“Try.” She smiled up at him.
Stephen began to pull up small tufts of grass all round him, and throw them aimlessly about.
“Oh, it’s a stupid enough story, and not at all original.” He gave a sufficiently realistic rendering of a mirthless laugh. “The only difference, I imagine, between my case and that of most of us was that I took things hard — damnably hard. I beg your pardon! You see, I cared about a woman. I was only a boy, as far as years went, and she was older than I was — ten years older. As a matter of fact, she was a married woman.” He hesitated. “Am I shocking you?”
“No,” said Zella steadily.
She was very much shocked indeed, and maintained her serious, pitying gaze only by an effort.
Stephen for a second looked all but imperceptibly disconcerted.
“You’d probably know who she was, if I told you her name — everybody knows her. She’s a most beautiful woman. Good heavens, yes! she is beautiful.”
He paused a minute, gazing over the terrace with most unseeing eyes. Possibly something less sympathetic than before in the quality of his listener’s silence recalled him; for he added with a suspicion of haste:
“Not everybody’s type, you know — not mine, for the matter of that — but undeniably wonderful in her own way. She had brains, too, and understanding. (Even then I could never have loved a face without a soul behind it.) Everybody knew, more or less, that she wasn’t happy. Her husband didn’t understand her; he was a little Jewish bounder, colossally rich, which is why she married him, I suppose. Of course she had a lot of friends — she’s one of the most popular women in London — and I was very much in her sort of set, I suppose. Anyhow, we saw a lot of one another during the whole of one summer, and in the autumn I went to stay at their place in Scotland for a week. I was madly in love with her, and I thought she knew it. I suppose I was a fool.”
He stopped.
Zella wondered what to say, and decided that he needed a courageous champion against his own self-humiliation in the retrospect.
“She must have behaved very badly,” she exclaimed hotly. “You were younger than she was, and she had no business to take advantage of you.”
He looked up, genuinely astonished, and Zella saw that she had struck the wrong note.
“Taken advantage of me? She did more for me than anyone, and I’m eternally grateful to her,” he said curtly. Then, with a relapse into his former tone: “Of course I gave her all I had to give, and she — well, she just didn’t want it. It was natural enough, I dare say. But I’ve sometimes wondered whether she knew “However,” resumed Stephen more briskly, after a pause which effectually implied the words that had not concluded his sentence—” whether she knew all that she was throwing away “—” that’s neither here nor there. You understand — I needn’t tell you — what a boy’s adoration is.”
Zella tried to keep out of her face the gratification which she felt, and to look morely pensive and deeply understanding.
“I would have laid down my life for her a hundred times over. It was a — a chivalrous sort of feeling, I suppose. Well, one evening on the moors I lost my head a bit. It was a glorious sunset, I remember, that night. The sky was all red and gold over the purple moors — I can see it still.... Somehow, I never can see a sunset now without thinking of that one. I — I’m a remembering sort of chap, you know.”
He laughed rather agitatedly.
Zella felt a thrill of sympathy and of a curious sort of envy. She would have liked a memory in her own life that should be roused at the sight of a sunset.
This time Stephen remained so long silent that she ventured gently:
“Tell me — at least if you care to.”
“Care to! You’re the only person in this world to whom I’ve ever spoken of it — the only one who would understand,” exclaimed Stephen vehemently. “Only tell me I’m not asking too much in asking you to listen; you’re not shocked, as other girls might be.”
Zella’s vanity was powerless against the subtle implication.
“I’m not like other girls,” she answered softly.
“I know,” said Stephen, looking at her.
Before the silence had time to become more fraught with weighty meanings than would have been convenient, he began to speak again:
“Of course it all came to an end. She stood amongst all that heather with the sunset light on her hair, and listened to me for a few minutes. I was on my knees, somehow, in front of her — and then — well, then”
He broke off abruptly, with a quick gesture of sudden finality.
After an instant he resumed in a flat, even voice:
“I thought I’d hitched my waggon to a star; I used to put it to myself that way sometimes, I remember. And then — well, the whole world was suddenly dark, and I’d foundered pretty badly on to the rocks.”
Both were too much absorbed to notice that the waggon simile was being slightly overstrained.
“I went to pieces for a bit, I fancy. I don’t know that I’d ever been fool enough to believe that she actually cared for me, you know, but the whole thing hit me pretty hard. It was disillusion, too. She hadn’t really ever understood. She just thought of it all as a boy’s fancy, and wanted to laugh at me a little and play at being my friend. One couldn’t stand that, of course. The only thing to do was to go away and fight it out alone. And I went.”
“If there’d been anybody to give me a hand it would have been different; but I was intensely reserved even then, and somehow I just saw it through alone. And yet in a way it wasn’t exactly alone, either. I don’t know if you’ll understand, or think me mad; but somehow the stars, and the dark sky, and the wind that blew up there on the moor, helped me in some extraordinary way. I can’t explain, and it sounds insane enough.”
His laugh simulated an awkwardness which he was far from feeling.
“Oh, I know,” breathed Zella. “It’s sometimes the only thing in the world that does help one; people don’t understand, but the earth and the sky”
She broke off.
“That’s about it,” said Stephen. “I don’t suppose one person in a million would have known what I meant, but somehow you understand.”
“I’m glad — oh, I’m glad!”
Their eyes met for a moment; then Zella’s were veiled, and she bent her head.
“Tell me what happened,” she added rather hurriedly. “Have you — have you got over it? — I mean, as far as one ever does get over anything like that,” she added hastily, for fear that he should think her unsympathetic.
“I came through somehow,” said Stephen with rather a grim intonation. “I lost something on the moors up there, though, that I shall never find again — perhaps it was my youth. Something snapped in me, you know, and life has been — well, different ever since.
“But I’ve learned a good deal since those days, I fancy. There’s the sun, and the wind, and the open road, you know — and other things as well. It’s been a sort of key to music and poetry and things like that, in a way; there’s a meaning in things now that was missing before. I suppose’ it’s just that one has to go down into the very depths before one can really see things in the daylight. It either makes one or mars one — I understand that now.”
“And you — just didn’t let go,” said Zella, instinctively falling into his own phraseology. “I can’t tell you how splendid I think it. Do you remember those lines:
‘“I thank whatever gods there be For my unconquerable soul’?”
“I know,” said Stephen briefly; “I mean, I know the quotation. Of course one held on, and somehow it was the only thing to do. And it’s over now. One doesn’t suffer like that twice. I sometimes wonder if she ever knew one-tenth of what I suffered, or of how much I cared; but of course she didn’t.” He laughed. “So that’s that.”
“Do you mean you don’t care for her any longer?”
“Not in the same sort of way. You see, it was never her real self that I loved — only my own
ideal that I called by her name. She wasn’t capable of being all that the woman of my imagination was. But I don’t suppose I shall ever care for anyone else in that way. One’s as one’s made, and I’m somehow the sort that doesn’t forget or change, I fancy.”
‘I know. So am I,” said Zella firmly, furious that a pang of mortification should shoot through her.
“There’s a thing I’ve applied to myself, in a way — I don’t know if you know it,” said Stephen, still absorbed in retrospect. “Lawrence Hope wrote it:
“‘ This passion is but an ember Of a sun, of a fire long set.
I could not live and remember, And so I love and forget....’”
There was a silence, differing in quality from any of those which had preceded it. Stephen’s voice had faltered on the last line of his quotation, as though it had occurred to him that the selection was hardly a happy one.
Not that it applies, you know,” he remarked lamely; “but you understand what I mean. If you care for Lawrence Hope, I want you to let me give you a volume I have. It’s one I care about a good deal.”
“I should love it,” said Zella softly and deliberately.
Voices on the terrace sounded above them.
“Here are the others, to tell us it is time to go and dress for dinner.”
Stephen rose, squaring his broad shoulders.
“That’s it. One may be in hell — or heaven — and the gong rings, and one — dresses for dinner.”
He laughed a little.
“It’s life, isn’t it?” said Zella, shrugging her shoulders.
She rose, obliged to look up at him even when she was poised on the steps of the terrace.
“Have I bored you?” he asked softly.
“You know,” answered Zella very low and rapidly, and then sprang up the steps to meet the advancing forms of James Lloyd-Evans and his inconspicuous friend, whose perfectly ordinary one-syllabled name no one could ever succeed in remembering.
“Lloyd-Evans, if you tell me that the dressing gong has sounded ten minutes ago, and that we’re going to be late, I shall take you out in the punt to-morrow and drown you!” cried Stephen, forestalling with some presence of mind any possible allusion to the length of time during which he had monopolized his hostess.
“It would be a case of the pot calling the kettle black, wouldn’t it?” said James coolly.
“Very happily put. Miss de Kervoyou, I trust you have no objection to having the title of ‘kettle ‘ thrust upon you?”
But Zella fled up the last flight of steps with a laughing gesture of dismay, crying that she should be late.
There was a pause, and after a suitable interval Stephen said carelessly, “Well, so long,” and strolled towards the house.
“Good-looking beggar,” said the friend, with simple envy in his tones.
“That man,” said James instructively, “is the best walking dictionary of catchwords, cant phrases, and stock sentiments, that I’ve ever come across. It’s all derivative — his whole ego. It’s like a mirror lying on a table; it can’t help reflecting all the things within range, on to its own perfectly hard, flat surface. Pick it up and smash it, and there’s nothing left of the reflections, and nothing behind.”
“Rather a good simile.”
“It’s got him all right,” said James, with calm assurance.
XXVII
With the singular and unabashed fatuity of the adult Latin, Alison’s friend St. Algers suggested that one evening they should all appear at dinner in fancy dress.
Alison might shrug her shoulders, but the idea appealed irresistibly to Zella’s vanity, and St. Algers contrived to enlist Stephanie de Kervoyou’s sympathy.
“There are costumes in plenty in one of the attics,” she smilingly observed. “In the old days here, charades were played frequently.”
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans looked at her with sorrowful repression over a silk tie she was knitting.
“One would not like to awaken memories that would grieve poor Louis,” she said in a low voice. “Dear Esmee used to be very fond of dressing up, I know, and I dare say some of the old stage costumes are still carefully put away in camphor, just as I left them myself when I went through her things afterwards.”
“But perfect!” exclaimed the Comte de St. Algers, with what Mrs. Lloyd-Evans disgustedly, and not altogether unjustly, qualified in her own mind as a foreign caper. “Delightful! To have an assortment from which to select — what amusement! And what joy for an artist’s eye! Miss St. Oraye as Iphigenia, for example! Perfect! The very type — majestic, tragic. Or Lucrezia Borgia — her hands are Italian....”
He lost himself in a mental review of the characters fitted to Miss St. Craye.
“What of my niece as a Dresden china shepherdess?” asked Stephanie de Kervoyou, amused. He bowed politely.
“Exquisite indeed! Or as a Juliet or Marguerite, or the painted figure on a Watteau fan come to life.”
“And yourself, Comte?”
“Oh, I!” he shrugged himself away with a Frenchman’s ineffable gesture of dismissal. “Pierrot — Pantaloon — what you will.”
“It is much more difficult to find a good fancy dress for a man than for a woman,” firmly enunciated Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, feeling that the conversation had ignored her quite long enough. “They are so much less easily suited.”
“But why?” demanded St. Algers, suddenly skipping round and facing her. “There are as many masculine types as feminine. Your son, for instance — the ideal medieval executioner! Perfect!”
“What would you make of Mr. Pontisbury?” said Stephanie, seeing that Mrs. Lloyd-Evans was offended, but was at the same time too much absorbed in a critical point of her knitting to give vent to her offence in words at the moment.
“Pontisbury — he is a shade more difficult. There is no — no — how shall I put it? — no historical parallel to Pontisbury.”
“Mr. Pontisbury would look well in any costume,” Mrs. Lloyd-Evans told him resentfully. He is very good-looking, and what I always think so much more important for a man, so very big and tall.”
“Precisely,” replied, in a tone of almost childish pique, the Comte, who stood barely five foot six.
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans did not diminish the bitter wrath in his eyes by adding in characteristically tactful tones:
“I mean, of course, for a young man.”
The Comte bowed ironically.
Stephanie, with no hint in her tones of the distress she was feeling, interposed quietly:
“I see your point as to the difficulty of fitting any individual character to Mr. Pontisbury, I think. He would look well in various costumes, but”
“Exactly so,” said the Comte as she paused. “He would make an admirable figure amongst a crowd of others: courtier, soldier — or flunkey,” he added viciously. “But it is difficult to find any individuality for him.”
“I cannot say that I agree with you,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Evans coldly, and she told Henry an hour later that it was really quite odd to see how very jealous foreigners always were of an Englishman’s good looks.
But even her strong disapproval of the undoubtedly foreign element that pervaded Villetswood could not dash the satisfaction with which Mrs. Lloyd-Evans viewed the progress of the affaire Pontisbury.
By the exercise of some self-control she refrained from mentioning the matter to Louis, knowing as she did that gentlemen very often rush in where the other and more tactful sex may fear to tread, and most characteristically conjecturing that Louis might precipitate a crisis by some ill-judged outburst of premature rejoicing. But she felt that the moment had come when Zella must indubitably feel the need of a mother’s guidance.
She consequently repaired to her niece’s room at the consecrated hour of eleven p.m.
Having determined to supply a mother’s guidance on the subject of Zella’s possible relations with Stephen Pontisbury, Mrs. Lloyd-Evans entered the room full of bright phrases about the projected fancy-dress dinner. “I should
like you to look nice, dear,” she said. “Why dress? One can so easily manipulate an evening dress a little.”
The originality of this scheme failed to appeal to Zella. She answered vaguely and untruthfully:
“I’m afraid I haven’t thought much about it, Aunt Marianne. It’s sure to be amusing, though, isn’t it? I might put on that blue shepherdess dress we found in the box upstairs; it ought to fit me.”’
She was talking rather at random, conscious of the purpose for which Aunt Marianne had sought her, half anxious to avoid the subject that was in both their minds, and half eager for the gratification of her vanity by discussing it.
“I wonder what they’ll all be,” she said nervously.
“My only hope,” declared Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, seating herself in an armchair, “is that that poor Frenchman won’t try to be funny. It would be too painful.”
By thus alluding to St. Algers she attained the double object of implying the slight contempt in which she held not powder your hair and link him as a foreigner, and of avoiding the pronunciation of his foreign and unpronounceable name.
“I don’t suppose he will,” abstractedly replied Zella, brushing out her soft thick hair, and subconsciously wondering what form of fancy dress would admit of her wearing it down her back.
“One can never tell, dear.”
“Now, I should think that Mr. Pontisbury would look very well in almost any sort of poudre costume,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, feigning a passionate interest in the tassel of a cushion, and apparently under the impression that the word “now” would successfully bridge over any possible irrelevance in her remark.
“Oh, should you? That tassel is getting so ragged, it worries me every time I look at it.”
She bent forward, also absorbed in the tassel.
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans put her head on one side for the purpose of better contemplation.
“I should almost take it off altogether, if I were you; the cushion would really look better without it. Yes.”
Her head resumed its normal position on her shoulders.
“What was I saying? Oh yes! Stephen Pontisbury. He’s good-looking, isn’t he?”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 28
