It seemed difficult to realize.
In the train Mary McNeill continued to sniff persistently, but the others began to catch the infectious excitement of those girls who were only going home for the holidays, and would return to the convent in September.
Installed in a third-class carriage which the party completely filled, Sister Veronica remarked impressively:
“Now, children, we will say the Litany, in order that we may have a safe journey. In the Name of”
This was done, and during the monotonous recital Zella decided that she owed it to her father to forget her sorrow and be brave. She made a final application of her pocket-handkerchief, and then put it away with a certain sense of relief.
She began to feel more excited than she had hitherto allowed herself to be, at the thought of being grown up. What would happen to her?
For a little while Zella indulged in vague dreamy visions of social success, and of the magnificent offers of marriage which would probably mark the progress of her first London season.
“Aunt Marianne, I do hope that you will let Muriel be one of my bridesmaids. I know she isn’t yet come out, but, still, she’s only a few months younger than I am, and I am going to be married....”
Then Zella remembered that her role would be that of declining these dazzling alliances, in order to renounce the world at the age of twenty-one, and offer up her youth and beauty for the service of God in the cloister.
“Aunt Marianne, I cannot marry the Duke, however much you may all urge me to. I am going to be a nun.”
But somehow this vision was less satisfactory than the other. It seemed impossible to conjecture what Aunt Marianne’s reply to such an announcement might be, but Zella did not feel that it would be of a complimentary description.
However, God of course would appreciate one’s sacrifice, whatever the world might say, Zella assured herself, faintly uneasy.
At the terminus Louis was awaiting her.
She exchanged hasty farewells with those of her companions not already seized upon by expectant parents, and told herself that the last link would indeed break between the old life and the new when she bade farewell to Mother Veronica. But Mother Veronica was hurrying down the crowded platform with a small child clinging on either side, her large umbrella causing considerable inconvenience to her surroundings, and her straw bag bumping smartly against her at every step she took. Zella realized that the nun had already forgotten her existence.
She had a passing sense of mortification, which was forgotten in Louis’s exuberant pleasure at having her beside him again.
“We’ll stop up here a week if you like, mignonne. You’ll want to come to some theatres, and have a little fun, after all this school.”
Zella’s eyes began to shine.
“I haven’t any grown-up frocks,” she said rather shyly.
“I thought of that,” triumphantly returned Louis, “and I’ve engaged a maid for you. At least, Stephanie found her for me, in Paris — a nice woman, and she’ll help you to get all you want. You’ll find her waiting at the hotel. You can get anything she thinks you need, you know.”
“Oh, thank you!” cried Zella ecstatically. She suddenly felt violently excited and happy.
“Your Aunt Marianne is up in town for two nights,” Louis continued, “and she and Henry are dining with us to-night. I thought you might like to appear as ‘grown-up ‘ for the first time. Would it amuse you?”
“Oh,” gasped Zella, greatly daring, “could I — do you think I could — put my hair up?”
“Of course, cherie! That’s what Hortense is for. She has some sort of evening frock for you, I believe, that Grand’mere sent you from Paris. It amuses me to think that we shall astonish your Aunt Marianne.”
He laughed rather triumphantly, glancing at his daughter’s pretty flushed face with unconcealed pride.
Zella followed her father into the big hotel consumed by only one desire — to shed as soon as possible her unbecoming school uniform, and to appear as a young lady of the world.
In the hotel bedroom, where carpets and curtains and electric light produced a startling sense of luxury after the whitewash and match-boarding of the convent, Zella found Hortense, a pleasant middle-aged Frenchwoman, awaiting her. On the bed was spread out a little creamy lace dress that only Paris could have produced.
“The present of Madame la Baronne, selected by herself,” beamed Hortense. “Mademoiselle would wish to wear it for the reunion de famille of to-night?”
“Oh yes!” breathed Zella.
The fascination of personal adornment, which had hitherto been quite unknown to her, woke suddenly.
Hortense had already half unpacked the modest school luggage, and Zella hastily divested herself of the dark blue serge bodice, with its high collar and badly hung skirt, and tore off the stiff straw hat.
“Do you think,” she presently timidly inquired of the maid in French, “that you could — could do my hair up? I mean not with a ribbon or anything, but really done up?”
“But yes, mademoiselle. Bien entendu.”
“It isn’t at all long,” said Zella regretfully.
Her hair had often caused her to feel a genuine humiliation. Her plait, amongst the plaits prescribed by convent regulations, had always presented a singularly unimposing appearance.
Mary McNeill’s straight fair hair fell in a lank pigtail below her waist, several of the girls boasted plaits over each shoulder, and Zella had often regretfully told herself that even her hair was “different,” because the short, broad plait made by her unaccustomed and unskilful fingers looked so unlike the long smooth tails adorning the heads of her companions.
Hortense unplaited the soft thick mass and began to brush it out.
“Shall you be able to make such very short hair look nice?” asked Zella nervously.
“Mais, mademoiselle! quelle idee! Mademoiselle a une chevelure ideale; c’est soyeux, c’est epais — tout ce qu’il faut pour une coiffure de jeune fille.”
Hortense ejaculated with sincere satisfaction as she coiled and twisted the pale brown waves of Zella’s hair.
“Voila, c’est ravissant!”
Zella looked at herself in the glass, and in her heart she echoed the maid’s heartfelt exclamation.
It was the first time that she had realized herself to be actually pretty. In theory, Zella had seen herself as the beautiful young heroine of many an unacted drama; but the occasional scrutinies to which she had hitherto subjected herself from time to time in the mirror had left her dissatisfied with the extremely colourless delicacy of her small face, the: shortness of her brown hair and thick lashes, and her still diminutive stature.
Now she saw a very obvious admiration in the maid’s eyes as she finally surveyed her youthful mistress, arrayed in the lace frock from Paris, and with her hair dressed high upon her head.
Zella felt a throb of pure, exultant vanity as she went downstairs to join her father.
It seemed to her incredible that only that morning she had been at the ink-stained desk in the convent classroom, putting away her old school alpaca apron, and crying a little because it was “for the last time.”
A small orchestra was playing softly in the hall as Zella slowly and self-consciously came across it. Her ready emotionalism responded promptly to the obvious conventional lure.
“This is life — all this is real, and I am made for it.”
She felt a transient pang at the memory of other aspirations and ideals.
“How hard it will be to give up the world! — perhaps harder for me than for other people. But that will make it more of a sacrifice.”
Perhaps Zella’s well-trained soul accepted the sop thus flung to it. At all events it ceased to make its voice heard.
“Zella dear! why, I didn’t know you!” exclaimed the well-known tones of kind cordiality, overlaying a slight substratum of regretful disapproval, belonging to Zella’s Aunt Marianne.
“How are you, dear? Say ‘
How d’ye do?” to Uncle Henry.”
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans always enjoined her niece thus, and would continue to do so, Zella felt resentfully certain, until the end of her life. She tried to look as though ignoring the behest, even while greeting Mrs. Lloyd-Evans’s husband.
“Darling, you seem to have made yourself very elegant,” observed her aunt, surveying her with an air of regret. “I thought you had only arrived from the convent to-day.”
“We are going to stay up here for a week,” interposed Louis, “and I was in a hurry to see my grown-up daughter. Certainly the transformation is complete, Zella. It does you great credit, my dear.”
His eyes said a great deal more.
“Very nice, Zella,” remarked Mrs. Lloyd-Evans in a tone calculated to allay every spark of vanity in any human breast, “and I see you’ve contrived to put up your hair. One always has to try experiments before getting quite into the way of it, but that isn’t at all bad for a first attempt.”
“My maid did my hair for me,” said Zella rather maliciously.
“Do you mean the hotel chambermaid, dear?” said her aunt, still tolerant, but with the latent hostility in her eyes growing more marked at these revelations.
“Oh no! Grand’mere sent over a maid for me from Paris, a Frenchwoman called Hortense. She seems very nice.”
“Well, dear, I dare say she will help you to keep tidy, though one would rather think you were able to look after yourself. And did she choose you this little frock?”
“Grand’mere chose that, in Paris, and sent it to me as a present.”
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans was silenced. As she afterwards remarked to Henry, “A Paris frock is a Paris frock; and however extravagant and unsuitable one may think these things, it is useless to pretend that a thing bought at one of those big Parisian shops is not certain to be extremely fashionable and je ne sais quoi.”
In recognition, therefore, of this intangible virtue emanating from Zella’s Paris frock, Mrs. Lloyd-Evans said no more, and Zella remained satisfied, both from her father’s expression, whenever his eyes rested upon her, and from the frequent glances which she manoeuvred to obtain from the long mirrors which surrounded her.
“And how did you leave the Sisters?” suddenly inquired Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, when they were seated in the dining-room.
“Oh,” said Zella, slightly embarrassed, “they were all very well.”
She wondered what Mrs. Lloyd-Evans would have said had she replied, as she might have done with truth, that a novena was being made at the convent for Reverend Mother’s hay-fever, which was recurring with its annual violence, and that Mother Pauline’s sprained wrist was enveloped in a bandage daily soaked in miraculous water from Lourdes.
“Poor things! it is a very gentle, aimless, placid existence, no doubt. I dare say it preserves their health wonderfully.”
Zella thought of the inexorable bell which she knew clanged out its daily summons at five o’clock, and on the first stroke of which each nun rose instantly from her pallet of straw. She thought of the day’s work, the teaching and praying and singing, and no doubt the manual labour performed out of sight, the scanty meals and coarse fare, which made up convent existence.
A curious sort of dismay began to take possession of her.
“What I always say,” observed Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, “is that one was not meant to shut oneself up between four walls. After all, God made the world and meant us to enjoy it, and it seems to me that one is dishonouring His gifts by shutting oneself away from them.”
Henry looked extremely uncomfortable.
“Are you glad to leave school, Zella?” he asked desperately.
Zella looked down at her pretty frock and round at the brightly lighted room, and answered, with a sense that she was crossing some sort of Rubicon of which only she knew the existence:
Yes, Uncle Henry, I am very glad.”
“That’s right. I expect you’ll begin to enjoy yourself in earnest soon.”
“I was just telling Louis, Henry, that so many women enter a Sisterhood simply because they have nothing better to do with their fives,” said the inexorable Mrs. Lloyd-Evans. “‘ There is always a little tragedy hidden under the veil,’ is what I always say — a disappointment in love, or something of the kind.”
Zella wondered resentfully whether Aunt Marianne was not talking at her niece. Nevertheless, the words rather impressed her. Was this how people in the world viewed that high and holy calling, a religious vocation?
Zella turned to Henry Lloyd-Evans, who was staring self-consciously into his plate.
“What do you think, Uncle Henry?”
He looked rather dismayed.
“I don’t know much about Sisterhoods myself; but — well, all that sort of thing’s rather bad form, don’t you know, isn’t it? Try some caviare, Zella.”
The verdict was spoken.
Zella, chameleon-like, had already, though half consciously, taken her colour from her surroundings. It was in this world that she was now to move, and to its standards that she would adapt her own.
That night in bed she cried a very little, rather vaguely, and half-despising herself for the ease with which her scale of values had once more shifted.
What, again, was Truth?
She spent a delirious fortnight in the selection of clothes. The convent phase was over.
XIX
Towards the end of April Zella was astounded, and rather dismayed, by the news that Muriel Lloyd-Evans was engaged to be married.
She had never supposed that Muriel at eighteen would prove any more charming than she had been at fourteen, and still less that she would be sufficiently so to attract serious attention. But it appeared that the accepted Captain Carruthers was only one of many admirers who had haunted the Lloyd-Evans’s flat in Sloane Street during the past winter.
Nevertheless, wrote Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, there had never been the slightest doubt, from the first moment they saw how things were going; and Muriel and her fiancé, who, it appeared, was always known as Chumps, were simply madly in love, and so radiantly happy that it was Like having perpetual sunshine in the house. The only cloud on this felicity was that Chumps’s regiment was to go to Egypt in October, and consequently the wedding was to take place as soon as possible, probably at the end of July. Would Zella come and stay at the flat for a fortnight before the wedding, as she must, of course, be bridesmaid, and Muriel and Aunt Marianne would so love to have her?
Muriel’s briefer note was to the same purpose. Zella wrote congratulations and good wishes and an acceptance. She looked forward to staying in London for the first time since leaving school, and, moreover, the spectacle of a madly-in-love and radiantly happy Muriel seemed to her worthy of consideration.
When she actually arrived at the Sloane Street flat, Zella felt suddenly nervous. She had seen Muriel a year ago, still in the stage of ankle-length skirts and plaited hair. Surely the wonderful experiences of falling in love and becoming engaged must have altered her.
Her first impression confirmed the supposition. Muriel looked taller, and from schoolgirl shapelessness had evolved a very pretty figure. Her face, except for soft youthful contour and freshness of colouring, could not have been called pretty, but her thick fair hair was swept into becoming waves and coils, and she was prettily dressed.
She was far more joyous and animated than Zella had ever seen her, and, from being silent and inarticulate, had become almost overwhelmingly talkative.
“Isn’t this ripping, Zella? I am glad to see you. I hope you won’t mind being frightfully squashed; this flat is simply tiny, and you know what a wedding in a house is. How’s Uncle Louis? it was perfectly ripping of him to send me such a lovely pendant — I simply love it.”
She led the way into the drawing-room.
“Mother’ll be here in one minute, but we won’t wait for tea. I’m dying to have a talk with you; but people are sure to turn up — they always do. Chumps said he’d look in if he could get off. I’m simply dying for you t
wo to see each other; I think you’ll like each other awfully. I’ve told Chumps all about you, and what friends we always were as small kiddies.”
“Do you call him — that?”
“Chumps? Yes — everybody does. I have for ages — even before we were engaged. As a matter of fact,” said Muriel, slightly lowering her voice, “it’s really just as well that he has got a nickname, because his real name is Archie, and mother simply couldn’t have called him that.”
“Why not? Is it a name she doesn’t like?” asked Zella, rather bewildered, and reflecting that, though the limits of Muriel’s vocabulary might have altered, they were still very sharply defined.
“My dear, no! what a weird suggestion! Don’t you remember, my poor little brother who died as a kiddie was called Archie?”
“So he was,” said Zella in tones which she instinctively tried to render awed.
“It’s really rather a weird coincidence, I suppose,” thoughtfully observed Muriel, twisting her engagement ring round her finger.
The entry of Mrs. Lloyd-Evans broke upon this disquieting consideration.
She kissed Zella affectionately, and said:
“Well, dear, this is nice! So you’ve come to see Muriel before Somebody carries her off to Egypt. How is poor papa?”
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans had thus alluded to Louis ever since his wife’s death.
“He is very well, and sent his love. He is coming up for the wedding, and to take me home next day.”
“How ripping to see him again!” said Muriel in a meaningless tone. “Do have some cake, Zella. It looks perfectly deadly, but that’s a detail. Oh, there’s the bell!”
Lady and Miss Newlyne were announced.
There was a great deal of momentary confusion of laughter and introductions, subsiding into a choice of chairs and offers of tea.
Tea, however, was declined, and Muriel at once jumped up.
“Oh, let’s come into the back drawing-room, then, and leave them to talk.”
She indicated her mother and Lady Newlyne with a gesture, at which both she and the other girl laughed slightly. Zella, not in the least amused, joined politely in their mirth.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 19
