Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  Zella began to feel that Christmas partook of the nature of her expeditions with her aunt — an artistic and educational progress that one could never own to be rather wearisome.

  On Christmas Eve she received a letter from Mrs. Lloyd-Evans that again seemed to throw a different light on the approaching festival.

  “One feels, Zella dear,” wrote her aunt, in a large illegible hand, “that this can only be a very sad Christmas for you, the first without dear, dear mother — and for poor papa, too. You must try and be as much comfort to him as you can, though one cannot help thinking it is rather sad that you should be so far away from England and Villetswood, for Christmas is, after all, the season so especially associated with Home and all those whom one loves.”

  A reflective sadness was shed upon Zella as she read.

  Last Christmas a party had assembled at Villetswood, and Zella tried to recall in mournful retrospect every pleasure that had been so joyously crowded into one festive week, although, as a matter of fact, she felt as though it had all happened in some far-distant past, too distant for any very poignant emotions of regret, however appropriate. She said tentatively to the Baronne: “I have a letter from Aunt Marianne: would you like to see it, Grand’mere?”

  “Thank you, my dear, but you had better tell me what her news is,” scrupulously replied the Baronne, who held that all personal correspondence should be treated as sacred.

  “It is a long letter. It made me feel rather homesick,” said Zella wistfully. She was always a little bit afraid that Grand’mere would think any display of emotion in bad taste, but the Baronne said very kindly:

  “My poor Zella! It is very natural. You are away from England, and that is a long distance at your age. Do you wish to go back?”

  Zella did not like to say “Yes,” as she was presumably in Rome in order to be near her grandmother and aunt, and felt that to say “No” would sound inconsistent.

  She replied indirectly:

  “I have not been home to Villetswood since October.”

  “Places do not run away,” returned the Baronne with much common-sense. “Time passes, little one, and you will find yourself there again.”

  “But shall I? said Zella. “Does papa mean to take me back there, ever?”

  “Has he not told you so?”

  “He has never spoken to me about it, or — or about anything,” mournfully said Zella, who meant, by the ambiguous word “anything,” her dead mother.

  “Then, child, you must respect his silence,” replied the Baronne decisively. “I need not tell you that in such masters one doesn’t ask questions: n’est se pas? Ca ne se fait pas.”

  Zella, who would in this case undoubtedly have asked questions had she possessed sufficient moral courage to break through her father’s reserve, replied meekly, “No, Grand’mere,” and felt that the conversation was ended.

  But she was acutely aware that the Baronne looked at her two or three times in the course of the day with great kindness, and shrewdly suspected that her little confidence had touched and interested the old lady.

  At Midnight Mass in San Silvestro she willingly took her place in the crowded church between her father and grandmother. Tante Stephanie knelt beyond the Baronne, a slight, devoutly bent figure, never moving from her knees throughout the long service, until the congregation rose together and filed, in rather aimless and very crowded procession, towards the Crib at a small shrine next to the High-Altar.

  The Baronne got on to her knees on the stone floor with difficulty, and Zella knelt beside her, so tightly wedged on either side that it would have been impossible to move. She could just see the brilliantly lighted Crib, across a sea of heads, with the large wax figure of the Bambino, dwarfing all the other figures in the group, raised on a straw-decked manger.”

  The organ pealed into the Adeste Fidetys, and the worshippers, with the shrill, nasal, and yet indescribably devotional intonation peculiar to an Italian congregation, began to sing.

  The air was familiar enough to Zella, and vaguely recalled memories of carol-singers at Villetswood.

  She hid her face in her hands, and was not ungratified to find tears trickling slowly through her slight fingers.

  She felt that her grandmother was looking at her, and raised her wet eyes to the Crib with an unconscious expression, half expecting to feel the pressure of the hand which Aunt Marianne would certainly have deemed suitable to the occasion.

  But the Baronne remained impassive, and, when Zella at last ventured to steal a look at her, her eyes were devoutly shut and her rosary beads slipping rapidly through her fingers.

  It was nearly half-past two in the morning before they got back to the Via Gregoriana, where Zella and her father left the Baronne and Stephanie, with a mutual interchange of “Bonnes fetes” and “Heureux Noels.”

  The next morning Zella’s father gave her an amber necklace, and she received two or three letters from England; and the day was much the same as other days, except that Tante Stephanie in the morning inquired whether she wished to attend the English Church.

  Zella felt that it would be almost unendurable if she were expected to attend the services of both the Protestant and Catholic churches, and, moreover, conjectured that her grandmother and aunt would think none the worse of her for being contented with the Catholic edition of Christmas worship only; so she answered very prettily that she had loved going to the Midnight Mass, and wished for nothing further.

  At which reply Stephanie de Kervoyou appeared better pleased than her mother, who merely said:

  “No doubt, if Louis wishes Zella to attend the English Church, he will himself take her there.”

  But Louis made no such suggestion.

  Zella, always sensitive to every faint shade of alteration in the feelings with which she was regarded by her surroundings, thought that she discerned a slight lessening of the added warmth of manner which the Baronne had displayed towards her since their conversation on Christmas Eve.

  An uneasy instinct made her wonder whether this might be attributed to her delicate display of emotion at the Midnight Mass. If so, thought Zella, it argued a degree of unfeelingness on the part of the Baronne that would certainly prevent her (Zella) from ever again indulging too freely in a demonstration of her deepest feelings that yet surely was so natural as to be almost commendable.

  Zella’s deepest feelings, accordingly, were not again allowed to come into play until the first warm days in March sent Zella and her father for a week’s visit to Frascati.

  There they stayed at the tall white convent of San Carlo, and went for daily drives and excursions that were to Zella a secret relief from the endless churches visited in Rome by her and Tante Stephanie.

  Her father appeared delighted with her companionship, and only when she received an occasional letter from her Aunt Marianne did it strike Zella as strange that he should have regained so entirely his old jovial good spirits.

  In the garden at the Frascati convent, on the first Sunday evening they spent there, Zella leant upon the little stone parapet that overlooked so wide a stretch of the Roman Campagna, and gazed at the distant lights of the city, just beginning to tremble through the quickly falling dusk.

  An agreeable melancholy filled her. Zella’s eyes filled slowly and luxuriously with tears.

  Ah, church bells recalling a happy, infinitely far-away past.... A wistful yearning, of which Zella made no attempt to discover the cause, took possession of her. Her eyes overflowed.

  A line read somewhere floated vaguely through her mind with-a beautiful sense of appropriateness:

  “Sunset and evening bell, And after that the dark....”

  She could not formulate any very definite cause for her tears, but moaned vaguely to herself of Villetswood — dear, dear mother — a long time ago — dear old days that would never come back again....

  She almost felt it a pity that no one should be there to witness grief so artistic in so appropriate a setting, when her father’s dismaye
d voice beside her caused her to turn hastily, the tears still sparkling on her thick lashes.

  “Zella, my dear! what is the matter? Why are you crying?”

  Zella had reached the stage when it becomes easier to cry harder still than to stop.

  “Oh,” she sobbed, clinging to him, “Villetswood — home! I want to go home. It all reminded me so—’ the church bells — dear, dear Villetswood!”

  It mattered nothing to Zella that the church bells had never been audible at Villetswood except from one particular corner of the stables when the wind was in a peculiarly favourable quarter.

  But her father was not a prey to similar oblivion. He looked at his weeping daughter with a dismay that was not devoid of humour.

  “Is it that you want to go back to Villetswood J” he demanded gently.

  “Yes — no,” incoherently sobbed Zella, who would have been hard put to it indeed to say exactly what it was that she did want.

  “But are you unhappy here with me?” asked poor Louis, a good deal perplexed.

  “No — oh no!” A flash of genuine distress shot through Zella at the idea that she might be hurting her father’s feelings. She looked up at him with wet grey eyes, feeling that an adequate reason for her grief must be produced without further delay.

  “It is only,” she said, summoning all her courage, “that I was thinking of dear mother and home. We never speak of her, but I never, never forget her.”

  A fresh burst of tears accompanied the announcement. “Why won’t you ever let me speak of her I”

  Hardly had Zella spoken the words than she wished them unsaid. A sort of fright checked her sobs, and there was a moment’s dead silence, which seemed to her incredibly long.

  The latent amusement had altogether faded from Louis de Kervoyou’s face, and he looked older than Zella had ever seen him. She suddenly noticed two little lines at the corners of his mouth that she had not seen before.

  “My dear child,” he said at last very gravely, “if I have not spoken to you of your mother, it is because I dislike a display of emotionalism almost as much as she did. If it has been putting a strain upon you, I am very sorry for it.”

  He paused a moment, but Zella was crying in good earnest now, and could not speak, nor had she any reply to offer.

  “I had concluded that you were unable to speak naturally of your mother, and consequently had very wisely decided not to do so until you could command yourself. Do you suppose that she would wish to see you overcome in this manner every time her name is mentioned?”

  Louis’s tone was weary rather than angry, but Zella’s tears redoubled.

  “How can I help minding?” she sobbed resentfully.

  “‘ Minding,’ as you call it, is not the question. I am speaking of self-control. I do not very well know how to discuss it with you,” said Louis perplexedly. “You are very young, but surely you know that to give way to outbursts of emotion, merely because one does not take the trouble to overcome them, is — is not done. Ca ne se fait pas,” he concluded, smiling again.

  “Grand’mere never speaks of anything — anything real — or hardly ever. She would like one to be always exactly the same, with good manners and smiling,” said Zella shrewdly enough.

  “She is perfectly right,” returned her father quickly. “My good child, do you suppose that those De Kervoyous who went to the guillotine in the Reign of Terror went there smiling and composed because they did not mind or were not afraid? It was, on the contrary, because they had these emotions under control that they made so fine an exit. Your grandmother’s great-aunt, Berthe de la Claudiere de Marincourt, was the first woman to mount the guillotine in Calais. She was a child of nineteen and went up to the scaffold smelling a rose, and with a deep reverence to the mob that was watching her, and another one to the three noblemen who were awaiting a similar fate. That is the meaning of breeding, Zella — self-control and consideration for other people.”

  Zella had never heard anything so nearly approaching a lecture from her father, and it struck her, dimly, as curious that it should be on such a subject.

  “I do understand,” she said quaveringly.

  Her father kissed her, and said, “Yes, my dear child,” very gently, and they went slowly towards the house.

  Zella had the old childish sense of having been naughty strong upon her; but when she went to bed and thought over the evening, she could only tell herself that her father’s first approach to a scolding had been because she had broken down and cried, and, when interrogated, had spoken of her dead mother.

  Zella wept again a little in self-pity at having had her confidence so strangely received, but her last waking thought was a vision of herself, youthful and white-clad, fearless and smiling, awaiting the stroke of the guillotine before a sobbing and awe-stricken crowd.

  Louis de Kervoyou, however, took his daughter back to Rome two days earlier than he had originally intended to, and sought the one person from whom he had always asked counsel — his stepmother.

  “So,” said the Baronne, “the little one has une crise d’emotion at the sound of a church bell, weeps a few harmless and no doubt mildly enjoyable tears, and you, my poor Louis! read her a long lecture upon self-control — all, I make no doubt, au grand serieux — and send her away with some reasonable grounds for feeling herself misunderstood and her natural feelings repressed.”

  “What else could I do?”

  “You could have treated it more lightly, mon ami — laughed at her a little. A sense of humour is the great cure for these attacks of youthfulness,” said the Baronne hopefully.

  “No,” said Louis gravely. “The child was speaking to me of her mother, almost for the first time since Esmee’s death.”

  “True. Poor child! her grief may well be sincere enough, though that little demonstration of it was prompted by what might be qualified as a sense of the appropriate.”

  But, my dear mother, a sense of the appropriate should not govern these things; for if it does so, then they cease to be genuine and entitled to respect.”

  “Louis,” said the Baronne, “in spite of your grey hairs, I perceive that you are still young. I, who am seventy, can assure you that you will find most things in the world to be a mixture. As for Zella, she has merely the failings incidental to her age and temperament. I have become aware of them during these last two months, and do not like the child any the less for being true to type.”

  “But there is such a thing as excess,” observed Louis dryly.

  “No doubt, and that is why, since you pay me the compliment of asking for my advice, I am going to suggest that Zella should be sent to school.”

  “Surely you do not advise that!”

  “I think the society of her contemporaries will do more for her than we can, at her present stage of development; and, indeed, I believe you will agree with me when you consider the alternatives: Villetswood, where she must of necessity be left a good deal to her own introspective tendencies; or that terrible Lloyd-Evans household,” said the Baronne with considerable candour.

  “Marianne was exceedingly kind to Zella, according to her lights,” justice impelled Louis to observe.

  The Baronne brushed away Mrs. Lloyd-Evans’s kindness with a wave of the hands.

  “She has given the child false standards, from what I can gather, besides a terrible little morocco-bound copy of Thomas a Kempis with the worst print I have ever seen in my life, and a vulgar pencil-mark under every other line,” said the Baronne inconsequently.

  They both laughed a little.

  “No, Louis, I assure you that a year or two with girls of her own age will give Zella a different outlook. Remember, she has always been an only child, and is, besides, unusually sensitive and impressionable. She ought to see something of the normal life of girls of her own class.”

  “I do not know that she will see anything of the sort at an average girls’ school.”

  “Heaven forbid,” piously ejaculated the Baronne, “that she should
be sent to an establishment where young ladies are taught to hit at one another’s shins with iron clubs on a muddy field. I was thinking of a convent school, needless to say, where she would at least be taught the manners of a gentlewoman by gentlewomen.”

  “Would there be no objection to her not being a Catholic?”

  “None whatever. Non-Catholic children are often received as pupils by the nuns.”

  “Zella would no doubt want to become a Catholic if she lived in that atmosphere.”

  “That is as it may be,” observed the Baronne dryly. “At all events, I can assure you that no pressure of any sort would be put upon her. Ca ne se fait pas.”

  “I am sure of it, said Louis, smiling a little. “Nor, as you know, should I object to it if later on Zella wished to become a Catholic, although I should require proof that it was a veritable, and not an emotional, conviction.”

  “She would not be received by the Church otherwise,” said the Baronne staunchly.

  Stephanie de Kervoyou entered the room noiselessly, but prepared to withdraw on seeing her mother and Louis in consultation.

  He sprang up.

  “Do not go, Stephanie. We are discussing the possibility of my sending Zella to a convent school. It would have to be in England,” he added, turning to the Baronne; “I could not leave her abroad, and business will necessitate my returning home before Easter.”

  Stephanie’s pale eyes gleamed. Was this the answer to her many prayers for the conversion of her niece?

  “Are you indeed thinking of it, Louis?” she asked eagerly.

  “If Zella does not object too strongly to the idea,” he replied, “I am inclined to agree with my mother that it would be the best thing for her.”

  Zella, far from objecting to the idea, received it gladly. She found her life monotonous, and viewed the idea of school as a rosy vista of triumphant friendships and universal popularity.

  “Only I would like to go back to Villetswood first,” she told her father rather timidly.