Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  So the analogy of the French Revolution didn’t hold good after all, thought Cliffe, rather dazed. That wasn’t the way things were done by the children of to-day. He was surprised, relieved, and faintly, irrationally, shocked at methods so different from those that he had deplored and resented through so many years.

  Sophie and Lucien, he supposed, represented the swing of the pendulum.

  But his mind, long accustomed to move in certain well-worn grooves, asked in astonishment whether the age-old passions of which the tears, the words, the reckless comings and goings of the Candi-Laquerriéres had been the outward form of expression, had become strangely chilled in transmission to another generation — whether Sophie and Lucien, so young and cool, were merely incapable of emotion.

  He felt, humbly, that he could not tell.

  He did not even know whether he admired their detachment or was disappointed by it.

  The thought crossed his mind — without lingering there, for introspection had had no place, ever, in the uncomplicated make-up of Cliffe Montgomery — that had a similar restraint prevailed amongst his contemporaries, existence — his own existence, particularly — would have been simplified.

  The many tears that he had seen shed; the incredible number of words that he had heard spoken; the long, long letters that he had been forced to decipher; the reconciliations, the furious disputes, the journeys, the telegrams, the emotional wear and tear of it all.... Had all of it, really, been avoidable?

  He looked at Sophie. She did not, he thought, appear very unhappy.

  “You’ll come over before you go away, then?” he asked diffidently.

  “I’m sure I can. Yes. I’ll ask Lucien this evening. He’s been out with Mr. King all day. He’ll bring me over.”

  “Then she’s not — you haven’t been prevented—”

  “No,” said Sophie. “You see, if I leave for Scotland next week and Lucien goes abroad quite soon — mummie’s arranging something like that — I don’t think she’ll mind very much what we do for the next day or two.”

  Even Clarissa, then, was less thorough-going than the tyrants of a bygone age. Perhaps, thought Montgomery, she could afford to be rather less than thorough-going because there was nothing very ardent and desperate for her to contend against. Sophie and Lucien would submit, he supposed, for lack of emotional energy to resist.

  It was with a vague sense of anticlimax that Cliffe returned to “Anarajapurah”, where the Princesse, wild-eyed and agitated, demanded news, as though of one newly returned from a cataclysm.

  XIX

  “THAT WILL DO, FITZMAURICE”

  “HE has failed, utterly failed,” said the Princesse. It was natural to her to word things as melodramatically as possible.

  “Ce bon monsieur Cliffe” muttered Catiche, half under her breath. It was at once an excuse for Cliffe Montgomery, and a tacit intimation that Catiche, for her part, had expected nothing else of him.

  “I must do something. I would lay down my life,” said the Princesse, rather abstractedly; for she was always ready to lay down her life, and she had learnt from experience that nobody ever wanted her to do so. Still, the phrase comforted here vaguely, because it was desperate and full of finality.

  “I could go up to London with Radow, of course. Or I could go to Mardale myself.”

  The eyes of the Princesse glittered.

  “Perhaps that’s what I ought to have done, Catiche, instead of sending poor Cliffe Montgomery. What time is it?”

  She glanced feverishly round the bedroom, where traces of her own strange personality — books, and an ivory rosary, and a quantity of photographs in shabby frames, and untidy heaps of black lace, and white woollen scarves — lay scattered over the permanent impress left by Miss Silver.

  “It is midnight,” said Catiche austerely, and without looking at any clock or watch.

  “Then to-night is too late,” the Princesse said, like a disappointed child.

  “Much too late,” Catiche agreed.

  “Not that I imagine they keep early hours at Mardale.”

  Catiche made no reply, but there was disapproval in the look that she bent upon the Princesse.

  “Catiche!” cried the Princesse in tones of deep reproof.

  Catiche, maintaining her inexorable silence, folded up clothes and put them away.

  “Good night,” said the Princesse haughtily.

  “Good night.”

  The old woman went to the door, moving noiselessly as usual in her black list slippers, carrying her old-fashioned flat candlestick.

  “Catiche!”

  Without turning round, she stopped.

  “Catiche!” repeated the Princesse pleadingly.

  “Well, well,” said the old woman. She went back, after carefully placing the candlestick on a table near the door.

  The Princesse sat before the looking-glass, her fine, scanty dark hair hanging round her shoulders.

  Catiche bent over her, and traced with her thumb the sign of the cross on the uplifted forehead of her pupil of more than fifty years ago.

  The nights had been few, indeed, when she had not bestowed that inaudible blessing with its muttered formula.

  The Princesse gently kissed the desiccated old hand, holding it in her own.

  “We must help Sophie to be happier than poor little Aldegonde,” she murmured imploringly.

  “Happiness—” Catiche grumbled unbelievingly between her teeth.

  “Certainly, you wicked, cynical old woman. Why shouldn’t Lucien make her happy?”

  “Now, perhaps, when they’re young. But afterwards. What about that?”

  “None of us can foresee the future. We can but do as seems best at the moment, and leave the afterwards to take care of itself,” piously remarked the Princesse, uttering unaware one of the sentiments most deeply disapproved of — and with reason — by Cliffe Montgomery.

  “First love never lasts.”

  “Neither does any other,” returned the Princesse, with a sigh. “But first love is the most worth having, all the same. I shall help Sophie and Lucien.”

  “Very well. But not till to-morrow,” stipulated Catiche.

  “Not till to-morrow,” the Princesse repeated submissively. “Bonsoir, ma vieille.”

  Like a shadow, Catiche slipped out of the room.

  The Princesse, forgetting that Miss Silver’s admirable bed waited to receive her, sat on in front of the mirror, revolving strange schemes that involved interviews and sudden departures, and desperate expedients for raising improbable sums of money.

  She was still lost in thought when at last she laid her head on the pillow.

  Alberta, next morning, came to her mother’s room with the slenderly furnished breakfast tray that was always brought to the Princesse upstairs, usually by Catiche.

  “Thank you, my precious,” effusively said the Princesse, who never remembered in time that endearments were detested by her daughter.

  Alberta frowned heavily.

  “Raoul wants to go to London to-morrow. Lawrence has written to him.”

  “Of course, he must go.” The Princesse was immediately sympathetic. “Naturally. Why didn’t Lawrence wire for him?”

  “Something to do with a possible concert engagement.”

  “I see. It’s a pity he won’t be here for the party.”

  “The party?”

  “Elinor Fish is giving a party.”

  “Oh,” said Alberta, with gloomy indifference, “Elinor Fish. I think I shall go up to London with Raoul.”

  This time the Princesse did not ask why. A tragic shadow fell across her face.

  “I can’t stay here for ever,” Alberta exclaimed, with a schoolgirl petulance that sat inappropriately on her haggard maturity.

  “I know,” said the Princesse, “that I can never expect you to be content for more than five minutes in the society of your mother.”

  “Five minutes! A whole summer,” bitterly ejaculated Alberta.

  The dialo
gue pursued familiar lines. It had passed between them many times through the years. Beneath high, painted ceilings, between the narrow walls of hired houses, or the spacious ones of an occasional palace, their mutual reproaches had resounded. The one was as incapable as the other of dispassionate judgment. Only Alberta, since her definite breaking away from the possessiveness of her mother, seemed able to afford an occasional concession, that took the negative form of substituting silence for the torment of speech.

  The Princesse was in tears, and Alberta pale and shaking, when Catiche at length interrupted them. As was her custom, she said nothing, but eyed them both with remote disapproval.

  Alberta left the room.

  “She is going away again, Catiche.”

  “I thought so,” muttered Catiche resentfully.

  The Princesse broke into a torrent of speech, mingled with tears. It seemed to relieve her, although she received no reply to any of it from Catiche beyond a sound or two, expressive of inarticulate disagreement.

  More than anything else, the Princesse was cheered by the dramatization, in the course of the morning, of Raoul Radow’s approaching departure. He shared her own tendency to elaborate farewells, and they exchanged reminiscences, auguries for the future, and short speeches mutually complimentary, until interrupted by Miss Fish, who had come up to say good-bye.

  “I shall come and hear you play in London — at the Albert Hall,” she observed optimistically. “Yes?”

  “I wish you could have stayed for our little party — Olivia’s and mine.”

  “It is when?”

  “Saturday.”

  “Too late,” said Radow, shaking his head. “Perhaps,” said Miss Fish, with thoughtful determination, “we could have it earlier. Why not to-night?”

  “Why,” said the Princesse, her eyes shining, “should you not put off the party until next week, and then Raoul come down for it?”

  “All the way from London?” cried Miss Fish, so genuinely scandalized by the idea as completely to forget her cherished conviction that she was as unconventional as any professional musician could possibly be. —

  “Yes, yes. By that time,” said the Princesse wildly, “there may be an occasion to celebrate.”

  “What?” demanded Miss Fish challengingly. The Princesse only shook her head.

  It was later on, when Radow had drifted away to an imaginary packing that would in reality be performed by Catiche, and when Alberta was sombrely detailing a vague but extensive programme of work and travel to Cliffe Montgomery, that she took Elinor into her confidence.

  “I am going to Mardale,” said the Princesse. “To see Mrs. Fitzmaurice?”

  “To try and arrange matters for Lucien and poor little Sophie.”

  “If anybody in the world can do it, you can,” excitedly proclaimed Miss Fish, who knew nothing whatever about it, but had attached herself with whole-hearted enthusiasm to the Princesse.

  Nothing further was needed.

  “Come with me,” earnestly said the Princesse.

  “But your daughter — ?”

  “No.”

  “Mr. Montgomery?”

  “He would not approve. I shall not tell him that I am going.”

  “If you really want me?” murmured Miss Fish, infinitely flattered.

  “Yes, yes, I do. If you will order a car to be at the bottom of the hill, say, at two o’clock, I will meet you there.”

  “But hadn’t I better drive up and fetch — no, no, just as you like,” hastily added Elinor, replying to something in the eye of the Princesse.

  At two o’clock Miss Fish, feeling, and indeed looking, like a conspirator, was striding up and down the lane, beside Harry King’s car that she had commandeered, rather than borrowed, for the occasion.

  The Princesse did not keep her waiting more than twenty minutes.

  She appeared, walking very slowly, but at the same time contriving to diffuse an atmosphere of intense urgency.

  “I have got Harry’s car,” announced Miss Fish. “I shall drive you myself.”

  “Thank you,” murmured the Princesse, eyeing Elinor and the car with some mistrust. “I prefer to go slowly,” she added, taking her seat.

  “So you shall, so you shall. I perfectly understand. Olivia is the same,” said Miss Fish — and might well have added that almost all her friends and acquaintances were also the same, for she was not the kind of driver that inspires confidence. It was not that one doubted her mastery of the machine; it was rather that in the enthusiasm of her conversation, she was apt to turn and look full at her companion, whilst still continuing to maintain a steady thirty miles an hour along the road.

  Fortunately for the Princesse, her conversational powers were entirely equal to those of Miss Fish, and her low, gentle voice quite as unceasing as Elinor’s much louder one. Neither listened very much, but both arrived in a state of mutual satisfaction at Mardale.

  “I will wait at the gate,” said Elinor heroically. “No, no — I expected nothing else. You want to talk to Mrs. Fitzmaurice.”

  The Princesse, however, entering the house alone, did not ask for Mrs. Fitzmaurice, but for her husband.

  “It is a matter of business, and I need not detain him very long.”

  She was accordingly shown into Fitzmaurice’s inappropriately named study, and there a moment later he joined her, wearing an expression of unbounded astonishment.

  “Ah, Fitzmaurice!” said the Princesse, and omitted any further form of salutation.

  “I didn’t expect — Have you seen Clarissa?” precipitately demanded Fitzmaurice, with his habitual instinct for hiding behind somebody else. “Certainly not. My business is with you.”

  “Is it?” said Fitzmaurice gloomily. “Won’t you sit down, and will you have anything to drink?”

  “No, thank you. I want to speak to you about my granddaughter.”

  “Sophia?”

  “Certainly, Sophie — and Lucien Marley.”

  “Oh, Lucien Marley,” repeated Fitzmaurice in a thoughtful tone, opening and shutting the lid of the glass ink-well on the table and not looking at his visitor.

  “The whole thing can be said in one word,” untruly stated the Princesse.

  “That’s good,” heartily ejaculated her host. “There is no reason in the world why they shouldn’t marry, and every reason why they should.”

  “There’s Clarissa — if you call her a reason. And, of course, the money—”

  “I know all about the money, Fitzmaurice. But if once she agreed to the marriage, there would be no difficulty about the money, would there? If Lucien marries with his mother’s consent, isn’t he to live at Mardale and get a certain income?”

  “That’s the arrangement. But she won’t give her consent unless it’s a marriage she approves of, naturally. Why should she, you know?”

  “There is no reason why she should disapprove of this marriage. Sophie is young and healthy and good and pretty, and as far as birth goes—”

  The Princesse paused expressively.

  “Quite,” said Fitzmaurice, with a renewed attack on the lid of the ink-well. “But Clarissa has always bossed the show, and always intends to, especially where Lucien is concerned. And if she doesn’t approve of a thing — well, she doesn’t approve of it, and nobody can make her.”

  “Nobody but you,” gently said the Princesse.

  Fitzmaurice was so much astonished that he raised his eyes and met hers in full before returning to the ink-well.

  “Why me?”

  “Because, Fitzmaurice, you are the only person for whom she has any affection — if we except Lucien — though really I’m not sure. That, however, is neither here nor there. What I really came to say is that you must tell Clarissa that you wish for this marriage, and you must make her agree to it.”

  “I’ve already turned that idea down, when old Cliffy appeared the other day and began to prate about my influence with Clarissa. My God, my influence with Clarissa — !”

  “Fitzmauric
e,” the Princesse began smoothly, “you and I know one another well of old....” Her pause held endless implications and memories that involved them both, and Fitzmaurice wrenched violently at the lid of the ink-well.

  “Do not tell me, for one moment, that a man of your type cannot obtain whatever he wants from a woman who is still in love with him. Clarissa — God knows why — is still in love with you. I have no doubt that you treat her abominably.”

  “Why should you—”

  “That is not my concern. But you must remember that you and I have had dealings more than once. Nothing about you could surprise me now.”

  “Nor me about you, if we’re going in for home-truths,” Fitzmaurice interjected.

  “Then,” returned the Princesse, “it will be so much the easier for you to listen to the proposal I am going to make. Tell me, Fitzmaurice — you are entirely dependent on your wife, I suppose?”

  “Lord, yes, and I can tell you it’s no joke, either—”

  “Very probably not. Therefore, I propose to make over to you a small income — about three hundred a year — to continue after my death, on the condition that you arrange this marriage between Sophie and Lucien at once. Pray, Fitzmaurice, make me no speech at all. We understand one another.”

  It seemed, indeed, that they did.

  Fitzmaurice, as though petrified, at last released the ink-well, and stared into the enormous, unwavering dark eyes bent upon him.

  “But you haven’t any money,” he remarked at last, with simplicity.

  “I have now,” the Princesse answered, with equal simplicity. “You remember the procés that went on so long? Judgment was given in my favour in the end. I made a third of the capital over to Alberta at once, and poor Radow had what would have been Aldegonde’s share. And Cliffe Montgomery invested the remainder, and I let him because I couldn’t think of anything better to suggest at the moment. I intended to leave it to Sophie — and you can still do that with the principal when it comes to you eventually.”

  “This isn’t business, you know. Besides, what are you going to live on yourself?”