Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “Amico” said Aunt Go, with some seventy in her voice, “you do not sec San Pietro in one visit — nor yet in two, nor perhaps two hundred. Je vous donne rendezvous at the Bronze Door at eleven to-morrow morning. Va bene?”

  Lily looked forward to the proposed excursion and hoped that the Marchese would be as agreeable as was his friend.

  She learnt from Aunt Clo that the name of the latter was Nicholas Aubray, that she had met him first in Paris, several years ago, and had then personally demonstrated to him the beauties of the Louvre.

  “Not altogether a Philistine,” said Aunt Go thoughtfully. “There are possibilities there, my Lily; undoubtedly, possibilities. Cc bon Nicholas! I wonder what he finds in common with Giulio della Torre!”

  Lily wondered too, when she met the Marchese della Torre on the following morning. He looked much younger than did Mr. Aubray, was extremely good looking in an elegant pink-and-bronze style, and was meticulously clad in a beautifully-cut grey suit, with a soft shirt, a pink tie, pink socks, and shining brown boots. Miss Stellenthorpe’s acquaintance with him was slight, she had told her niece, but she addressed him as della Torre, in Continental fashion, and extended the back of her hand for him to kiss. The Marchese also kissed Lily’s hand, and she fancied that she saw amusement lurking in Nicholas Aubray’s long, lean face.

  She had expected that Aunt Clo, as usual, would live up to her role of connoisseuse in Beauty, and would deliver eloquent and pungently-worded dissertations upon the more eclectic subjects for admiration that surrounded them.

  But it speedily became astoundingly evident that Aunt Clo’s erudition was out-matched. Lily and Mr. Aubray, obediently waiting to be told what they might admire, found themselves overlooked in the clash of conflicting authorities. The Marchese gracefully countered all Miss Stellenthorpe’s artistic and historical allusions with others even more recondite, and appeared to have command of ejaculatory phrases in at least six languages to her three.

  “Michelangelo — il maestro!” said Aunt Clo reverently, gazing up at the dome.

  “You forget Bramante!” cried the Marchese in tones of courteous anguish, “Aie! you forget Bramante!”

  “Most certainly I do not forget Bramante,” said Aunt Clo with dignified annoyance. “But I put the Maestro first.”

  The Marchese bowed with a gesture that far outdid, in its appreciative humility, the tone of Aunt Clo’s tribute, through which an undeniable asperity had pierced.

  “E le due San Gallo?” murmured the Marchese.

  “Penuzzi!” Aunt Clo retorted with flashing eyes.

  “Rosellino,” said the Marchese politely, but securing the last word, since Miss Stellenthorpe had nothing ready with which to defeat the recollection of Rosellino.

  “Your aunt is a wonderful person,” said Nicholas Aubray in lowered tones to Lily. “She knows everything about Art, I suppose?”

  “Yes, I suppose she does.”

  “She and della Torre must revel in one another’s company. He’s a most artistic fellow, very well read and full of information. I knew they’d have a lot in common.”

  At the triumph in his tone, Lily turned to look at him. He was evidently not in the least ironical, but full of genuine pride and satisfaction at an encounter which he obviously accepted entirely at its face value.

  Lily felt momentarily ashamed of her own secret inclination to detect a concealed and embittered resentment at the other’s pretensions on the part of either of the two exponents of Art.

  She was half puzzled and half attracted by that characteristic simplicity of Nicholas Aubray’s, that, to her more critical perceptions, was later on to account for his curiously limited capacity to judge correctly of his fellow- creatures, and that so oddly counteracted his unmistakable shrewdness of mind.

  She found in him a very sympathetic companion, as they wandered together round the interior of the immense building, leaving behind them fragmentary echoes of the sprightly Spanish proverbs with which the Marchese appeared to be countering Aunt Clo’s interpolated French exclamations and Latin quotations.

  There was a feeling of relaxation in freely pointing out certain obvious glories and universally acknowledged masterpieces, such as Aunt Go regarded as only to be commented upon by the general public, and Lily felt it to be even more of a relief when Mr. Aubray calmly suggested, at the end of half an hour, that they should go outside and wait for the others.

  “You’ll get tired, if you stand about for so long in the heat,” he observed matter-of-factly, and with a consideration to which she had, at Genazzano, become unused.

  They sat down outside in the shade, and instead of abstract and impassioned discourse upon all that Beauty stood for, Lily found herself embarked upon such trivial and comfortable personalities as she could not help welcoming, after the long course of unbroken conversational altitudes upon which her hostess habitually promenaded her.

  Nicholas Aubray actually seemed to think that anything about herself was interesting!

  She told him about her home and about Bridgecrap, and he laughed whole-heartedly when she confessed that she was no good at games, and seemed to think it of so little account that Lily was encouraged to make a daring confession.

  “Sometimes I read children’s books — just because I enjoy them. It makes me feel as though I was only pretending to be grown up, you know.”

  “Oh, you splendid person! I think that’s simply ripping!”

  “You don’t think I ought to be ashamed of it?” cried Lily, delightedly conscious that he did not.

  “Good heavens, no! I think it’s splendid. Why shouldn’t you like children’s books? I read fairy-tales myself and enjoy them immensely.”

  “Do you really?” Lily was enchanted.

  “Tell me some more about yourself,” begged Nicholas Aubray warmly, and Lily was young enough to respond candidly to the invitation.

  “We must make some more of these expeditions,” was the conclusion reached by Mr. Aubray, when he and Lily had spent an hour in eager conversation eminently satisfactory to them both.

  “I was a good deal bored at having to stay on and on here, excellent fellow though della Torre is, but this meeting with you and your aunt has made all the difference in the world. You’ll conic with me again, won’t you?”

  “Oh, I should love to!”

  “Hurrah!” He looked quite boyishly delighted, and flung his hat into the air and caught it again.

  “Now what about lunch? Food — food! I’m starving!”

  He reiterated the announcement with the same unabashed exuberance to Aunt Clo herself, having returned into the Cathedral, to Lily’s rather awed astonishment, for the express purpose of summoning her away.

  “Come along, come along. We want our meal!”

  He was just as vehemently enthusiastic about their excellent and prolonged luncheon at the Grand Hotel as he had been about St. Peter’s or in denunciation of Lily’s deprecatory confessions of her athletic shortcomings.

  Aunt Clo’s own vitality, to the strength of which she often made carelessly thankful allusion, was as nothing beside that of Nicholas Aubray.

  But to-day, Aunt Clo appeared to have fallen rather below her usual standards of high-spirited graciousness and gallantry of intellect.

  She even said “Ay di me!” in a rather wearied fashion as she sank into a chair.

  “I’m afraid you are quite tired out,” solicitously said the Marchese, in his fluent English idiom.

  “I am not easily wearied of body,” returned Miss Stellenthorpe, smiling sombrely.

  “Food — that’s what we all want!” Nicholas Aubray declared. “I may not always be hungry, but thank God I’m greedy, as the man said in Punch.”

  He laughed heartily at the hackneyed jest, and Lily noted with a slight feeling of disappointment that his laugh was perhaps the least attractive thing about him. It came too frequently, although always spontaneously, and was what the French call saccade in character. Moreover, his laughter at his own
indifferent humour, rooted more often in light-heartedness than in wit, was overprolonged.

  An adjournment for rest at the Palazzo della Torre was politely suggested by the Marchese, and Lily rather hoped that the invitation might be accepted, but Miss Stellenthorpe again gravely repudiated any suggestion of fatigue.

  “But you make the siesta, surely?” cried the Marchese, astonished.

  “Never,” said Aunt Clo austerely.

  The stately proclamation of her own immunity from the prevalent custom of an afternoon sleep during the hot weather, appeared somehow to restore to Aunt Clo her usual equanimity.

  She bade an agreeable farewell to the two men, by whom an expedition to Frascati was proposed for the following week.

  “We’ll make a picnic of it,” cried Nicholas Aubray joyously. “Take plenty of sandwiches and things, and eat them under the trees.”

  But even Nicholas Aubray’s needless insistence upon the grosser aspects of the day’s requirements did not, as Lily half feared, cause Miss Stellenthorpe to flinch.

  “I’m glad,” said she graciously that evening at Genazzano, “very glad to do all in my power pour égayer un peu les choses for Nicholas Aubray. Tell me, my Lily, how did our friend strike you?”

  “I liked him very much.”

  “Liked!” Aunt Clo shrugged away the conventional phrase in her most characteristic fashion.

  “How significant that contrast was, nest-ce pas? The frankly bourgeois enthusiasm of our friend — his naif admiration for the obvious — and then that affectation of preciseness, that pedantic effrontery of young della Torre! It amused me, Lily — it amused me greatly.”

  Aunt Clo’s mouth took on an embittered curve at the recollection.

  “Let me recommend you to cultivate that young man rather more, bambino, when next our quartette sallies forth in company. He repays study, I assure you. Besides,” added Aunt Go with some acidity of tone, “I will not conceal from you that a whole day spent in listening to so much youthful arrogance would try my nerves considerably. He is your contemporary, my Lily. I shall leave you to deal with him.”

  Lily felt vaguely sorry to hear it.

  “He is much younger than Mr. Aubray, isn’t he?” she asked.

  “By at least ten years, I should imagine,” said her aunt emphatically. “Nicholas Aubray must be nearing forty. But the heart of a boy still. Ce cher Nicholas! He should have married, as I have often told him. Now della Torre, who could well learn rather more of life in the wider, bigger sense of the word, is actually in search of a wife, as I know. But fools have ever rushed in—”

  Aunt Clo ended with raised eyebrows and a sigh, leaving no doubt, in Lily’s mind, that her own destined role in the Frascati expedition was that of recipient of the Marchese’s polished conversation.

  Perhaps her efforts were not sufficiently decided.

  Perhaps Nicholas Aubray, with a certain joyful obtuseness that he was disconcertingly apt to display when dealing with the human equation, still triumphantly furthered the intercourse of the two fine spirits between whom he had elected to find so rare an affinity. Perhaps, as Lily herself suspected, the Marchese liked a youthful and ignorant hearer less well than one with whom discussion was at least possible, even if unprofitable. At all events, he explained Frascati to Miss Stellenthorpe, and twice informed her that she had been misinformed regarding the remote ancestry of the family of Aldobrandini, while Lily and Nicholas Aubray loitered beneath the trees, and Nicholas told Lily that he lived by himself in London and was often very lonely.

  “But to you, I suppose, I seem almost old. Too old to want new friends?” he asked her with a wistful air of desiring contradiction, and at the same time throwing out his broad chest and straightening his always straight shoulders with obviously unconscious vanity.

  Lily remembered her father. He was over fifty, and she certainly did not look upon him as being old, if only because she knew that he would have regarded the application of such an adjective from a child to a parent as being both disrespectful and disloyal.

  Nicholas Aubray was at least twelve years younger than Philip Stellenthorpe.

  She reassured him whole-heartedly and was gratified at the satisfaction in his face, which he displayed with the frankness of a child.

  “I thought you and I would be pals, somehow, from the first moment we met. Don’t you think it’s a great thing to have a pal?”

  Lily felt herself to be unreasonable for intensely disliking the word that he had selected.

  “That’s a word I like — pal!” said Nicholas Aubray, striking one hand into the palm of the other. “Isn’t it a splendid, hearty sort of word? That’s what I should really like us to be — regular pals.”

  There was silence between them for the fraction of a moment, and then he added wistfully: “You don’t think it’s cheek of me to suggest it — you don’t think it’s absurd, at my age?”

  On the instant, his odd, intermittent appeal made itself acutely felt once more.

  “I should like it,” said Lily, flushing. “I — I think it’s an honour for me.”

  “No, no — it’s all the other way round. What a splendid thing life is! Don’t you think it’s splendid, on a day like this, when one’s just struck a bargain like ours? Real pals — that’s what you and I are going to lie. I can’t tell you how much it’s going to mean to me. Of course, you’ve got heaps of friends of your own age already I suppose. Perhaps there’s even—”

  He paused.

  “I haven’t any business to ask, I suppose. But since we’re to be pals, you won’t mind. You know I’m not asking from impertinent curiosity, but from very keen interest in anything that belongs to you.” His voice had become very serious.

  “Tell me whether there’s anybody very special, that you take a — a great interest in, won’t you?”

  “No, there isn’t,” said Lily in a low voice. She did not feel humiliated by the unromantic admission, because she was acutely aware that it would somehow intensely gratify her listener.

  She heard him exhale a long breath.

  “Do you know that’s a relief to me! I was somehow certain you were going to say that there was some young spark — and somehow I didn’t want there to be.”

  He burst out laughing.

  “There’s no fool like an old fool, is there? I want my new-found little pal to myself, you know. I don’t want to share her thoughts with some young blood at Oxford or God knows where—”

  He went on laughing, in catches, long after Lily felt that her own faint smile had died upon her lips.

  X

  Lily thought a good deal about her friendship with Nicholas Aubray.

  Sometimes she rejoiced almost incredulously in his flashes of sympathetic understanding, and in the frank enjoyment of childlike things that he, unlike her, never thought it necessary to conceal. Sometimes she applied to herself the old term of “disloyal,” because an involuntary criticism of his simple vanity, or of his curiously unequal powers of judgment, occasionally flashed across her.

  She was flattered and touched by his enthusiastic liking for herself, and presently she began to wonder, rather awestruck, whether he could have fallen in love with her.

  When she suddenly found him looking at her in silence with eager, pleading eyes, or when he said: “We’ll let the others go on a bit, let’s walk slowly,” she was reminded of the boy Colin Eastwood, and she then thought that perhaps Nicholas Aubray loved her. When Aunt Clo said, in her thoughtful, appraising way: “My very good friend, Nicholas, is accounted an able man in his own line. He has made a success of his career — oh, undoubtedly!” then Lily felt that only an incredible presumption could ever have led her to imagine that so clever a man and one so much her senior, could ever have thought of her save with the most passing, friendly interest.

  His susceptibility to beauty was very evident, and he made it clear that he admired Lily’s.

  That, of course, was not at all the same thing as falling in love, Lily told
herself.

  She speculated a great deal more upon the state of Nicholas Aubray’s feelings, than upon her own. One of the more solemn counsels which Lily had received from Miss Melody upon leaving Bridgecrap, had concerned the question of falling in love.

  “Not too many romantic fancies in that little head, childie,” had been Miss Melody’s warning. “Remember that you’ve no mother to guide you, poor child, and keep a watch upon yourself. Not too much novel-reading — aha, Lily, isn’t that a weakness? — and no day-dreaming, mind.”

  Lily had been quite as much annoyed at hearing herself called romantic as the romantic usually are.

  “If love should come — as I hope it will, in due course — let it all come quite naturally. Don’t think about it beforehand; don’t indulge in fancies. Beware of that romantic imagination,” Miss Melody had repeated with great significance.

  Lily had listened very dutifully, but if she had ever analyzed this submissive spirit, she might have discovered that it was founded upon a curious, calm certainty that Miss Melody knew nothing whatever of what she talked about.

  Not that the daughter of Philip and Eleanor Stellenthorpe, well versed in distrusting and suppressing her own instincts, would have made such an admission to herself. She was undeveloped, and had never been allowed the luxury of intellectual honesty.

  She had, as yet, arrived at no conscious weighing of her own capacities. Her nearest approach to it took the form of an inward and rather derisive wonder that Miss Melody, who so advocated forethought and preparation in respect of examinations, choice of a career, and the like, should appear to suppose that something which Lily classified to herself as “the most important thing in the world” could be best approached after a course of completely ignoring its existence and tacitly denying its potency’.

  In defiance of Miss Melody, Lily allowed herself to wonder whether Nicholas meant to ask her to marry him. Her upbringing and her inexperience alike admitted of no other development of affairs than a proposal of marriage, to result in either a refusal and eternal separation, or an acceptance and subsequent wedding.