Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “I thought she was clever.”

  Nina shrugged her shoulders.

  “It’s not the sort of cleverness that attracts,” she said shrewdly. “Hazel Tregaskis, before she married, had twice the success that Rosamund had. Now, of course, with money and clothes and things, and that romantic story about her marriage, Hazel is too popular for words, though she’s really not pretty in the least — only very bright and attractive.”

  Lady Argent, who did not think that Hazel Tregaskis’s marriage with Sir Guy Marleswood was a sufficiently reputable subject to be mentioned, except to the Almighty, with whom she occasionally pleaded piously for the first Lady Marleswood’s demise, maintained a rather weighty silence.

  Nina rippled lightly through it.

  “Rosamund is rather the sort of girl who likes to go about looking like a tragedy-queen, and for no particular reason, you know. There was a very foolish and youthful love affair,” said Nina with an air of extreme detachment, “which only lasted about a week, and meant nothing at all, but she has quite got over that — so that her air of having a grievance is really affectation. You know anything which fails to ring quite true does jar so — one feels it instinctively — in a moment. Don’t you agree?”

  Lady Argent looked as though she were torn between truth and an unaccountable desire to contradict her visitor, and it was a slight but distinct relief to them both when Ludovic came into the room.

  “Are you going to be kind enough to let us hear you play, Mrs. Severing?” he asked her. “The piano is an Erard, and though it is not new, I should very much like you to try it, if you will.”

  “Do,” said Lady Argent cordially.

  Ludovic wondered whether the cordiality sprang from a certain weariness which he thought that he could detect in his parent’s expression. It seemed to him that one might weary rather speedily in Mrs. Severing’s company. But when she was seated before the Erard, a load of rings removed from her white supple fingers, and the sound of one of her own “Preludes” filling the room, Ludovic felt inclined to change his mind.

  Nina Severing at the piano interested him. He felt that “meretricious” was still the word that he would apply to her talent, but her rendering of her own inspirations struck him as an odd bit of self-revelation.

  The “Prelude” was a rapid, highly-technical tour-de-force of muscular agility, with the merest and most disconnected thread of melody possible in the treble, and in syncopated time. Ludovic divined that Nina regarded it as her masterpiece. She played with great self-confidence and an amount of force that was rather surprising.

  Afterwards, at Lady Argent’s request, she played a Chopin Polonaise and the too well-known Minute-Waltz.

  Her rendering of neither satisfied Ludovic’s taste, but he listened with an interest that was almost profound.

  “She is only sincere when she is dealing with her own compositions,” was his final verdict. “As an interpreter she fails altogether. She does not attempt to give us Chopin’s Chopin, but Nina Severing’s Chopin — the Chopin of the author of the ‘Kismet’ songs. And so the polonaise becomes trivial, almost a little vulgar — it is utterly above and beyond her personality.” He gave himself up to interested musings, and listened to Nina’s subsequent performances with his outward ear only.

  But Frances and Lady Argent gave the popular musician her full meed of applause and congratulation.

  “How you can ever have time to practise all those things, and learn them by heart, I can’t imagine,” said Lady Argent admiringly. “When I think what difficulty I had as a girl in memorizing a very pretty thing called ‘The Maiden’s Prayer,’ which I believe is quite out of date nowadays — but then I was never considered particularly musical. Ludovic gets it all from his father.”

  “Celtic blood,” said Nina, pronouncing the C as though it had been 5”. “No — memorizing has never been of much difficulty to me. Things just seem to come, you know. As a child I used to spend hours and hours in an old organ-loft, just playing to myself, you know — always alone, but never lonely so long as I could make music.” Her eyes deepened and grew introspective over this pathetic sketch, which happened to be a fancy one, and it was with a perceptible effort that she presently shook off her slight appearance of absorption and once more begged to be shown the chapel.

  “Frances will take you, and show you all that there is to be seen. I know you will forgive me for not undertaking the stairs oftener than I can help,” said her hostess with a little hesitation.

  “But of course!”

  Nina followed her guide with a graceful gesture expressive of complete understanding.

  “Ludovic!” cried Lady Argent in a distraught manner, as soon as he had carefully closed the door. “I am afraid it was really very wrong of me to tell such a shocking untruth, though I did not say in so many words that it would bring on my asthma if I went upstairs to the chapel, but I am sure that is what she understood me to mean, and the worst of it is that I meant her to take it that way, and that is really just the same thing as telling a downright lie. Because of course stairs never affect me in the least, as you very well know, only damp, which the chapel is far from being, especially with that dear little radiator put in under Our Lady’s statue. Oh, my dear boy, do you think it was very wrong of me?”

  “Not in the least. Why should you have taken her to the chapel yourself, tiresome woman that she is?”

  “Oh, hush,” said his mother, looking delighted. “Pray don’t call her names, Ludovic, my dear, it really is most uncharitable. But I am dreadfully afraid that I have taken a terrible dislike to her.”

  “What! When she is so much interested in Catholicism? “asked Ludovic, with a shade of derision in his tone.

  “I did not like her manner about the Church at all,” said Lady Argent with melancholy emphasis. “I really did not, Ludovic. I have no doubt that it is very uncharitable of me, but it positively struck me once or twice that she was almost posing about it all. So unlike dear little Frances, who is so much in earnest.”

  “I believe it was Mrs. Severing who first put the idea of Catholicism into her head, all the same,” said Ludovic rather maliciously.

  “My dear boy, how can you say such a thing! It was the grace of God, neither more nor less, and when you consider that Mrs. Grantham was a Catholic herself, by birth! — though I’m sure I had no idea of such a thing till just the other day: but then one was so dreadfully apt to look upon all foreigners as belonging to some odd fancy religion, or even nothing at all, in those days. And, of course, poor thing, she must have given up her religion altogether, or those children would never have been baptized Protestants, poor little things, when you think of the promises the non-Catholic party to a marriage always has to make — but I suppose Mr. Grantham was never even told about them, let alone asked to make them.”

  “Probably not,” agreed her son placidly.

  “Dreadful to think of! And so poor Mrs. Grantham died without the Last Sacraments or anything at all. If one had only known in those days! However,” said Lady Argent, wisely putting the past away from her, “God has His own ways of doing things, and I have no doubt that Frances is His chosen instrument for many things — perhaps she may even bring dear Bertie herself into the Church, one of these days.”

  “And Mrs. Severing, mother?”

  “Ludovic! I can’t bear to think of that woman’s first Confession. I can see her, keeping the poor priest for hours in the confessional, while she forced all her fancies down his throat,” said Lady Argent, with the energy that only a really good woman can put into denunciation.

  “Mother!”

  “Well, my dear boy, I dare say it is very wrong of me to say so, and if I am giving you scandal I am sorry for it.

  You know very well that I would never say such a thing before the servants or anybody, though what Charles must have thought of her at luncheon, calling the turbot symbolical and everything, I really don’t know. She will have to have tea before driving all that way back
, but pray ring the bell and let me order it half an hour earlier.”

  This inhospitable manoeuvre had hardly been put into execution before Frances and Nina reappeared. The latter laid her slender, gloveless hand for a moment on Lady Argent’s sleeve, the blackness of which formed an admirable foil to extreme whiteness and the flash of diamonds, and said in tones which almost suggested an emotional tremolo: “I can’t thank you enough. It’s been a revelation — Coram sanctissimum!”

  Ludovic, with some perspicacity, divined that Mrs. Severing supposed her fragment of Latinity to be some recondite version of “sanctum sanctorum,” and tried to look proportionately gratified, the more so as his mother’s expression denoted considerable distrust mingled with a most perfunctory politeness.

  “I’m so glad,” she murmured doubtfully. “Do pray let me give you some tea — they are just bringing it.”

  “The little shrine!” said Nina with a sort of soft rapture. “It reminded me so much of those little wayside shrines one saw everywhere in Italy. I have always loved them.”

  “Do you know Italy well?” asked Ludovic.

  “I was there years ago — with my husband. I remember,” said Nina determinedly turning to Lady Argent, “that we had a private audience with the Pope — so interesting, and he was the dearest old man. I shall never forget kneeling there — I was a mere child, I married very, very young — to receive his blessing, and how impressive it all was. He gave me some beads, too, that I am sure have all sorts of beautiful Indulgences attached to them, even for a poor little heretic. Frances knows them — they always hang over my bed at home. I really could hardly sleep without them.”

  Even Frances felt no regret when Mrs. Severing took her departure.

  Neither she nor Lady Argent alluded to the visit that evening, and Ludovic, on his return from conducting Nina to the Towers, spent the evening in reading aloud an article on French literature.

  But when his mother rose to go to bed, and he handed her the small heap of miscellanies without which she seldom moved, she looked almost coldly at the polished brown rosary that crowned the little pile.

  “Thank you, my dear boy,” she said rather faintly, taking them from him, and added, as soon as Frances was out of earshot, “I assure you that that absurd woman has really almost put me off saying my rosary for the evening.”

  XII

  WHATEVER Lady Argent’s strictures on the length of time that Mrs. Severing might entertain a hypothetical director in the confessional, she did not herself hesitate to inflict upon the Prior at Twickenham an epistle which covered the better part of six pages.

  Ludovic watched his mother’s pen hurrying over her paper with an uneasy sense of knowing what she was about, and presently asked her gently: “Mother dear, you won’t try and persuade Mrs. Tregaskis into allowing that little girl to do anything in a hurry, will you?”

  “Not for the world, dear,” said Lady Argent, colouring guiltily. “I quite see what you mean — it would seem very interfering, and besides, I do not think it would move Bertie in the least. She is much cleverer than I am, and would not dream of asking my advice, far less of taking it. But I am just sending a few lines to Father Anselm, on a — a little matter of conscience, dear.”

  Ludovic knew the peculiar expression of self-conscious guilt which meant that his mother was embarked upon some pious course of which she felt certain that her son would disapprove, and was far from reassured by this simple explanation.

  Lady Argent’s mysteries were so transparent, however, that he felt confident of a speedy enlightenment, but a few days later she announced that she thought of making a few days stay in London and of taking Frances with her.

  “But why, dear? You know London never suits you.

  Is it really necessary?”

  “My teeth really do need attention, Ludovic,” faltered his mother with an intonation which betrayed plainly that how ever much her teeth might require attention they were not solely responsible for her sudden resolution, even if she had not immediately added in conscience-stricken accents: “Not that I want you to think it is only my teeth, though I have made an appointment with Mr. Fanshawe, because it seemed such waste not to go there when one was actually in London, but I do rather want to do one or two other things besides.”

  Ludovic perceived that his mother did not wish him to have a more intimate knowledge of the one or two other things, for which he felt sure that the singular number would have sufficed, and forbore to inquire further.

  She took Frances to London the following week, and from there wrote to her son: “We went to Twickenham for the day on Sunday, as Frances was most anxious to see the monastery, and I could not help longing that she should know Father Anslem. I left them to have a little talk together while I paid my visit to the chapel, and the dear child was so very much pleased with all he said to her.”

  Lady Argent, like the majority of women, was always at her most valiant on paper, and Ludovic rightly conjectured that she hoped thus to render further allusion to the Twickenham visit unnecessary. It was therefore not without some amusement, on the evening that she and Frances returned, that Ludovic listened to the conversational manoeuvres by which his mother strove to forestall any inconvenient inquiries.

  “And what about Twickenham, dear?” he firmly inquired.

  “Oh, my dear boy, it was the most freezing day you can imagine — that very cold Sunday — and altogether so unlike what one always associated with Twickenham — Twickenham Ferry, you know, though it’s a song one never hears nowadays — such a pity, I always think. It makes one think of straw bonnets and crinolines and so many delightful things of that kind, which one never meets with now — not that I can remember crinolines myself.”

  “I suppose not, dear, but I want to hear about the monastery,” said Ludovic inexorably. “What did you think of the Prior, Miss Frances?”

  “I liked him very much. I never saw a monk before, and he was so much more human and cheerful than I had expected, somehow.”

  “It would not be at all surprising if they were the most melancholy creatures on earth,” Lady Argent agitatedly broke in, “at least from a human point of view, because, of course, want of food and sleep are most dreadfully trying, and they never have enough of either.”

  Frances sat with an awestricken expression in her eyes.

  “It’s extraordinary to realize that that sort of thing actually goes on now, at the same time as one’s own ordinary everyday life,” she said slowly. “I never knew before that it — religious life, I mean — went on, in that sort of way, in England nowadays. It always seemed, somehow, so remote — belonging to medieval times.”

  “Like the Inquisition, etc.,” unkindly remarked Ludovic, with a glance at his mother, whom the allusion always roused to eloquence.

  “That was only a political institution, dear, as you very well know, and had nothing to do with the Church — at least the worst part of it hadn’t, and naturally autres temps autres moeurs, and, besides, it was in Spain, which I never think is quite the same as other countries, in spite of having kept the Faith in that marvellous way all these years, which I believe is the reason they have no days of abstinence there, but look at the bull-fights and things. Their ideas must be different to ours, I feel certain.”

  “Very different indeed,” dryly remarked Ludovic. “But please go on about Twickenham. Did you spend the whole day there?”

  “Yes,” said the unconscious Frances. “They gave us lunch and tea in the guest-house, and showed us all over the grounds, and we stayed to Benediction in the evening. It was so nice.”

  “Such good music, my dear boy,” said Lady Argent in a pleading tone of extenuation.

  Ludovic refused to attribute the visit to any music, good or otherwise, but he said no more until he found himself alone with his mother, who faced him with a mixture of deprecation and resoluteness in her gaze.

  “I know you don’t approve, darling,” she said bravely, “but the fact was that that poor
little dear really requires some spiritual direction, and I had already written to Father Anselm about her, and he was so very anxious that I should put her into the way of being taught something about the Faith, that it really seemed one’s duty. You see she will be dreadfully cut off from everything when she gets back to Porthlew.”

  “And what is the Prior going to do? Lend her books?” said Ludovic, with a most unenthusiastic intonation, and a vivid recollection of the innumerable devotional manuals of suggestive titles that were strewn about his mother’s bedroom and boudoir.

  “Yes, dear,” meekly returned Lady Argent; “and — I am really afraid you won’t approve at all, Ludovic — but she is most anxious to be instructed — and really when one remembers that her mother was a Catholic and everything “She paused helplessly.

  “You can’t have had her turned into a Catholic already?”

  “No — they wouldn’t receive her until she knew more about it — but Father Anselm is going to give her a course of instruction by post.”

  “Mother, you really are not acting fairly by Mrs. Tregaskis.”

  “Do you think she would mind so very much? After all, Frances is not her daughter.”

  “The point is that she has not been asked. I really think she has a right to be told, before there is any question of anything so definite as receiving regular instructions.”

  “Oh, Ludovic, my dear boy! I wish I could get you to look at it as I do. The gain of a soul, you know.”

  “The end justifies the means,” quoted Ludovic, shaking his head and unable to help laughing. “Mother dear, may I talk to her about it?”

  “To Frances? Oh yes, dear, I wish you would. I assure you that it’s most edifying to see the graces that child has already been given — she seems to believe by instinct, as it were. Perhaps,” said Lady Argent with a sort of melancholy hopefulness, “she may be able to show you things in quite a new light.”