It amuses me far more than it does them,” said Louis briskly. “Amusement is not at all the predominant factor in James’s feelings this morning, unless I am much mistaken. And Pontisbury is probably overwhelmed by the British fear that any sort of fancy dress must necessarily make a fool of him. Even Miss St. Craye is contemptuous, and declines to admit any interest in the subject.”
“That is a mere pose, Louis, and great nonsense besides. But I am delighted,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Evans with sorrowful astonishment, “to hear that all this is amusing you. I suppose you do not intend to dress up yourself?”
“Why not? I have, on the contrary, every intention of doing so, and am now on my way to find out whether I am grown too corpulent for any of my old theatrical costumes!”
He was gone before Mrs. Lloyd-Evans could devise any allusion that should be at once tactful and pointed, as to the suitability or otherwise of middle-aged widowers making mountebanks of themselves. She retreated sombrely into the morning-room, and, finding Stephen Pontisbury there in earnest conversation with Zella, exclaimed with ready ease that one only had to come downstairs in order to find that one’s knitting was upstairs, and made her exit with smiling naturalness through the French window into the garden.
Stephen had not, as Zella had half expected, sought her at eleven o’clock in the morning in order to ask her to marry him.
But he sat on the arm of the sofa, swinging one large foot gently to and fro, and looking at her with intent blue eyes.
“I wanted to give you a birthday present,” he said slowly. “It isn’t new, but — it’s just something I care about a great deal.”
She raised her eyes to his, and was wise enough to keep a silence which might be translated into the appropriate words which she was unable to find.
He was balancing a flat volume upon his palm.
“I’ve had this by me since I was a boy,” he said deliberately. “It’s been in camp, and in a hut out at ‘Frisco, and other places, too, back o’ beyond....”
He paused.
Zella felt as though they were two people in a book. “The stain on the cover here has a story, though it’s not one I could tell you.”
“Tell me.”
He shook his head, with a half-smile.
“Not that — no. But it’s been sort of mascot to me. It’s only a Shakespeare, you know, but I wanted to give it to you instead of a new copy just because — well, you know.”
Zella put out both hands with a gesture half timid, half eager, and wholly enchanting.
Stephen caught them and held them for a moment. Then he deliberately bent and kissed them before giving her the shabby book in its stained and faded morocco cover.
Zella had coloured deeply, and she bent her head over the gift in silence.
“Shakespeare is about the only fellow I’ve cared to read, many a time,” Stephen observed musingly. “He gets at reality, somehow, and, then, there’s so much of him. I believe I know most of that book by heart; it’s helped me through so many sleepless nights. I — I’m glad you’ll keep that.”
“I haven’t thanked you,” faltered Zella, “but it’s only because I can’t.” She fell back upon his own expression: “You know.”
And Stephen replied with great gentleness and gravity:
“I know.”
“I shall keep it always,” she said.
There was an instant’s pause, and it had hardly had time to become weighty before she added in a lighter tone, and half smiling:
“It will remind me of you.”
Stephen followed her lead, and replied inevitably, but with much conviction in his voice:
“I don’t want you to need anything to remind you. I don’t want to be forgotten, please, as soon as I leave here to-morrow. You’re coming to stay with us for a shoot in September, aren’t you?”
“I haven’t been asked yet.”
“But of course you’ll be asked. You know that,” he said vehemently. “My mother is longing to see you. And I want you to know her and to see the place.”
“I shall love it.”
“I want to show you the old pony I hunted my first season, and the pond where I caught tadpoles when I was a kid, and the old yew-tree I used to shin up on Sundays because the branches were so thick I was never found there, and couldn’t be hauled in to my Catechism. And I want you to see the nursery I used to play in, and all sorts of things.”
“The nursery where you used to look out of the window and talk to the moon when you were lonely,” said Zella, in order to show him that she had not forgotten, “So you’ve remembered that?”
“Of course,” she answered softly, looking up at him.
Stephanie de Kervoyou opened the door, and, far from following the tactful Mrs. Lloyd-Evans’s example, advanced into the room, observing calmly to her niece:
“Do you feel like tennis, Zella? They want to make a set, but it is too hot for Miss St. Craye, and I thought that perhaps you would play instead of her.”
“Of course,” said Zella, unable to prevent herself from looking disconcerted.
“I’m sorry my partner of yesterday has deserted,” said Stephen casually; “I wanted to have our revenge for the beating you and your cousin gave us last time. Let us see if she can’t be persuaded.”
The speech carried him easily to the door, and enabled him to follow his youthful hostess down to the tennis court.
They played tennis intermittently for the rest of the day.
“He will propose to me to-night,” thought Zella, her heart beating fast as she ran into the house at seven o’clock to don the impromptu fancy dress which her maid had been busy fitting and finishing for the last three days.
“Is that you, mignonne?” called Louis as she went past the open door of the study.
She came in and stood beside the writing-table at which he sat. He looked at her in silence for a moment, drumming his fingers absently upon the blotting-pad in front of him. There was a half-humorous, half-wistful expression in his eyes as they rested on the small dainty vision in her white frock. She somehow reminded him irresistibly of the child who had crept into his study after her mother’s funeral, and told him that she would be a comfort to him.
“It’s been a very nice birthday,” smiled Zella, in order to break the silence, “and I love these.” She touched the pearls he had given her.
“I’m glad of that. They look very well on you.”
He paused again.
“So it’s been a nice birthday.”
In the silence that followed the absently spoken words lay the only question that Louis would ever put to his daughter on the subject that filled both their thoughts.
The breast of her white frock rose and fell rather more quickly than before, and she did not speak.
“Enfin!” he said at last. “You are happy, sweetheart.”
“Yes, very,” she whispered emphatically, and kissed him before turning to run upstairs.
In her fancy dress, she lit all the candles in her room, and gazed at herself in the mirror for a long time.
She wore a peasant costume, of the convenient variety which can be called Swiss, Italian, or Norwegian, with equal unreason, and she looked charming. Her soft pale brown hair hung in two thick plaits over her shoulders, and excitement had brought a brilliant flush to her delicately colourless complexion. Her radiant grey eyes were shining as she looked at her own reflection.
Alison St. Craye knocked at the door, and showed her disregard for conventionality by entering without pausing to receive the customary permission.
Zella faced her critical gaze confidently.
The value of Miss St. Craye’s standards had diminished with strange rapidity in the last few days, and Zella’s new sense of security was never more apparent to her than in the moment when, insensitive alike to Abson’s praise or blame, she heard her murmured comment:
“Charming, no doubt. But why — why so conventional?”
“Is it?” she retorted, with an in
difference that was not assumed. “It was all I could find on the spur of the moment, and I adore blue.”
“Crude,” smiled Alison, raising her eyebrows. “However, subtle colours would be quite unsuited to you, and you look — charming.”
Her slight pause before the adjective contrived to make it sound kindly contemptuous.
Zella noted, with an increasing sense of triumph, that she had no perceptible feelings of mortification.
In her turn she spoke kindly:
“Nothing could be lovelier than what you’re wearing yourself. Do tell me the period.”
Alison folded her long, early Italian hands before her, turned her head slightly over one shoulder, and smiled slowly, her eyes half shut.
Zella waited in vain for a reply.
“Isn’t it Italian?” she hazarded.
Alison still said nothing, but the smile perceptibly stiffened “Anyhow, it is delightfully original,” Zella felt it safe to remark.
Alison uncrossed her hands, and tapped Zella rather smartly on the shoulder.
“You have not the artist’s eye,” she said, with the light laugh of extreme annoyance.
The affair remained mysterious to Zella until St. Algers, waiting for them at the foot of the stairs, greeted Alison’s appearance with the enthusiasm of a creator.
“Monna Lisa!” he exclaimed.
St. Algers himself, with an ingeniously contrived hump, represented Polichinel, and indulged in an amount of gesticulation that was a sore trial to the patience of Mrs. Lloyd-Evans. But St. Algers was not destined to be the greatest thorn in her side that evening.
James Lloyd-Evans had elected to garb himself in the skullcap and scarlet robes of a Cardinal.
His appearance was greeted with a burst of applause, in which the delighted St. Algers, who had himself devised the costume and superintended the manipulation of the old red curtains of which it was mainly composed, joined almost with ecstasy.
“Admirable! Perfect!” he cried rapturously. “You are the very type — only too young, a shade too young. But that nose and that forehead — you see what I mean?”
He turned to Louis, and Mrs. Lloyd-Evans drew her son into a corner of the room by means of that grave magnetic look which he had spent so much of his boyhood in vainly endeavouring to ignore.
“My dear boy!” she said gently—” a Cardinal of the Church of Rome?”
“There are no Cardinals in any other Church, mother,” urged James. “It had to be Rome or not at all.”
“Then, why not, not at all, James? One does not want to put you out of conceit with yourself, but surely you see that this is very unsuitable. We know very well that in the Middle Ages there were some very strange people about, but immorality is hardly a subject for jesting.”
“ But, my dear mother, I am not jesting about immorality! I am merely representing a Cardinal in the abstract, not any one particular monster of iniquity.”
“That does not make it any better, James, and I only hope that with Cardinal’s clothes you are not putting on Cardinal’s tricks of twisting the truth about. One knows what a name Jesuits have made for themselves, and they are all tarred with the same brush,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Evans with melancholy impartiality.
“I will do my best not to push the impersonation to those limits,” replied James dryly.
“Very well, my boy. I quite understand, and young people don’t always quite think what they are about, I know. I dare say you only thought of wearing a nice bright colour, and didn’t realize that it might seem in rather bad taste to recall intrigues and scandals that are better forgotten. Especially with so many more or less French people about.”
She cast a disparaging glance round the room.
“St. Algers, who is quite ten times as French as the average Frenchman, originated the whole affair, and rigged up this costume himself, so I presume his feelings will survive the strain.”
“Very likely,” said his mother, “especially as he probably has no feelings at all. He is what I call a man milliner, and I cannot imagine how Louis can encourage him as he does. But, as I always say, Jimmy, there are others, and if he has no shame, it does not follow that other people have none.”
“Very well,” said James resignedly, “I will tell them that I am not a French Cardinal. I will be an English one.”
“That would be most tactless, dear, and very silly into the bargain, since there are no such things as English Cardinals, as you very well know. The Church has true priests, I am thankful to say, not dressed-up puppets in jewellery,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, looking disgustedly at the enormous glass stone on her son’s finger. “However, I do not want to distress you, Jimmy dear; only, as your mother, one had to say a few words. Let us forget about it, and see what the others have done to themselves.”
The things that the others had done to themselves were indeed strange and various. Louis was triumphant in a Beefeater’s suit that had, after all, not proved too small for him; and St. Algers had himself personally converted Stephen Pontisbury into a very passable imitation of Sydney Carton.
He entered the room after everyone else had arrived, and even’ when the evening was in full swing, with the twelve or fourteen guests who had driven over to dinner in various feeble attempts at Pierrot costumes, or with flour-sprinkled hair, he was incontestably the handsomest, as he was the tallest, man in the room.
Across the glittering space of the dinner-table Zella cast one or two rapid glances at him through lowered lashes, and felt strangely excited.
He asked her for the first dance, and a sudden suffocating shyness made her answer constrainedly:
“I believe I ought to look after people a little just at first. Miss Oliver is all by herself; do let me introduce you to her.”
Stephen stood his ground.
“It is you I want to dance with,” he said, looking full at her. How many will you give me?”
“I’ll tell you later on. We’ll dance No. 7, if you like.”
Zella could not have told what instinctive desire was urging her to put off the moment she foresaw. She wanted Stephen to say that he loved her, and she told herself that she loved him; but she was glad when by a sudden request of St. Algers the seventh dance turned into the Lancers, and ended in a species of General Post.
“Give me the next one,” said Stephen masterfully. “I can’t. I haven’t another one until No. 14. I will give you that one.”
“Who has the next one?”
“My cousin James. I dare say he wouldn’t mind,” hesitated Zella, looking up at him.
“I should mind very much,” said the voice of James unexpectedly, behind her.
Stephen turned away, looking very like Sydney Carton indeed.
James took Zella on to the terrace. Surprisingly, and uncharacteristically, he was an unusually good dancer, but he said in a dispassionate tone:
“If you don’t very much mind, Zella, I want to talk. Let’s come out.”
She came obediently, surprised and rather flattered. At the back of her mind, the subconscious excitement induced by the thought of Stephen grew steadily.
She felt so much as though she were on the stage, that it was without any active feeling of astonishment that she heard James remark:
“I have made up my mind to thrust upon you a conversation in the very worst possible taste, Zella, to speak like a cad and a bounder, and if necessary to resort to the cowardly and unmanly expedient of brute force in order to compel you to listen to me. You are on the verge of making an appalling muddle, and if nobody else will try to stop you, I shall.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I am talking about Pontisbury. He wants to marry you, and I believe you mean to accept him — though whether you’ll ever marry him God only knows. I hope to Heaven you’ll break it off before it’s got to that.”
Zella knew that she ought to feel far angrier than she did, and simulated violent indignation in her tones.
“Are you mad, James, to speak to
me like this? Even if what you say is true, what right have you to say it?”
“Don’t talk about ‘what right ‘; you’re taking your stand upon false ground,” said James vehemently. “No one has any right — I haven’t the shadow of a right; I know that as well as you do. I loathe interference and officiousness, and I’ve never interfered with anyone before.”
“Then, you are simply taking advantage of a near relationship.”
“You know that isn’t true, Zella,” said James earnestly; “have you ever known me officious? If I see you out on a cold night without a wrap on, do I offer to fetch you one?”
He did not, indeed, reflected Zella, not without a touch of humour.
“I may know it’s a cold night, but so do you; but you prefer to have no wrap. It’s your own affair. But in this case you apparently don’t know.”
“What don’t I know?”
“That Pontisbury would make you wretched or drive you mad. He’s in love with you, of course, as far as he knows how, but what does he know of the real you? You’re playing up to him all the time, being what he wants you to be and what he expects you to be, answering his endless catchwords with others as meaningless. You never get down to bedrock for one single instant. What do you suppose Pontisbury would do if you told him a lie, and he found it out?”
“James!”
Zella felt a pang that was physical in its intensity shoot through her.
“You want to think that I’m insulting you by the suggestion. Stephen Pontisbury would think I was insulting you. But I’m not; I’m speaking of the real things, the things that are at the back of us all, and most of all at the back of a temperament like yours. Because I understand you, though we’re poles apart. But if you told Pontisbury a lie, he’d attitudinize, and say his star had fallen out of heaven; and he’d be heart-broken, and then he’d forgive you and say that his trust had risen stronger than ever through it all, and spend the rest of his life in trying to catch you out again.”
“Why do you assume that I should deceive him?”
“Because you would,” he answered unhesitatingly. “You couldn’t live with him and be absolutely sincere. He wouldn’t understand it. You’d jar on his susceptibilities, and you haven’t the moral courage to do that.”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 30
