‘You must leave us now,’ she said softly, loosening the tight grip of their hands.
Then she kissed them, in order, before they were carried out. Very small children, she had decided, would only have lain about in heaps and run the risk of being trodden on.
Soon after this, the guests began to arrive.
There was no lack of rank and fashion, it appeared, and all were vociferous in their admiration of Mrs Radclyffe’s candid beauty, while hastening to detect its blemishes. For instance, her throat, of which other mothers had always predicted the worst, had thickened undeniably. If the world of fashion overlooked the generosity of her glance, it was because such virtues embarrassed it, even destroyed the illusion of its power. Belle, in her simplicity, secretly admired those who were light and meretricious, imagining they had found the key to some freedom she had never yet experienced, nor would, because she did not dare. This diffidence, far from diminishing her beauty, enhanced it in the eyes of the elegant by restoring the strength they had been in danger of losing. They would declare:
‘My dear, there is none lovelier than Belle Radclyffe, although she is not what she was as a bride. Do you remember?’
Here would follow noises suggestive of severe colic.
‘Yet, one might say she is improved, in a certain sense. Such spirituality!’
More noises, less physical, but more mysterious.
‘Many a hard outline would be softened if its owner possessed but half of Belle’s charm.’
Here someone was demolished.
‘But would you describe Mrs Radclyffe as an entertaining companion?’
‘Entertaining? It rather depends upon what you wish the word to imply. I do know others who might be described as more entertaining than Mrs Radclyffe. But no woman, of course, is endowed with all the qualities. And Belle is so sweet.’
‘And dresses so beautifully. If not after the highest fashion.’
‘More of an individual style.’
‘I must say it does require considerable courage to appear with such an ornament in the hair.’
‘The moonstones.’
‘The moonstones? Effie! The Moon!’
‘Sshhh!’
‘Effie, do you not realize that Belle Radclyffe has come as the Moon?’
A thin laughter continued to uncoil.
Guests were circling and wondering which others they should avoid. Only their iridescence mingled. The men, in black, were clinging together for protection.
‘Mrs de Courcy, it was so kind of you to come,’ Mrs Radclyffe said, advancing.
Learning phrases from the more accomplished, she did not learn them well enough and spoke them with a hesitation, which did charm momentarily even the crueller women.
‘You know that I would die for you, Belle. I would die for you alone,’ said old Effie de Courcy, who was doing something to her chignon and looking round.
It was doubtful to which of the gentlemen that lady would offer the cold remains of her looks, but to one she must, out of habit.
Now the insignificant figures of several poor or grotesque individuals, known to most of the company, began unaccountably to make their appearance. There was a Dr Bass. Nobody would have guessed that the worthy physician had any other function beyond the prescription of pills. There was Topp, the music-master, who had been coming to everybody’s house for years, to the exasperation of everybody’s girls, and naturally Topp had always been allowed a slice of madeira cake and a glass of port, but in isolation, of course. There was that old Miss Hollier, a fright in pink net, who could recite pedigrees by the yard, and from whom one escaped only by buying a lotion for removing freckles. The presence of such persons provided the first unmistakable evidence that something was amiss. A Member of the Legislative Assembly was frowning, and several ladies were look-at their long kid gloves and giving them a tweak. Then it was noticed that children also were present, both of the house, and other young people, lumpy girls, and youths at the age of down and pimples. Strangest of all, Willie Pringle had arrived. Certainly Willie had grown up, which nobody had ever expected. That he had remained ridiculous, nobody was surprised. On returning from France, where he had lived for some years in a state of obscure morality, he had painted, and was still painting, a collection of what no one could describe as pictures; it was a relief to be able to admire the gold frames.
Immediately on entering the Radclyffes’ drawing-room, Willie Pringle kissed his hostess because he loved her. This drew a gasp of horror from the guests.
‘What kind of entertainment can Mrs Radclyffe be preparing for us?’ the Member wondered to his immediate circle.
Mr Radclyffe would have remonstrated with Pringle if he had not held him in the highest contempt. He was also uneasy at the prospect of his own approaching nakedness, which would coincide with the arrival of his wife’s cousin. He still hated Laura Trevelyan.
Belle Radclyffe moved amongst her guests, and now, surprisingly, said to some, who were most resentful of it:
‘I have asked you all toinght because I value each of you for some particular quality. Is it not possible for each to discover, and appreciate, that same quality in his fellow-guests, so that we may be happy together in this lovely house?’
It was most singular.
The doors and windows were standing open, and the blue night was pouring in. Two little boys, with scrubbed, party faces, had fallen asleep upon an upright sofa, but their dreams were obviously filled with an especial bliss.
Several kinder guests were murmuring how entertaining, how sweet, following upon the speech by their hostess, but most took refuge immediately in their own chatter and the destruction of their friends.
Amongst the gentlemen, the talk was principally of the discovery of the wild white man, said to be a survivor from the expedition led by that mad German twenty years before. The man, who professed to have been living all those years with a tribe of aboriginals, had been brought to Sydney since his rescue, and had attended the unveiling of a memorial to his leader that same day in the Domain.
Now everyone was pushing in their attempt to approach old Mr Sanderson of Rhine Towers, and Colonel Hebden, both of whom had been present at the ceremony.
‘Is it a fraud?’ voices were heard to ask.
‘It is something trumped up to discredit the Government for its slowness in developing the country,’ others maintained.
Mr Sanderson would only smile, however, and repeat that the man was a genuine survivor from the expedition, known to him personally. The assurances of the old grazier, who was rather confused by his own goodness and the size of the gathering, were a source of irritation to the guests. Colonel Hebden could have been a statue, in stone or metal, he was so detached, hence impregnable, but the people might have vented their spite on old Sanderson if something had not happened.
Just then, rather late, for she had been detained at her school by a problem of administration, Miss Trevelyan, the headmistress, arrived. Her black dress, of a kind worn by some women merely as a covering, in no way detracted from the expression of her face, which at once caused the guests to differ sharply in opinion. As she advanced into the room, some of the ladies, glittering and rustling with precious stones, abandoned their gauzy conversations and greeted her with an exaggerated sweetness or girlishness. Then, resentful of all the solecisms of which they had ever been guilty, and it appeared their memories were full of them, they seized upon the looks of this woman after she had passed, asking one another for confirmation of their own disgust:
‘Is she not plain? Is not poor Laura positively ugly? And such a freakish thing to do. As if it were not enough to have become a schoolmistress, to arrive late at Belle’s party in that truly hideous dress!’
In the meantime Miss Trevelyan was receiving the greetings of those she recognized. Her face was rather white. Holding her head on one side, she murmured, with a slight, tremulous smile, that could have disguised a migraine, or strength:
‘Una, Chattie, Lizzi
e. Quite recovered, Elinor, I hope.’
‘Who is this person to whom all the ladies are curtseying?’ asked Mr Ludlow, an English visitor, recommended to the Radclyffes by a friend.
‘That is Miss Trevelyan. I must attempt to explain her,’ volunteered the Englishman’s neighbour.
The latter immediately turned away, for the object of their interest was passing them. It happened that the speaker was Dr Kilwinning. Even more richly caparisoned than in the past, the physician had continued to resent Miss Trevelyan as one of the few stumbling blocks he had had the misfortune to encounter in his eminently successful career.
‘I will tell you more presently,’ he said, or whispered loudly into the wall. ‘Something to do with the German explorer, of whom they have just been speaking.’
‘What a bore!’ guffawed Mr Ludlow, to whom every aspect of the colonial existence was incredible. ‘And the young girl?’
‘The girl is the daughter,’ whispered Dr Kilwinning, still to the wall.
‘Capital,’ laughed the Englishman, who had already visited the supper room. ‘A green girl. A strapping, sonsy girl. But the mother!’
People who recognized Miss Trevelyan, on account of her connexions and the material glories of the past, did not feel obliged to accept Mercy. They received her with flat smiles, but ignored her with their eyes. Accustomed to this, she advanced with her chin gravely lowered, and an expression of some tolerance. Her glance was fixed on that point in her mother’s vertebrae at which enemies might aim the blow.
Then Laura met Belle, and they were sisters. At once they erected an umbrella in the middle of the desert.
‘Dearest Laura, I would have been here to receive you, but had gone up to Archie, who is starting a cold.’
‘I could not allow you to receive me in our own house.’
‘Do you really like the gas? I loved the lamps.’
‘To sit reading beside the lamps!’
‘After the tea had been brought in. You are tired, Laura.’
‘I am rather tired,’ the schoolmistress admitted.
It was the result of her experience of that afternoon, for Mr Sanderson had been so kind as to send Miss Trevelyan a card for the unveiling of the memorial.
‘You should have come, too, Belle.’
‘I could not,’ Belle replied, and blushed.
Small lies are the most difficult to tell.
The cousins had arrived at a stiff and ugly chair. It was one of those pieces of furniture that become cast up out of an even life upon the unknown, and probably perilous shores of a party, there to stay, marooned for ever, it would seem.
‘I shall sit here,’ said Laura.
No one else would have dared, so evident was it that the stern chair belonged to its absent owners.
‘Now you can see,’ people were saying.
‘Is she not a crow?’
‘A scarecrow, rather!’
‘Do not bring me anyone,’ Laura Trevelyan enjoined. ‘I would not care to be an inconvenience. And I have never succeeded in learning the language. I shall sit and watch them wearing their dresses.’
This woman, of the mysterious, the middle age, in her black clothes, was now commanding the room that she had practically repudiated. One young girl in a dream of white tarlatan, who was passing close enough to look, did so, right into the woman’s eyes and, although never afterwards was she able to remember exactly what she saw, had been so affected at the time that she had altered her course immediately and gone out into the garden. There she was swept into a conspiracy of movement, between leaf and star, wind and shadow, even her own dress. Of all this, her body was the struggling core. She would have danced, but her heels were still rooted, her arms had but reached the point of twitching. In her frustration the young person attempted, but failed, to remember the message of the strange woman’s eyes, so that it appeared as though she were intended to remain, at least a little longer, the victim of her own inadequacy.
Laura Trevelyan continued to sit in the company of Mercy, who did not care to leave her mother. Bronze or marble could not have taken more inevitable and lasting shapes than the stuff of their relationship. The affection she received from one being, together with her detachment from all others, had implanted in the daughter a respectful love for the forms of all simple objects, the secrets of which she was trying perpetually to understand. Eventually, she must attempt to express her great preoccupation, but in what manner, it was not yet clear. That its expression would be true was obvious, only from looking at her neat brown hair, her strong hands, and completely pleasing, square face.
In the meantime, seated upon a little stool at the feet of her mother, she was discussing with the latter the war between Roman Catholic and Protestant maids that was disturbing the otherwise tranquil tenor of life at their school.
‘I did not tell you,’ Mercy informed, ‘Bridget has blackened Gertrude’s eye, and told her it will match the colour of her soul.’
‘To decide the colour of truth! If I but had Bridget’s conviction!’
The two women were grateful for this humble version of the everlasting attempt. Laura was smiling at Mercy. It was as though they were seated in their own room, or at the side of a road, part of which they had made theirs.
Strangers came and went, of course. Young people, moved by curiosity. An Englishman, a little drunk, who wished to look closely at the schoolmistress and her bastard daughter. A young man with a slight talent for exhibiting himself had sat down at the piano and was reeling off dreamy waltzes, whereupon Mrs de Courcy persuaded the Member of the Legislative Assembly to take a turn, and several youths were daring to drift with several breathless girls.
At one stage, the headmistress began to knead the bridge of her nose. She had, indeed, been made very tired by the episode in the Domain.
The platform had groaned with officials and their wives, to say nothing of other substantial citizens – old Mr Sanderson, who was largely responsible for the public enthusiasm that had subscribed to the fine memorial statue, Colonel Hebden, the schoolmistress who had been a friend of the lost explorer, and, of course, the man they had lately found. All of these had sat listening to the speeches, in the pleasant, thick shade.
Johann Ulrich Voss was by now quite safe, it appeared. He was hung with garlands of rarest newspaper prose. They would write about him in the history books. The wrinkles of his solid, bronze trousers could afford to ignore the passage of time. Even Miss Trevelyan confessed: it is agreeable to be safely dead. The way the seats had been fixed to the platform, tilted back ever so slightly, made everybody look more official; hands folded themselves upon the stomach, and chins sank in, as if intended for repose. The schoolmistress was glad of some assistance towards the illusion of complacency. Thus, she had never thirsted, never, nor felt her flesh shrivel in crossing the deserts of conscience. No official personage has experienced the inferno of love.
So that she, too, had accepted the myth by the time the Premier, still shaky from the oratory prescribed for an historic occasion, pulled the cord, and revealed the bronze figure. Then the woman on the platform did lower her eyes. Whether she had seen or not, she would always remain uncertain, but applause informed her that here was a work of irreproachable civic art.
Soon after this everyone regained solid ground. Clothes were eased, civilities exchanged, and Miss Trevelyan, smiling and receptive, observed the approach of Colonel Hebden.
‘You are satisfied, then?’ he asked, as they were walking a little apart from the others.
‘Oh, yes,’ she sighed. ‘I am satisfied.’ She had to arrange the pair of little silken acorns that hung from the handle of her parasol. ‘Though I do wish you had not asked it.’
‘Our relationship is ruined by interrogation,’ laughed the Colonel, rather pleased with his command of words.
Each recalled the afternoon in Mrs de Courcy’s summer-house.
‘Years ago I was impressed by your respect for truthfulness,’ he could not resist sayi
ng, although he made of it a very tentative suggestion.
‘If I am less truthful now, it is owing to my age and position,’ she cried with surprising cynicism, almost baring her teeth at him.
‘No.’ She recovered herself. ‘I am not dishonest, I hope, except that I am a human being.’
Had he made her tremble?
To disguise the possibility, she had begun speaking quickly, in an even, kind voice, referring not so much to the immediate case as to the universal one:
‘Let none of us pass final judgement.’
‘Unless the fellow who has returned from the grave is qualified to judge. Have you not spoken to him?’
As her appearance suggested that she might not have heard, the Colonel added:
‘He appears to share the opinion you offered me at our first meeting: that Voss was, indeed, the Devil.’
Now, Miss Trevelyan had not met the survivor, although old Sanderson, all vague benevolence since time had cast a kinder light upon the whole unhappy affair, had gone so far as to promise him to her. Seated on the platform, listening to the official speeches, she had even been aware of the nape of a neck, somewhere in the foreground, but, deliberately, she had omitted to claim her right.
‘I do not wish to meet the man,’ she said, and was settling her shawl against a cold wind that was springing up.
‘But you must!’ cried Hebden, taking her firmly by the elbow.
Of dreadful metal, he towered above her, with his rather matted, grizzled hair, and burning desire for truth. Her mouth was dry. Was he, then, the avenging angel? So it appeared, as they struggled together.
If anybody had noticed, they would have made an ugly group, and he, of course, the stronger.
‘Leave me,’ she strained, out of her white mouth, ‘I beg of you, Colonel Hebden!’
At that moment, however, old Sanderson, whom no one of any compassion would willingly have hurt, emerged from the group still gathered round the statue, bringing with him a man.
‘Miss Trevelyan,’ said the grazier, smiling with genuine pleasure, ‘I do believe that, after all, I have failed to bring the two of you together, and you the most important.’
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