish, reckless Baba would never do.
Yet, of all her four step-children, Isobel had always loved Baba the most.
At the time of her marriage to Arthur France, Baba had been only a year old, and Myra barely three. Baba now was actually twenty-eight, although she looked far younger. Myra was thirty, and the boys, if they had lived, would have been men of thirty-five and thirty-six.
Both had been killed in Flanders.
The boys had resented their father’s second marriage, at first. As urchins of five and six years old, they had shown Isobel that they did not want her, and the infant Myra had tried to imitate their display of antagonism, overtly encouraged by jealous servants.
Isobel had won them all, in the end, but at first only Baba had been too little to resist her coaxings and petting. The tiny, motherless creature had responded to it, climbing into her stepmother’s lap, anxious to caress, and to be caressed.
Isobel France, on a late June afternoon nearly thirty years later, leant back in her chair, and remembered.
She was twenty-six years old, she had been married a year, and she was profoundly unhappy, with all the penetrating, pervasive unhappiness of the romantic.
Her marriage to Arthur France had been a mistake, born of wounded self-esteem and childish, petulant pride, in the reaction from the first tempestuous love affair of her girlhood. Because Antony Chisholm had been poor, because he had been ardent, young and an imperious lover, she married, immediately after her quarrel with him, Arthur France, who was wealthy, unemotional, elderly and merely desirous of finding a well-bred and attractive mistress for his house, and mother for his four children. From the moment that she accepted him, Isobel had been dismayed, but she lacked the courage to extricate herself.
She married him, and went to the house in Belgrave Square.
It was full of the traces of her predecessor, and she felt a certain tenderness about altering anything, though Arthur himself said that the drawing-room displeased his taste.
It was, indeed, exactly like the majority of London drawing-rooms in the late nineties. There was a white-and-gold wall-paper, there were the heavy oil-paintings in gilt frames, the armchairs and the sofa upholstered in yellow brocade, the Dresden china groups on the marble mantel-piece, and the grand piano laden with flower-vases and silver-framed photographs. She disliked it all — but then, with despairing honesty, she admitted to herself that she would dislike any place associated with the early days of her married life.
Fool that she had been....
Marriage with the man she didn’t love had only served to show her, with sudden and agonizing clarity of vision, what marriage might have meant with the man that she did love.
Married to one man, she loved another.
Isobel saw it as a sin, and strove, first against the knowledge, and then — when she could no longer escape that — against the feelings within her.
If Arthur had loved her, she thought, it might have been easier. But Arthur’s love, such as it was, had been given to his first wife, and for his second, he had only a cold sort of admiration, and a cheerful companionship that bore no relation whatever to spiritual intimacy.
“Perhaps the children will love me, and let me love them,” thought Isobel.
But Robin, the eldest, was a difficult little boy, and he had made up his mind that a stepmother was cruel, and to be hated. Ralph followed his lead in everything. The French governess, Isobel thought, tacitly encouraged them, and at the end of six months, finding that they were still defiantly set against her, she persuaded Arthur to dismiss Mademoiselle. She had not foreseen the result, in her inexperience.
Mademoiselle had been with the children for more than five years.
The Belgrave Square household was convulsed.
The servants, declaring that it was a “shame,” created an atmosphere that at once affected the children. From looking upon Mademoiselle as a mild, inevitable item in the long list of evils to be endured in the nursery, they learnt, with incredible speed, to view her departure as an act of monstrous tyranny on the part of the usurper.
Even little Myra was taught by Robin to make faces and scowl at her stepmother, and to say: “I don’t want you — I want Mad’moizelle” in deplorable crescendo, when Isobel came to kiss her good-night.
“It’s wonderful how faithful their little hearts are to them as they’ve always known,” an impertinent nurse remarked meaningly in Isobel’s hearing. “After all, Mademezelle’s been as good as a mother to them, since their real mother was taken.”
The vulgar spitefulness of the words hurt Isobel unaccountably. She most desperately wanted to be loved, and her husband was a man who loved no one, and his children were determined to hate her.
She could not, in her youthful misery and despair, preserve any sense of proportion. She forgot that the children were only babies, actuated mainly by the spirit of imitation. She projected adult values into the childish declaration of hatred and dislike that little Robin — a passionate, intelligent child — hurled at her.
Once, and once only, she spoke to Arthur.
He utterly missed the fact of her unhappiness, equally with its cause, but his sense of authority was outraged at the thought that his children should dare to question the desirability of the mother that he had found for them.
He went to the nursery — where his unwonted appearance struck terror in itself — and said to the six-year-old Robin:
“Your mother tells me that you are
impertinent and disobedient towards her—”
“My mother is dead,” said little Robin, ignorantly and yet shrewdly thrusting at the vital spot. His father, white with anger, whipped him. Isobel, when he curtly told her of it, wept herself sick with dismay and compassion.
The nurse told Robin that he owed his punishment to his stepmother, and the children began to look upon her with something like real horror.
Isobel did not dare to dismiss the nurse, who had been with her predecessor ever since Robin’s birth. She thought pitifully that Nurse was their last link with their own mother, and little Myra, at least, was devoted to the woman.
The baby, whom they called Baba, had been sent to her grandmother in the country at the time of her mother’s death, and Isobel had scarcely seen the little thing, who was barely a year old. She wondered, miserably, whether Baba, too, if she came home, would learn to hate her, and even after she had been mistress of the Belgrave Square house for a year, she did not suggest the baby’s return.
Then the inevitable happened.
In the comparatively small circle of London society to which she and her husband both belonged, Isobel met Antony Chisholm again.
It was at one of the formal dinner-parties in the season to which they were invited by a barrister friend of Arthur’s. His young wife knew nothing of the affair between Isobel and Antony, and he was placed next to her at dinner.
It seemed to Isobel France a very terrible situation, and her heart beat so violently that she was afraid of fainting. The low sound of his voice beside her brought the blood back to her face in a rush.
“Isobel, it’s all right. I won’t speak to you if you’d rather not... but this was bound to happen, sooner or later. Couldn’t we forget — and meet as friends?”
She could only sign assent. It was impossible for her to speak.
For months she had known that she still loved him, but she had not foreseen the mad rush of exultant joy that possessed her at meeting him.
What he had said was true.
It was inevitable that they should meet.
After that first evening, it became perilously natural to them both to do so.
Every morning of that June Isobel woke with the knowledge singing in her heart, that there was the possibility of meeting Antony in the Park, of hearing his ring at her own front door-bell, or of dancing with him at night. Her husband was not jealous. He trusted her, and also, she knew, he considered it impossible that any woman of sense and principle should jeopardize her good name or her position in Society.
She was no longer lonely, nor unhappy.
For a golden month, it seemed to be always summer weather, and flowers bloomed, red and white and yellow, in all the window-boxes of Belgrave Square.
All the hansom cabs — and they were many — jingled gaily as they went — all the women wore pretty hats, and huge, smart, puffed sleeves, and had tiny waists. The flowers blazed in the Park. Every morning she rode in the Park, and met Antony by the railings.
Arthur was at his law office all day and every day. When he came home in the evenings, he very seldom asked her what she had been doing all day. They almost always went out, to dinnerparties, or balls — sometimes to both — or they entertained in their own house.
The children were sent to the sea, with Nurse and a nursery-maid, and Isobel lived in a radiant dream, knowing that she must wake, but refusing to realize it.
After that first meeting at dinner, Antony had said: “We can always be friends — we’ve everything in common.”
“Yes, let’s be friends,” she had assented wistfully, thinking how much she wanted a friend. They never spoke about her husband, although she had said something; to him of her difficulties and disappointments with the children.
“They’ll love you when they get to know you. It’s shyness,” he suggested.
“No, not that. Especially with Robin. He’s been taught that he should hate his stepmother. It’s the fault of the servants, I think.”
Antony looked at her, and his long, strange, passionate gaze told her everything that he did not put into words.
“He wants me. He can’t understand that anyone should hate me — should want to hurt me — as that vulgar, jealous nurse does. And if Antony was my husband — he’d turn the nurse out of the house.”
The thought came to her involuntarily. She dared not dwell upon it.
Isobel France did not consider herself an especially religious woman at twenty-six. But she had the simple, sincere convictions of her class and her generation.
She went to church on Sundays, she read a few verses in the Bible every morning, and she said her prayers every night.
And she believed in the Ten Commandments.
So that when that wonderful month of June was over, and “everybody,” in the phraseology of the Frances’ world, went out of town, it seemed to her as though she awoke with a start, and found herself confronted by the necessity for a decision.
She was to join the children at Boscombe, stay there for a rest before joining her husband at Cowes, and then go on with him to spend August and half September in Scotland.
Antony Chisholm’s regiment was ordered to India, and would have sailed before they returned to Belgrave Square.
He came to say good-bye to her.
Arthur was detained. He sent a messenger round to tell her that he should not be home until late. No one was to sit up for him.
That meant, she knew, that he would not be home until after twelve. Arthur always said that it did no servant any harm to sit up until midnight. It kept them up to the mark.
It was seven o’clock when Antony Chisholm arrived. She was already dressed in her elaborate, yellow silk tea-gown, with ruches at neck and sleeves, and voluminous pleated skirts sweeping round her feet. She wore a diamond “sun” at her breast, and a turquoise locket swung among her laces, from a gold chain. Her dark hair, like a fuzzy cloud, lay low upon her forehead, covered her ears, and was bunched loosely in the back of her neck.
“Isobel, how beautiful you are!” said Antony. He took both her hands in his.
Isobel’s heart beat heavily.
“You shouldn’t!” she whispered.
“I’ve tried not to, my darling. But after all, you were mine before you were his — and if I hadn’t been a mad fool — Oh, Isobel!”
She wrenched her hands out of his.
“Antony, you must go. I’m married to Arthur, now. I can’t let you talk to me like that.”
“I didn’t mean to. I thought I could say good-bye to you, and go out of your life — but you’re so wonderful, and I love you so.”
A blinding flash of joy went through her, when he said that, and she knew then how much she had longed to hear it.
“Antony — why did we make such a dreadful mistake?” she murmured.
It was enough.
His arms were round her.
For one instant, she clung to him.
But she felt herself to be weak, disloyal, dishonourable.
Withdrawing herself, Isobel gazed up at him, her eyes brimming with tears.
“It’s too late. We can’t do anything, except say good-bye.”
“Tell me one thing, Isobel, and I’ll go. Are you happy with him?”
Antony’s eyes compelled her.
She made a little gesture of despair.
“Then, my darling, you must come with me. Be brave, and leave it all. You ought never to have married him, and he doesn’t know how to make you happy. Why, even the children are ungrateful little brutes — they don’t love you.”
“Oh, hush — Antony, don’t! You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I do. Nothing else matters in the world, Isobel. I’ll send in my papers, and we’ll go abroad. Thank God, although I’m not rich like he is, I’m not dependent on a profession.”
“You’re sailing in a week’s time,” she said, dazed.
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll arrange everything. Only come to me, Isobel.”<
br />
She fell back upon the sofa, crying and trembling. Antony knelt beside her, and she felt his arms round her shoulders, as he pleaded with her. He wanted her so terribly — and Arthur and Arthur’s children didn’t.
But again and again she repeated that it would be a sin to break her marriage vows, and to go to her lover.
The utmost that he could wring from her was the half promise that she would telegraph to him if she made up her mind to go away with him.
“Even if it’s at the eleventh hour, Isobel, I’ll come straight to London — meet you anywhere.”
She felt that it was only that faintest glimmer of a hope that ought never to have been given, that enabled them to part.
“One kiss—”
He was gone and she crouched on the floor in her yellow tea-gown and sobbed and cried, with her face against the blue silk frills of the sofa cushions.
She felt as though her heart were breaking with love for Antony, grief for the futile pity of their estrangement, and shame at having been wicked enough to listen to him — she, who was the wife of another man.
It seemed incredible to her that she should have fallen so low, and she buried her face yet deeper in the cushions, abased before herself.
She was a wicked woman... almost as wicked as though...
“He that... hath already committed adultery in his hearth Only the sudden terror of being found by her husband sent her upstairs at last, thankful to know that her maid had orders not to sit up for her after eleven o’clock.
Isobel had the courage to face her world next day, but she was too young and too desperate not to show signs of strain and conflict in her face, and Arthur said that the season’s rush had tired her out, and accelerated her departure for Boscombe.
He was slightly vexed.
“I’d no idea you were so delicate, Isobel. But you’ve evidently been doing too much, and it’s told on your nerves.”
He did not spare the time to see her off at the station himself, but he sent the butler to take the tickets for herself and her maid, to put them into a first-class carriage, and duly look after the luggage.
“Good-bye, Isobel,” was Arthur’s farewell, after he had informed her of his arrangements. “I hope you’ll look very different when next I see you.”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 562