Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  Lady Argent looked at her affectionately.

  “Dear Bertie, I do like to hear your laugh again.”

  “It is an infectious chuckle, I believe,” returned Mrs. Tregaskis; “but I’ve always had a huge appreciation for the funny side of things. It’s helped me all through life, Sybil. I’m not an irreligious woman, though my religion is perhaps not a conventional one, but I really believe the whole of my creed could be embodied in one word: ‘Smile!’ I do believe in smiling! It cheers others, helps oneself, and does good all round. I don’t mind owning to you that a good many people, one way and another, have told me they blessed my knack of smiling. I’m sure one laugh is worth ten sermons, very often!”

  “Sermons are so often a little difficult to understand,” said Lady Argent apologetically. “I sometimes find myself quite hazy in church — though I dare say that’s mostly from the long drive, which makes me so dreadfully sleepy.”

  “You have to go all the way to Chepstow, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, and dear Ludovic is so angelic about driving me in. Not that he often allows me to go early, but then that’s because he thinks it tires me, not because he minds the distance.”

  “Your relationship is a very beautiful one,” said Bertha thoughtfully.

  “Oh, my dear, it is!” cried Lady Argent very simply.

  “I often wonder what I’ve done to deserve a son like Ludovic, when I see how dreadfully other people are worried by their children.”

  She coloured suddenly at the allusion, and then hurried on. “It’s not because I’ve brought him up beautifully or anything of that sort, either. I never could have theories, though I bought hundreds of little books — from the very first day that I knew I was going to have a baby. But I always forgot, and then dear Fergus, who was nothing if not determined — so very Scotch, you know, dear — used to say that little books were all rubbish, and if I wanted to know how to bring up a child, Solomon had said all there was to be said upon the subject. Not that he would ever have laid a finger upon Ludovic himself, you know. The only time the poor darling was ever punished, when he was about six years old, I had to do it myself, with a bedroom slipper. And I cried so dreadfully that Ludovic said in the middle of it: ‘It’s all right, mummy, don’t cry, you’re hardly hurting me at all.’ So touching, I always thought.”

  “I sometimes think that bringing up hasn’t anything at all to do with it,” said Bertha dryly. “I brought up my own child as well as I knew how, and practically brought up the other two girls as well. And look at my Hazel, Sybil.

  She hasn’t one thought for me. She came home when her father died and stayed a week — and her husband came for one night. She was sweet enough and affectionate enough — Hazel’s always been that — but do you suppose that I didn’t know that the whole of her thoughts were at Marieswood, with Guy and the babies, after the first day or two were over? Perhaps it’s natural — but it’s very bitter, Sybil. I don’t ask for impossibilities — I couldn’t have lived with them, and I should never wish to — but they never even suggested it.”

  Lady Argent said nothing at all, and took Bertha’s hand into hers.

  “It’s the fuss over her marriage that she’s never forgotten,” said Bertha bitterly, “and yet God knows she can afford to. She’s taken her own way, and is happy in it — and her father and I forgave her long ago, if she wanted forgiveness, for her self-will and disobedience.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Well,” said Bertha at last, “Rosamund is the only one who has come back to the old nest after all. Hazel’s gone right away from me — I know that well enough, in spite of all her loving letters — and won’t ever come back. Little Francie took her own way and followed a will-o’-the-wisp that she thought was the Star in the East, and I tell you, Sybil, that before she’d been in that place six months she was just as remote and far away from us as though she’d been in another world. Why, her very language wasn’t ours any longer — her whole scale of values had shifted....

  Someone who saw her once after she had entered told me it was like talking to someone with a thick wall of impenetrable glass all round. You could see her — but you could never get near... never be in touch again....”

  “You are nearer now, perhaps,” softly said Lady Argent.

  “Who knows? But the child that’s come back to me is Rosamund. And I shan’t fail her, Sybil.”

  “No, Bertie,” said Lady Argent lovingly. “You would never fail her.”

  “Never,” repeated Bertha with curiously intense conviction. “You see, apart from everything else, she’s the one of the three that has sought me when other things failed her.

  It’s an appeal that one doesn’t forget. I have to give, you know, Sybil. I’m made that way — and Rosamund has every claim on me.”

  There was silence again, and Bertha only broke it to take her departure with a brisk matter-of-factness that seemed to draw a swift curtain across some intimate threshold to a sanctuary where even her own footsteps seldom penetrated.

  XXX

  “HAZEL and the babies are coming for a week,” announced Bertha triumphantly.

  “How delightful! But oh! dear Mrs. Tregaskis, have you considered where you’re going to put them?” urgently demanded Miss Blandflower, wearing an expression of anxiety.

  “Ask my landlady, Minnie.”

  Miss Blandflower’s expression, now complicated by the addition of a puzzled smile, was turned towards Rosamund.

  “The little balcony room for Hazel, of course, and the spare room is quite large enough for nurse and the baby — but Dickie”.

  “He can have a cot in my room,” said Dickie’s grandmother quickly, “unless Hazel wants him with her. What about a nursery? They’ll be out most of the day, in this glorious weather, but it gets dark early; and then for meals.”

  “There’s the attic,” said Rosamund rather slowly. “It’s very big and light, and can easily be cleared. It used to be a sort of nursery.”

  She remained a moment reflective, and Mrs. Tregaskis eyed her kindly and observantly.

  “Fancy!” ejaculated Minnie in the silence.

  “Yes,” said Rosamund. “It makes a very nice room, and there are two windows.” She thought to herself that she would rather like the attic, where she and Francie had played together, to be a nursery again.

  “You’d rather like it to be a nursery again, wouldn’t you?” said Bertha gently.

  The attic was made ready, and two days later the engaging Dickie was trotting round it and gazing through the big dormer windows on to the garden below.

  Hazel, radiantly pretty and good-humoured, showed the caressing appreciation and gratitude for the welcome prepared that Rosamund had never known her fail to bestow.

  She played with the babies, gardened with Minnie, and answered all Bertha’s half-tentative questions with the same joyous unreserve of manner. If, in that very unreserve, there was a withholding, Rosamund thought it a most unconscious one. To Rosamund, Hazel gave of her loving way and impulses freely. Above all, she gave her, by a sort of tender instinct, what Rosamund needed most — the care of Dickie.

  It was Dickie who, unknowing enough, completed what Mrs. Mulholland, with her kind, inadequate goodness, had begun after Frances’ death.

  Rosamund came to realize that, on the day that she received news of Mrs. Mulholland’s death. She was in the garden with Ludovic Argent, as so often now, under the big Spanish chestnut from which still hung, stained and creaking, the frayed ropes and wide seat of the swing that had belonged to her and to Frances.

  “Mrs. Mulholland is dead,” she said, with wet eyes.

  “She just died in her sleep, on Sunday night. They’ve written from the convent to tell me.”

  She handed him the letter quite simply.

  Ludovic read the rather set, conventional phrases in which a French nun asked Rosamund’s prayers for the repose of the soul of her old friend.

  She had been “ready to go” for a long w
hile.

  “Yes,” said Ludovic, “I remember you told me about that.”

  “She wondered what the meeting with her husband would be” like — after all those years. She talked of dying just as though it was like going on a journey, to some place where people one knew were waiting. She was very matter-of-fact about it. I think Catholics are like that. She said she would take messages from me to Frances — in a sort of way it comforted me very much. It made it seem — not so very far away, after all. I wonder.”

  She was silent for a moment, and then said almost timidly: “Do you think perhaps she’s given the messages now?”

  “Who knows, my dear?” said Ludovic Argent gently.

  Watching Rosamund, whose gaze was turned to the dim outline of the Welsh hills, he knew that he loved her, and told himself that he had always known it.

  Presently he told her.

  “I think I am not capable of any very strong feeling any more,” said Rosamund almost childishly, and half apologetically. “I had to tell Morris that.”

  “You don’t care for him?” he asked quickly.

  “Oh no,” said Rosamund.

  “Then may I try to make you care for me?”

  “Ludovic, I’ll try and explain,” said Rosamund, speaking with difficulty, and using his name for the first time. “It has seemed to me that there is only one way for anyone to learn anything — and that is through caring. Francie’s love for God, whether one thinks it a mistaken sort or not, made her give up everything and go to the convent — as you know. And it nearly broke my heart, because it took her away from me, and I wanted her to be happy in my way and with me. When I went to see her after she’d actually entered I knew that in some way she’d grown up, while I hadn’t — I was still muddling about in chaos, while she’d found a definite anchor. I couldn’t understand, and I felt further away from her than ever before. Then, when I went to the convent when she was ill, and they wouldn’t let me go to her, I understood all she’d given up. You see, for Francie to do or say anything that would hurt me was the greatest sacrifice that she could ever have offered. When I was in the chapel then, I prayed that she might die....

  “It was all such pain and despair as I can’t describe — but afterwards, very slowly, I think I’ve understood a little.

  There is only one thing which counts, and that’s loving — and loving is giving.

  “Frances gave one way — her way — and taught me a very little of what it meant.

  “But my way is not the same as hers.”

  “You are giving the things of the spirit,” said Ludovic.

  “I don’t know,” said Rosamund with a sort of sob “But it’s the only way of feeling that Francie and I are not so very far apart after all.”

  From the garden below came the voices of Hazel’s children, Dickie calling in a shrill, sweet treble.

  Rosamund gave a sudden smile, and then it died from her eyes in a rush of overwhelming loneliness.

  Ludovic’s need was urgent, and he took his advantage.

  “Rosamund,” he said entreatingly.

  Her gaze did not leave the far line of the horizon, but very slowly, without turning her head, she gave him her hand.

  Exeter, June, 1916.

  London, June, 1917.

  THE END

  CONSEQUENCES

  This 1919 novel also concerns a young woman entering a convent. Its heroine, Alex Clare, refuses to marry the only young man to make her an offer of marriage, and, finding herself regarded as a failure by society, must resort to convent life. Though Delafield herself entered a convent for a year, she was able to find freedom through working as a VAD. Alex is not afforded such freedom and her tale ends tragically as a result.

  CONTENTS

  Dedicated to

  Book I

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  Book II

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  Dedicated to

  M.P.P.

  and, in spite of air-raids, to the

  pleasant memory of our winter

  in London, 1917-1918

  Book I

  I

  The Game of Consequences

  The firelight flickered on the nursery wall, and the children sat round the table, learning the new game which the nursery-maid said they would like ever so, directly they understood it.

  “I understand it already,” said Alex, the eldest, tossing her head proudly. “Look, Barbara, you fold the piece of paper like this, and then give it to Cedric, because he’s next to you, and I give mine to you, and Emily gives hers to me. That’s right, isn’t it, Emily?”

  “Quite right, Miss Alex; what a clever girl, to be sure. Here, Master Baby, you can play with me. You’re too little to do it all by yourself.”

  “He isn’t Baby any more. We’ve got to call him Archie now. The new little sister is Baby,” said Alex dictatorially.

  She liked always to be the one to give information, and Emily had only been with them a little while. The children’s own nurse would have told her to mind her own business, or to wait till she was asked, before teaching her grandmother, but Emily said complacently:

  “To be sure, Miss Alex! and such a big boy as Master Archie is, too. Now you all write down a name of a gentleman.”

  “What gentleman?” asked Cedric judicially. He was a little boy of eight, with serious grey eyes and a good deal of dignity.

  “Why, any gentleman. Some one you all know.”

  “I know, I know.”

  Alex, always the most easily excited of them all, scribbled on her piece of paper and began to bounce up and down on her chair.

  “Hurry up, Barbara. You’re so slow.”

  “I don’t know who to put.”

  Alex began to whisper, and Barbara at once said:

  “Nurse doesn’t allow us to whisper. It’s bad manners.”

  “You horrid little prig!”

  Alex was furious. Barbara’s priggishness always put her into a temper, because she felt it, unconsciously, to be a reflection on her own infallibility as the eldest.

  “Miss Barbara,” said Emily angrily, “it’s not for you to say what Nurse allows or doesn’t allow; I’m looking after you now. The idea, indeed!”

  Barbara’s pale, pointed little face grew very red, but she did not cry, as Alex, in spite of her twelve years, would almost certainly have cried at such a snub.

  She set her mouth vindictively and shot a very angry look at Alex out of her blue eyes. Then she wrote something on the slip of paper, shielding it with her hand so that her sister could not read it.

  Cedric was printing in large capitals, easily legible, but no one was interested in what Cedric wrote.

  There was a good deal of whispering between Emily and little Archie, and then the papers were folded up once more and passed round the table again.

  “But when do we see what we’ve written?” asked Alex impatiently.

  “Not till the end of the game, then we read them out. That’s where the fun comes in,” said Emily.

  It was a long while before the papers were done, and most of the children found it very difficult to decide what he said to her, what she replied, and what the world said. But at last even Barbara, always lag-last, folded her slip, very grimy and thumb-marked, and put it with the others into Emily’s apron.

  “Now then,” giggled the nursery-maid, “pull one out, Master Archie, and I’ll see what it says.”

  Archie snatched at
a paper, and they opened it.

  “Listen!” said Emily.

  “The Queen met Master Archie — whoever of you put the Queen?”

  “Cedric!” cried the other children.

  Cedric’s loyalty to his Sovereign was a by-word in the nursery.

  “Well, the Queen met Master Archie in the Park. She said to him, ‘No,’ and he answered her, ‘You dirty little boy, go ‘ome and wash your face.’ Well, if that didn’t ought to be the other way round!”

  “I wish it was me she’d met in the Park,” said Cedric sombrely. “I might have gone back to Buckingham Palace with her and—”

  “Go on, Emily, go on!” cried Alex impatiently. “Don’t listen to Cedric. What comes next?”

  “The consequences was — whatever’s here?” said Emily, pretending an inability to decipher her own writing.

  “Well, I never! The consequences was, a wedding-ring. Whoever went and thought of that now? And the world said—”

  The nursery door opened, and Alex shrieked, “Oh, finish it — quick!”

  She knew instinctively that it was Nurse, and that Nurse would be certain to disapprove of the new game.

  “Don’t you make that noise, Alex,” said Nurse sharply. “You’ll disturb the baby with your screaming.”

  For a moment Alex wondered if the game was to be allowed to proceed, but Barbara, well known to be Nurse’s favourite, must needs say to her in an amiable little voice, such as she never used to her brothers and sister:

  “Emily’s been teaching us such a funny new game, Nurse. Come and play with us.”

  “I’ve no time to play, as you very well know, with all your clothes wanting looking over the way they do,” Nurse told her complacently. “What’s the game?”

  Alex kicked Barbara under the table, but without much hope, and at the same moment Cedric remarked very distinctly:

  “It is called Consequences, and Archie met the Queen in the Park. I wish it had been me instead.”

  “Well!” exclaimed Nurse. “That’s the way you do when my back’s turned, Miss Emily, teaching them such vulgar, nonsensical games as that. Never did I hear — now give me those papers this minute.”