Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  She dominated him, adored him, did her best to spoil him completely. She had a little love left to spare for Lucy, but not enough for his individuality to suffer from her possessiveness.

  As for Fanny, born five years after Lucy, Cecilia viewed her undesired arrival with candid dismay.

  She hadn’t wanted another child.

  She had never wanted a girl at all.

  The boys were good-looking, especially in early childhood, dark like their father, on a big, largeboned scale, yet both of them supple and graceful. Fred had the great dark eyes of his father, Lucy the light, brilliant hazel ones of his mother. Fanny, larger and darker than either of them, had an underlying yellow beneath her sallow skin, a yellow tinge even on the whites of her eyeballs, and was neither supple nor graceful. She was merely a heavy, solemn-looking child, lethargic of mind and body alike, a rarely displayed but quite unconquerable obstinacy her only marked claim to any individuality of her own.

  The boys were eight and seven years old, and Fanny nearly three, when Frederic Lemprière, at forty-two, fell an easy victim to one of the frequent epidemics of fever that, in the Barbados of the ‘seventies, were the inevitable outcome of tropical heat, tainted water and lack of indoor ventilation.

  Continual recourse to fresh rum had discounted Frederic’s least chance of recovery, and his illness lasted barely a week.

  The uncle and aunt at Brighton urged Cecilia to return to England with her children, the aunt unfortunately writing her a letter to the effect that it was surely time the little ones should be brought up in a Christian civilization — and the uncle pointing out that a woman could not manage a sugar plantation and that Cecilia must therefore instruct her late husband’s overseer to sell it as soon as possible.

  Cecilia sent for John Newton, whom everybody called Johnny Newton, a yellow, monkey-faced, loose-limbed fellow still in his early forties.

  “Johnny, I suppose you’ve really been running the plantation for years, haven’t you?”

  “Ever since I came out and took over from my uncle, twenty-two years ago.”

  “You’ll go on, of course.”

  Johnny, who had never expected anything else, nodded.

  “I’ll keep things going all right till young Fred’s a bit older.”

  “That’s just it, Johnny. You know we talked of sending the boys home to be educated, anyway?”

  Johnny nodded again.

  He knew that Cecilia had violently resented the mere thought of parting from Fred, and had threatened that if her husband would not agree to go and live in England for five years at least, she should go alone with the children.

  Johnny fixed his heavy, pouched eyes on Cecilia’s handsome, haughty face.

  “Yes, ma’am?” he said with an interrogative inflection. He always called her so, pronouncing the word in the old-fashioned way, Marm, as a compromise between the formality of saying “Mrs. Lemprière” — to the wife of his late cousin Frederic, and the familiarity of “Cecilia” that, in spite of assurances to the contrary, he chose to consider unsuitable to his position as employee.

  “Well,” said Cecilia, playing with the black frillings of her heavy crape, “I don’t intend to sell. I don’t even intend to live in England. But I shall take the boys over there, and find a good school for them.”

  (She omitted to mention Fanny, whose existence she had for the moment forgotten.)

  “I may even make my home over there for a few years. But I shall come backwards and forwards — after all, what’s sixteen days? It’s only that, by the Harrison Line. And I know you’ll look after our interests properly. As soon as Fred’s older, we can come back to live. I suppose I can let this house, meanwhile.”

  “It’s a nice house,” said Johnny. “Where do you think of living at home?”

  “I only know London, where I was at school, and Brighton, where I stayed with my uncle and aunt. I don’t think I should like either of those. The country would be nice, for the boys. Somewhere that isn’t too cold.”

  “Why don’t you try South Wales? It isn’t cold there, and you’d have Joe at hand.”

  Johnny’s brother, Joe Newton, was the lawyer who had charge of the Lemprière affairs. He practised as a solicitor in Lydney and lived in a small house on the outskirts of Chepstow.

  “That’s a very good suggestion,” declared Cecilia, who hadn’t the least idea where she wanted to go, and cared only to show her uncle and aunt — especially her aunt — that she intended to be independent.

  “Could your brother find me a house, do you think? I’d like to have somewhere to go to as soon as we arrive.”

  “I’ll write to Joe next mail. What kind of a house?”

  Cecilia reflected for the space of about five seconds and then spoke with the decided air of one who had long ago pondered the whole subject and reached a well-weighed decision.

  “In the country, with a garden, and I should like to be somewhere near your brother. I remember poor Frederic telling me how he spent holidays with your father and mother when he was a schoolboy, and how much he liked being there.”

  The Newtons were distant, and comparatively poor, cousins of the Lempriére family.

  “Joe could find you a house, I expect. What you want is a furnished place, on a short lease. Then if you don’t like it you needn’t stay there.”

  “With a garden, for the boys. Not large.”

  “The Wye Valley is full of houses that aren’t large and have gardens, and Joe knows all about all of them.”

  “I think poor Frederic would have liked to think of our going there,” said Cecilia thoughtfully.

  Johnny gazed at her reflectively. He saw that all she really cared about, so far as any house in Wales was concerned, was to be saved all trouble.

  “You’d better let me see about it, ma’am, and Joe. He’s on the spot, and he’s poor Frederic’s executor besides. Shall I write to Joe and tell him to send us full particulars of any suitable houses? Then, if necessary, we can cable instructions.”

  “That will do very well,” said Cecilia. She was a woman whose calm confidence in herself and her judgments concealed from herself and from most other people the fact that all her decisions were made upon impulse and on emotional, not on rational, grounds.

  Johnny Newton only realized that she was an unbusiness-like woman — which was what he always expected any woman to be — but not at all a stupid one.

  Sooner or later, and probably sooner, men would want to marry her, attracted by her fortune, her good looks, and a latent strength of character that at present manifested itself principally in her management of her children.

  It was Johnny’s opinion that Frederic had never awakened Cecilia to passion, but that a stronger man might well do so, all the more successfully because she was no longer in her first youth.

  He told himself sardonically that he didn’t envy Joe the job that would probably fall to his share, of preventing Cecilia from throwing away her own money and what she could touch of her children’s, on the first fortune-hunter who should succeed in attracting her seriously. He hoped it would be someone who would be kind to the children.

  The only expression that his thoughts found aloud, was an assurance to Cecilia that he and Joe would always do their best for her.

  Cecilia thanked him politely, although without warmth. She was accustomed to taking it for granted that people should do their best for her, and Frederic Lempriére had quite insensibly imparted to her his own conviction, and that of his father before him, that any Newton must be only too glad to work for any Lemprière.

  And indeed it had hitherto been true.

  2

  Cecilia might be autocratic, but she had not lived ten years in Barbados, and with Frederic Lemprière, without becoming well inured to delay.

  The most suitable house reported by Joe to be available could not be made ready for immediate occupation. There was business to be transacted, both in Bridgetown and at home, connected with Frederic’s estate and Cecili
a’s own marriage settlement.

  Johnny Newton in Barbados and Joe Newton in Monmouthshire worked together by correspondence, and bundles of yellowed paper, tied with pink tape, passed from one to the other. Each was patiently explained to Cecilia by Johnny, who knew as well as possible that she neither understood nor even wished to understand anything at all except where it was necessary for her to sign her name, and even then she sometimes signed it in the wrong place.

  Her grief for Frederic was a superficial emotion. She had been shocked by the suddenness of his death, dismayed at the thought of no longer having a man to take charge of the unavoidable practical details of everyday life, and conventionally saddened at finding herself a widow at the age of thirty-eight.

  There was no insincerity in Cecilia. She was inherently incapable of self-criticism and she never thought of herself as inadequate, or even mistaken. Thus she felt that it was very sad she should be a widow, but it did not seem to her sad that her children should be fatherless. She felt that, whilst they had her, they could need no one else.

  Frederic had been dead nearly six months when Cecilia, the two little boys and their sister, all of them heavily be-craped, were taken down to the docks by Johnny Newton and left upon the liner where Cecilia’s negress was already seated on a pile of luggage, weeping forlornly, although she was to return by the next boat.

  “Goodbye, Johnny. Thank you very much for all you’ve done,” said Cecilia primly.

  “Goodbye, ma’am. You shall hear from me regularly, and old Joe will look after you. He’ll do anything he can, and if there’s anything I can — —” He paused.

  “Thank you very much,” repeated Cecilia. “I hope to come back again, you know, to — to see to things. As soon as I’ve arranged about the children.”

  “I hope so, ma’am,” said Johnny dutifully.

  He stooped and kissed the two dark little boys, one clinging on either side of their mother’s spreading skirts, and would have saluted Fanny likewise, but she turned away her face and shrugged one shoulder at him.

  Cecilia gave him her hand and he took it gravely and awkwardly. “Goodbye, ma’am.”

  “Goodbye. You will see that poor Frederic’s resting-place is properly cared for?”

  Johnny nodded.

  He had already given her his promise to do so several times.

  As he left the steamer, he was unable to prevent a sigh that held more of relief than regret. He would still miss Frederic, but Cecilia without Frederic would be better at home, where her relations could look after her and do their best to keep her from spoiling the boys, and where some man would no doubt marry her and, if he had property of his own in England, thankfully leave the Lemprière plantations to Johnny’s experienced care.

  3

  The house that Joe Newton had taken for Cecilia on a yearly tenancy was a stone-built villa of medium size half-way up a hill, a few miles out of Chepstow on the Monmouth side.

  It was unimaginatively called The Rise.

  Cecilia, after a brief and unenthusiastic visit to her Brighton uncle and aunt, went there with the children, and a nurse whom she had engaged in London.

  Joe Newton’s wife, on instructions from Johnny via Joe, had engaged for her three women servants, a knife-boy-and a gardener.

  Cecilia found Joe Newton as anxious to serve her as his brother had been. Indeed, she often had the oddest sensation of not being quite certain whether it was Joe or Johnny to whom she was now continually appealing for help.

  The two brothers were not only very much alike in appearance — although Joe resembled a grey monkey more than a yellow one — they had very similar mannerisms and voices.

  This was the odder as they had not met for nearly twenty-three years.

  “How’s old Johnny?” Joe said. “A good deal altered, I daresay, since I last saw him. It’s a funny thing, we were like twins as youngsters — used to be called the Inseparables — and yet I don’t suppose old Johnny and I would know one another now if we met in the street. Funny, that is, when you come to think of it.”

  Joe always ended with a hearty laugh, as though he really did find something very humorous in the idea.

  He and his wife rendered every service in their power to Cecilia. Mrs. Joe was a small, hard-faced woman, of better birth than her husband and related to several of the oldest families in South Wales.

  She introduced Cecilia to most of the society within reach, but owing to her deep mourning Cecilia did nothing beyond exchanging cards with such of the houses — there were not many of them — as were within a drive.

  Joe had found her two quiet carriage horses, a pony for the little boys and a coachman who would teach them to ride.

  “But they’ll be going to school directly, or at least Fred will,” said Joe, faithfully adhering to instructions repeatedly written to him by Johnny from Barbados.

  “Yes, of course,” always replied Cecilia, but never did anything about it.

  The children were delighted with the new life. Even Fanny acquired a small degree of animation as she rolled about on the lawn amongst the daisies, in early summer.

  Fred never left his mother’s side. She rode with him, walked with him in the woods, took him out in the carriage and taught him to play easy accompaniments for her when she sang, in a rather pretty soprano voice with a good many mannerisms acquired from the singing master of her Brighton days.

  Music, for which he had a natural facility, appeared to be Fred’s chief talent. He was backward in learning to read, in spite of ten minutes spent daily at Cecilia’s knee with My First Spelling Book, and took no interest in the carpentering lessons that Joe Newton offered to give both the boys. But he quickly learned to throw a cricket-ball, and could also play an excellent game of croquet.

  His devotion to his widowed mother was held by all those who saw them together to be a very beautiful and touching thing.

  Cecilia was, in fact, seldom to be met with anywhere without one or both boys.

  Lucy, however, was less dear to her than Fred. He was not as precocious as his brother, conversationally, but had learnt his letters long before Fred and was often to be found with a book.

  Unlike Fred, he showed a marked degree of manual dexterity, spent a great deal of time in Joe Newton’s workshop, and asked for a set of carpenter’s tools for his birthday present. He took more notice of Fanny than did anyone else in the house, for even Nana seemed to find it impossible to be enthusiastic about her charge.

  Lucy was not enthusiastic either, but he often sat watching Fanny in the periodic struggles between her and Nana as to whether she would, or would not, say Ta when told to do so.

  Fanny could say Ta, as everyone in the nursery knew, but had long, tremendous fits of obstinacy in which neither threats, bribes, scoldings nor even slappings would induce her to utter.

  “Baby is a naughty, naughty girl,” she was indignantly informed by Nana.

  Fanny’s huge black eyes looked up solemnly and unwinkingly at the nurse.

  She was four years old, and it might almost have been thought that she was mentally deficient. Whether her refusal to speak was inability or unwillingness had never been clearly determined. Nana sometimes said that the child was wanting and it wasn’t any good trying to force her, and then, when she had tried to force her — without success — that it was pure, sheer devilment.

  Cecilia, indifferent as she always was to anything that concerned Fanny, remained practically unaware of her state of retarded development, except that she referred to it from time to time in order to exemplify the immeasurably greater powers of Fred or Lucy at the same age.

  “Really, Cecilia,” said the childless Mrs. Joe Newton indignantly, “I think the way you treat poor little Fanny is quite wicked. Anybody would think you didn’t care for your own child.”

  Cecilia remained unmoved by the reproach. She simply thought that Mrs. Joe didn’t really mean what she said, for Cecilia was almost impervious to criticism.

  “Fanny was a gre
at disappointment to me,” she said. “I never wanted to have a girl at all.”

  “But it isn’t as if you hadn’t got two boys already!” cried Mrs. Joe.

  “I’m proud of having sons, and disgusted at having a daughter,” blithely replied Cecilia, as she looked adoringly at Fred and stroked the thick black hair away from his forehead.

  Fred and Lucy reacted in different ways to their mother’s attitude, which she never sought to conceal from them. Fred assimilated the thought of his own superiority, knowing that he was his mother’s favourite — she often said so quite openly — and accepting as fully as she did herself, that his childish possessiveness and dependence upon her were never to be outgrown, but rather to intensify with his emotional development.

  Lucy, upon whom the pressure of maternal love bore much less heavily, heard Mrs. Joe’s comments about Fanny and felt, without reasoning about it, that they were true.

  He grew rather sorry for Fanny, and as Cecilia, by example and precept alike, had established the theory of her own infallibility beyond any shaking in the minds of her young sons, it was Nana whom he regarded as unjust and unkind, and against whom he presently began to protect Fanny.

  Fanny repaid him with a dumb, astonished gratitude, and when she was alone with Lucy, she would sometimes chatter quite readily.

  By the end of their first year at The Rise, Fanny, although habitually silent, had learnt to talk.

  Fred had learnt, reluctantly, to read and, more readily and with greater success, to play cricket and so had Lucy. In addition, Lucy could use his hands skilfully and liked carpentry.

  4

  Cecilia did not fulfil Johnny Newton’s prediction and marry a second time until she had been a widow nearly eight years.

  The boys were both at Harrow and Fanny in the hands of a Swiss nursery governess at home, and Cecilia was still talking of going back to Barbados with the vague intention of “seeing how the plantations were going,” when she met a Mr. Lorimer Charlecombe who had recently inherited a property in the neighbourhood. He was a bachelor — fifty, to her forty-five — a pleasant, brown-haired, brown-bearded man of a type to be seen in the pages of Punch, drawn by du Maurier.