Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  It was that same look, Rosamund thought, which angered Mrs. Tregaskis when her daughter resolutely asked her for an interview that evening.

  “No, my darling; I’m not going to let you stay and chatter now. You’ve had a long journey, and must pop off to bed early. We’ll have a long talk to-morrow. Dad and I are not at all angry with you, but I’ve had a letter from Jessie Alistair, and it’s quite plain that I ought never to have let you go and stay away without me. Now run along with Rosamund, my pet.”

  “What did Lady Alistair say?”

  “I shall talk to you about that to-morrow. I am not at all angry with you, Hazel, but one thing you and Rosamund may as well understand, since I suppose you’ve told her all about it. You may flirt with boys of your own age, if you like, and have all the fun that’s natural and proper, but.”

  Bertha Tregaskis paused. She spoke with a quiet and good-humoured implacability, her hands resting on her broad hips, and her resolute mouth set firmly. “But — to flirt and get yourself talked about with a married man, is — a — thing — I — don’t — allow. See, darling?”

  Rosamund caught her breath and looked at her cousin.

  Hazel, who seldom or never blushed, had flushed the slow, deep crimson of a woman who hears herself insulted.

  “Sir Guy Marleswood is not a married man,” she said slowly. “At least, neither he nor I think so, which is what matters, after all. He divorced his wife five years ago. He has asked me to marry him.”

  “Very well, darling. When he writes and asks the permission of your parents, we shall see. But a man of four or five-and-thirty, who has led the sort of life that he has led, does not generally want to marry a little girl of nineteen, even though he may be dishonourable enough to play at making love to her.”

  But this agreeable theory was shattered next day, when Sir Guy Marleswood wrote a formal statement of his position, and an almost equally formal request for his daughter’s hand in marriage, to Frederick Tregaskis. He also stated unemphatically that the following day would find him at Porthlew Railway Hotel.

  Thereafter, Rosamund watched the storm break over the household with a strangely aching heart.

  Bertha regarded Sir Guy as a married man, and said so staunchly. Frederick Tregaskis, whom Rosamund had never yet heard to agree with his wife, declined to view the question from an ethical standpoint, but declared Hazel too young to enter upon a marriage which would of necessity be regarded more or less dubiously by the world in general.

  “Wait another five years,” he remarked grimly to his daughter, “and see if you can’t do better for yourself than a divorced baronet fifteen years older than yourself.”

  “No,” said Hazel, her small face set like a flint. “He wants me to marry him now.”

  “I dare say. And I want you to wait. I suppose you owe something to your father?”

  “Yes,” she said, and began to cry. “But not everything in the world. I owe something to myself. It’s my life.”

  It was the passionate cry for individualism that Rosamund had heard from Morris Severing.

  But Hazel Tregaskis, unlike Morris, was directing all the energies of her will into one channel. And Rosamund, watching, saw those energies guided and strengthened day by day by the stronger force that held steadfast behind her.

  Guy Marleswood was not of those who fail.

  Before the close of that year, the day came when he extorted from the exasperated Frederick: “Marry her, then.

  I see you mean to do it, both of you, and it may as well be with my consent as without it. Anything to put an end to the subject.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Sir Guy imperturbably. “I will go and tell Mrs. Tregaskis that we have your consent to the marriage.”

  “You will do nothing of the kind. I shall tell her myself. I may as well get some satisfaction out of it,” said Frederick viciously.

  He sought his wife in the library, where she sat, looking unusually disheartened, amid a pile of leaflets.

  “Bertha, you are about to be relieved of one of your responsibilities.”

  “I’m thankful to hear it,” she returned wearily.

  “I have decided to give Hazel into Marleswood’s keeping.

  “Frederick! You can’t. You’re mad. A child of nineteen — and a marriage that’s no marriage — she’ll be no more married in the eyes of God than if she were openly living as that man’s mistress.”

  “I’m not concerned with the eyes of God,” said her husband in detached tones. “It’s perfectly evident to mine that if we don’t give our consent they mean to do without it, and I don’t choose to have my daughter making a runaway match. We had better give in gracefully while it is still possible, Bertha. Marleswood is not the sort of man to heal a breach, if it came to that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that we don’t want to be cut off from the little girl for ever after her marriage,” said Frederick, his voice shaking a very little. “That’s what it’ll mean if we let her go from under our roof in defiance, Bertha.”

  “Hazel is an infatuated, self-willed child, but she is not heartless,” cried Bertha.

  “I do not intend to put her to the test.” Frederick Tregaskis had regained his habitual dryness of utterance.

  With unwonted consideration, he added a word of consolation for his wife.

  “I may as well tell you that I am perfectly satisfied that Marleswood is a good fellow in every way, and devoted to her. The whole thing, after all, amounts to a question of conscience, which she is entitled to judge for herself.”

  “She’s not,” flashed Bertha. “She’s only a child, and ought to accept the ruling of her parents until she’s old enough to judge for herself.”

  “I have no doubt,” said Frederick drily, “that all parents, taken as a class, would agree with you. Unfortunately for ourselves, however, we have passed into an era where the individual, and not the class, will rule.”

  He walked out of the room, looking older and more deeply lined than ever.

  Rosamund found Mrs. Tregaskis, who never broke down, weeping violently among the piles of disordered pamphlets.

  “Cousin Bertie! Don’t!” cried Rosamund fearfully.

  “Is it about Hazel?”

  Bertha raised a piteously mottled and disfigured face.

  “I’m beaten,” she cried. “Frederick has consented to this iniquitous marriage, and nothing can stop it now. My little girl, whom I’ve brought up to be good, and to whom I’ve tried to teach religion — that she should be willing to break my heart, and rush deliberately into sin, the first time temptation comes near her!”

  “No — no. It’s not that. She doesn’t think it’s sin.

  She doesn’t believe it’s sin — not for an instant. Her point of view is different.”

  “Her point of view!” cried Bertha bitterly. “How dare you talk to me, a woman of fifty, of such preposterous non- sense? You and she are children; you know nothing of life, you’ve had no experience. How can Hazel judge of what is right or wrong? She’s a child — a child.”“

  In the vehement repetition of the assertion, it seemed to Rosamund that she found her clue to Bertha Tregaskis’s impotent suffering. She would not, could not, admit in her daughter any claim to the rights of an individual.

  Hazel’s judgment, unrecognized by her mother, carried with it no amazement to Rosamund.

  Certain faiths, certain scruples and acceptances inborn in Rosamund and Frances, had been the veriest lip-service to the child Hazel always. Rosamund recognized in her the purest and most natural type of highly-evolved paganism.

  “You know, Rosamund, I’m not doing anything wrong, although they won’t believe it. It isn’t wrong to me, and I don’t believe in an abstract right and wrong. Each individual case has its own laws.”

  “Should you do it if you thought it was wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hazel thoughtfully. “I can’t imagine seriously believing that it would matter to God, on
e way or the other. Should you? Frances wouldn’t, one knows.”

  “If I did it,” slowly said Rosamund, “it would be as a deliberate choice between good and evil. I should believe myself to be breaking God’s law — but I might do it, if I thought it worth while.”

  She knew that if, as she said, it seemed to her worth while, no laws of God or man should bind her. But she would break them of deliberate intent, whereas to Hazel Tregaskis they were non-existent, myths designed for the wanton frightening of children.

  Rosamund recognized the absolute sincerity of Hazel’s point of view, and sometimes found herself wondering what Sir Guy’s might be. One day, very soon before the marriage, she held an odd little conversation with him, standing in the wintry sunshine of the terrace. Frederick Tregaskis was ahead of them, grimly poking with a walking-stick at a little drain that was choked with leaves.

  “He’s been very kind to me,” said Sir Guy abruptly, indicating with a gesture the odd little figure.

  “I think that he really likes you very much,” said Rosamund. “And though he would be very angry at being told so, I have always known that Cousin Frederick adores Hazel.”

  Sir Guy nodded with full comprehension.

  “Yes, of course. She knows that, too. It’s been the best thing in her life so far — that and having you and your sister here.” He paused for a moment or two. “You know,” he said slowly, “I want to try and make up to her for everything that she hasn’t had, so far. She ought to have everything. She seems, somehow, so made for happiness.”

  “I have never seen Hazel sad,” said Rosamund, rather surprised. “I think she is happy by nature.”

  “Yes, though an atmosphere which might perhaps seem an unsympathetic one.”

  He left the sentence unfinished, and it required no effort on Rosamund’s part to conjecture his meaning. Sir Guy resented, none the less implacably that his resentment was expressed by implication only, the attitude of Mrs. Tregaskis towards her daughter. That Hazel herself had never resented it, and had only opposed to it the bright glancing hardness of her impenetrable self-confidence, did not, Rosamund felt, in any way diminish his perfectly silent ire. Mrs. Tregaskis herself would be forced to recognize that in this man fifteen years her senior, Hazel had found champion as well as lover, knight as well as comrade.

  Rosamund turned away with an aching heart, wondering dimly whether her need had not been greater than Hazel’s.

  After the formal consent given by Frederick Tregaskis, there had been no further discussions between Sir Guy and Mrs. Tregaskis. She accepted her defeat with the sort of grim gallantry that would always be characteristic of her, and, as far as Rosamund knew, attempted no appeal to Hazel. But she aged more perceptibly in the weeks before Hazel’s marriage than during all the five years that Rosamund had passed at Porthlew.

  No other indication that her guardian recognized defeat was evident to Rosamund’s eyes. Her manner to her daughter was what it had always been — kindly, authoritative, at times possessive. She admitted Sir Guy’s claims to much of her daughter’s time, and even seemed disposed, gradually, to concede to him rights which he had not tried to arrogate for himself.

  “You mustn’t let this little person be too much in London,” she observed, with a hand upon Hazel’s shoulder.

  “We’re very excitable, and it knocks us up. I had to be a very strict mamma and bring her home long before the dances had come to an end last year.”

  “If we take the St. James’ Square flat, there is no reason why we shouldn’t spend all the week-ends Hazel likes at Marleswood.”

  “Well, I don’t know about week-ends,” said Bertha doubtfully. “They’re not very restful. I think a home in the country and an occasional fling in London must be Hazel’s programme.”

  She spoke with her customary matter-of-fact assurance and kindly good sense.

  Sir Guy fixed his objectionable monocle more firmly.

  “That,” he observed in a detached manner, “is a decision which I shall leave entirely to my wife.”

  If Mrs. Tregaskis found it necessary to readjust her forces after this, the readjustment was made silently and without delay. But it was very shortly after that, when it only wanted a week to Hazel’s wedding-day, that Rosamund again found Cousin Bertha in the library, struggling with hard, choking sobs. Hazel hung over her, caressing her with most unwonted demonstrativeness and with tears in her own pretty eyes. But that they were tears of the merest surface pity and tenderness was abundantly obvious even without the gently mournful observation which she made to Rosamund that evening.

  “Poor mother! I hate to see her minding it so, but you know, Rosamund, I can’t feel as unhappy as I ought.”

  “Don’t you wish — sometimes — that you’d waited, as they begged you to? It would have been the same for you in the end.”

  “The same for me, and the same for them,” returned Hazel crisply. “They wouldn’t have liked it any better ten years hence — at least mother wouldn’t. I believe daddy’s reconciled already. Mother wants me to be happy, but in her way.”

  “Are you really happy, when you know she is miserable?” spoke Rosamund with more curiosity than compassion. Hazel coloured, but faced her cousin with unflinching honesty.

  “Yes,” she said, “I am. It’s of no use to pretend, Rosamund. I am happier than I have ever been in my life. Of course, I should have preferred it if everything had been straightforward, and there hadn’t been all this fuss, and having to extort a consent — but it would have been just the same if they hadn’t given it. Do you know, that’s the pathos of it, to my mind — they couldn’t do anything. Guy and I would have married without their consent, just as much as with it.”

  “He asked you to, I suppose,” said Rosamund, as though stating a fact.

  Hazel pushed her curling tawny hair from her forehead.

  “He asked me if I would, if it came to that, and of course I said yes. But we both knew it wouldn’t come to that, and that mother would have to give in. I used to think that if one’s parents forbade a thing, it became impossible ipso facto, but it doesn’t. They just can’t do anything at all.”

  To Rosamund, Hazel had summed up the situation in that sentence.

  They could not do anything at all.

  The wedding took place quietly at Porthlew, and they said good-bye to Hazel, radiant-eyed, and clinging in an unwonted embrace to her father at the last moment.

  Then she drove away with her husband, and Miss Blandflower, in a piping soprano, remarked to Rosamund: “It’s like a death in a house, isn’t it? But we must all try and take her place, now.”

  The suggestion drove Frederick, snarling disgustedly, into the study.

  Frances went quietly to put away some of the litter in Hazel’s room, while Rosamund, feeling herself useless and in the way, yet hung helplessly in the vicinity of Nina Severing, who had remained with Bertha in the drawing-room after the departure of the few guests.

  But no word of Morris reached her.

  Nina was murmuring consolation to her friend who, for once inactive, sat gazing heavily into the fire.

  “After all, dearest, the young birds will fly out of the old nest and leave it desolate. It’s nature.”

  Bertha groaned.

  “It’s not the selfish loss to myself that I mind, Nina, but the thing she’s done. If I were giving her to some simple, honest boy of her own age, how gladly I’d see her go. We mothers don’t ask more than that, after all — just to see the children happy.”

  “I know,” breathed Mrs. Severing. “It’s all one lives for.”

  “I’ve no plans or wishes for myself — it’s all for them,” muttered Bertha disjointedly. “What else has one to care about — an old gargoyle....”

  Nina straightened herself slightly.

  “‘Having outlived hope, fear, desire...’” she quoted softly, at the same time turning her long neck so that the firelight fell upon her burnished hair and exquisite, appealing profile.

&nb
sp; “A man she’s only known a few months,” pursued Bertha bitterly. “And she’ll disobey her parents, the mother who’s loved and guarded and cherished her all her life, and break their hearts, for his sake.”

  “God grant the poor child may not regret it bitterly one day,” breathed Nina piously.

  There was a long pause.

  “Well!” said Bertha, and slowly stood up. “There’s a lot to be done.”

  “Do let me help you, dearest.”

  “Thanks, Nina, if you would. The girls are somewhere, I suppose.”

  “Ah, they’ll be a comfort to you, I hope. They who owe you even more than Hazel does, if possible.”

  “One does what one can. It seems to me that it’s all give give, give on our side, and take, take, take on theirs. I feel rather like an unfortunate pelican feeding its young, sometimes.”

  With the words, and the curt laugh that dismissed them, Bertha Tregaskis regained possession of herself.

  IX

  ROSAMUND, though unhappy, was not as unhappy as she would have liked to think herself. The defection of Morris Severing, although gaining in poignancy by contrast with Hazel’s serene happiness, was a sorrow of the emotions only, and a certain fierce sincerity of outlook prevented Rosamund from rating it otherwise.

  But she felt that she could have borne it better had the disappearance of her quondam lover touched the mainsprings of her life, and left that life dignified by a lasting grief, instead of merely rendered unprofitable and savourless from an unrecognized sense of vague discontent.

  “I don’t know what Rosamund’s grievance is!” her guardian was exasperated into exclaiming, nearly a year after Hazel’s marriage. “I don’t believe she knows herself.”

  And, in so saying, diagnosed the case.

  Rosamund Grantham, after the manner of the modern generation, had yet to find herself, and suffered accordingly.

  It need scarcely be added that she did not confine her sufferings to herself.

  Frances, overwhelmed by the difficulties of reconciling responsiveness to Cousin Bertie’s bracing councils of selfreliance, with submission to Rosamund’s intensely protective and rather overpowering solicitude, sought more frequently than ever the soothing society of Nina Severing.