Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  Marbury was in love with her.

  She felt with intuitive certainty that he would follow her to London, and ask her to marry him.

  IV

  From the instant she set foot on the boat Eve, always a bad sailor, felt that the crossing was going to be a nightmare.

  And it was a nightmare.

  The weather, that had been sultry the day before, had changed. A cold wind blew across the decks, and a chilly, spiteful rain fell slantwise.

  Eve, wishing to economize, had carried her own suitcase and hat-box from the train. As a result, she missed her chance of securing a chair on deck. Every one was occupied by the time she arrived, by a woman possessed either of an attendant man, or of unusual celerity and determination.

  It didn’t matter, Eve wearily reflected. She knew well that it was probably only a question of moments before she was driven to the Ladies’ Saloon. Better go there at once, perhaps, and secure a corner before the rush began.

  She dragged her suitcase and hat-box to a corner and left them there.

  In the saloon, an elderly Belgian lady was already extended on the plush settee, a large hat precariously balanced on the enormous curve of her hip, and a handkerchief suggestively spread across her chest.

  Eve shuddered slightly, and went to the other side of the saloon. Another elderly woman, obviously English, sat upright, wearing an apprehensive expression.

  The stewardess, dark, plump and indifferent, with a sallow face, walked about knitting, ex changing observations in French, or English, or Flemish, with anyone who spoke to her. From time to time she looked at herself in one of the many mirrors that surrounded them, and ran a pocket-comb through the greasy strands of her limp black hair.

  “How awful it all is!” thought Eve.

  She was experiencing the reaction from her triumph and excitement of the previous night and her vitality was already at a low ebb.

  She sat down on the settee, took off her hat and bestowed it in a safe corner, tucked her travelling cloak round her knees, and tried to read.

  She found herself, instead, remembering, comparing, calculating.

  She thought both of Denis O’Reilly and of Miles Marbury — but mostly of Marbury.

  It was evident that he cared for her.

  Eve reflected, dispassionately enough, that she was not in love with him. Secretly she doubted whether she possessed the capacity for falling in love. But she liked Marbury — she could imagine being very fond of him. She would do her utmost to love him, and to be loyal to him if he should make her his wife.

  After all, it would be the least return that she could make, when he would be giving her so much.

  For a moment she let her mind dwell on the thought of her mother’s rapture at such a marriage.

  It would not only be present joy and triumph, but it would mean future security.

  There would be no more bills, no more anxiety about the rent, no more travelling as cheaply as possible and economizing in porters....

  Eve closed her eyes as a sudden lurch caused the prostrate Belgian lady to groan:

  “MON Dieu! Nous partons!”

  It was as bad as she had feared. The tiny ship rolled and pitched in the choppy sea, and ladies with wan faces and distraught eyes were assisted in from the deck and sank down on to the seats, all round the saloon.

  The stewardess, still impassive, gave the necessary help with an air of detachment.

  “Ah-ah-h! mon bon Saint Joseph!” said the Belgian lady, and was unrestrainedly ill.

  Eve, in a little while, was ill too. Everybody was ill, except the elderly Englishwoman, who sat upright in the midst of the fallen, in stoical endurance.

  “What unspeakable misery this sort of thing is!” Eve reflected desperately, as nausea gripped her again and again.

  After Calais had been passed, the pitching and tossing incredibly grew worse than ever.

  “Seulement une heure, maintenant,” said the stewardess, and the Belgian lady returned faintly but with determination: “Une heure? Alors je meurs!”

  Eve felt inclined to echo her.

  But she did not die.

  She survived to emerge ice-cold, shivering and green of face, into a heavy shower of sleet on the docks at Dover.

  “Passports — British Passports to the right, please — to the right—”

  Eve felt certain that she had lost her passport. Her head was swimming, she could scarcely stand.

  She looked wildly round for a porter.

  “All right,” said a familiar voice, very quietly.

  It was Denis O’Reilly.

  “What are you doing here? Oh, wasn’t the crossing awful? But I thought you were still in Brussels.”

  “I’ll see to your things, dear. Give me that suitcase—”

  She thankfully resigned all her luggage to him. Miraculously Denis extracted her passport from her handbag, led her through the Customs, and said:

  “Go to the train and get a seat for yourself, and I’ll get your luggage through. Nothing to declare, I suppose?”

  Eve shook her head.

  “Here, porter! Find this lady a place in the train for Victoria.”

  She saw Denis tip the man and was dimly conscious that she ought to protest. He could not afford tips and this one, judging by the porter’s alacrity, had been of particularly extravagant dimensions.

  She sank thankfully into her corner seat in the train, feeling its solidity and motionlessness as a luxury.

  In five minutes’ time she was able to take off her hat, adjust her hair into its accustomed becoming waves, pull out her powder-puff, lip-stick and pocket-mirror, and make adequate use of them.

  The tall figure of Denis O’Reilly appeared in the carriage doorway.

  “All right. Here’s your stuff. Nothing discovered this time.”

  He bestowed away the luggage.

  “Better now? That’s right. Half a minute—” He disappeared again.

  What in the world was Denis doing at Dover? He’d meant to stay on in Brussels. She blessed the change of plans that had brought him to her help, with quite irrational fervour. The next minute he was handing her a cup of steaming tea.

  “Oh, you angel! I was just beginning to know how badly I needed it. What should I have done without you? Get in, and tell me why you came back after all?”

  “I can’t get in — you’ll be off in a few minutes.”

  “But aren’t you coming to London?”

  “I’m going back to Brussels. There’s a boat in an hour’s time. I shall be there in time for to-morrow’s Conference, all right.”

  His eyes, half-sad and half-smiling, looked into hers.

  “I simply couldn’t stand the thought of you being ill and upset and having to struggle with your luggage, and I knew it would be raining when you arrived, and I thought perhaps you’d be glad of some help—”

  “Denis, I never was more thankful to see anyone. But you don’t mean that it was for me — and nothing else — that you came over — spent money on a return ticket and — Oh, it’s too absurd!”

  “It was worth it, darling. Those are the things that matter, you know — the personal things. I don’t care if you think I’m a mad fool. I dare say I am, I’m Irish. To my way of thinking it was a most obvious thing to do.”

  “Denis!”

  Eve gave him both her hands.

  “There isn’t a woman in the world who doesn’t dream of having those insane things done for her sake. But I didn’t know that there was anywhere a man who’d actually do them!”

  His face was suddenly illuminated.

  “Stand back there, please!” roared a voice.

  A whistle blew.

  “Darling sweetheart, do you mean—”

  “Anything you like — write to me!”

  “I’ll write — and I’ll be in London next week.”

  The train had gone on, leaving Denis on the platform.

  Eve sank back, gazing with quite unseeing eyes at her fellow-traveller
s. She was unaware of them, as she had suddenly become unaware of Miles Marbury and his magnificent generosities, and the opportunity that he might yet offer her for attaining security, and comfort, and position.

  A mad and extravagant act had seized upon her imagination, and cast into the balance of a woman’s values, it had out-weighed common sense, safety and the acquired philosophy of years.

  Eve, irrationally, insanely, and irretrievably, was in love.

  THE INDISCRETION

  LIKE SO many other things, it had seemed a chance so remote as to be not worth considering.

  Yet it had happened.

  The tiny yacht had overturned, and now Sydney and Arthur clung one to either side of it, confronting one another, with immense, placid and yet powerful, reaches of water all round them. Both had the courage of the well-bred, and Arthur, in addition, had that of the entirely unimaginative as well.

  Neither could swim more than a little.

  “It’s only a question of how long one can hold on, I suppose,” said Sydney, rather quaveringly.

  Her fingers were already hurting badly.

  “Oh, come,” said Arthur encouragingly. “The Johnsons were only just ahead of us. If they have the least glimmer of sense, they’ll look for our craft, and turn back to see if we’re all right. Don’t give up, dear.”

  How brave Arthur was! She had the oddest idea that presently he would adjust his monocle, with the gesture that she knew so well, and fix her with his kind, but dispassionate gaze. But Arthur’s monocle, if it had survived the catastrophe at all, was dangling far below the water, and his hands were occupied, as were her own, in grasping at the slender craft that spelt life.

  “Just hold on till the Johnsons’ yacht is in sight,” repeated Arthur, in the kindest way.

  The seconds were intolerably long.

  “I’m so glad we’ve no children,” gasped Sydney.

  Arthur was silent for a moment, and during it he apparently made up his mind to accept, as his wife had done from the first, the fact that they were in imminent peril of death by drowning.

  “I’ve left everything in order,” he said quietly. “My will is at the bank — I’ve left everything to you, and failing you it goes in equal shares to my sisters.”

  “Everything of mine is left to you, except one or two personal remembrances,” she returned.

  “Well, the lawyers won’t find much of a job, except the collection of death duties. Are you all right, dear?” he added strangely.

  “I shan’t be able to hold on very much longer, I don’t think.”

  “If you have to leave go, call out first, and then try to float. I’ll get to you somehow.”

  “All right.”

  “The Johnsons ought to be here any minute. They must have missed us by now.”

  He gave a loud hail, but there was no reply. Sydney felt that she had never done Arthur justice before. His calm, and his courage, were superb.

  It was only a question of minutes now, before her clutch slipped.

  “Arthur, there’s something I ought to tell you. I want you to forgive me. It was two years ago — when we seemed to be rather drifting apart. I was lonely — you were so busy, and you didn’t take any notice of me.”

  “You were my wife, dear. Why should I take any notice of you?” Arthur inquired simply.

  “There — there was another man. I broke with him after a year, but for a time I was unfaithful to you. It’s the end, now, probably for both of us. Will you forgive me?”

  “The Johnsons—” said Arthur, almost automatically. “Who was the man?”

  “You never even thought enough about me to guess?”

  “Was it the fellow who used to send you his books — Carson?”

  “No, oh no. How could you think that? I could never have fallen in love with him.”

  “You fell in love, then,” Arthur repeated, in a slightly displeased voice.

  “But Arthur!” (However, what was the use of an explanation at this the eleventh hour?) “If I hadn’t fallen in love I shouldn’t have given myself to him,” she said faintly.

  “Who was the man?”

  “Osbert Evans. Arthur, say you forgive me: I can’t hold on any longer.”

  “I forgive you,” slowly said Arthur, and then his voice rose to a loud shout that seemed to mingle with the water roaring in her ears, as her hands relaxed.

  The Johnsons rescued them just in time, and Sydney came to consciousness again by degrees. They were on shore, and she in bed, before her mind grew clear.

  ‘Then everything, as they say, came back to her, although not all at once.

  “Arthur was marvellous,” she murmured. “Is he all right?”

  “He’s here.”

  Arthur was at her bedside.

  They were alone. —

  For an instant they gazed at one another, awed. Then a searing recollection suddenly flashed across her, and she knew that her expression had altered. Next moment, the alteration was reflected in her husband’s.

  Fixing his monocle in his eye, he looked down upon her, his face suddenly suffused.

  “By the Lord Harry!” he shouted. “What was that you told me about that infernal skunk Osbert?”

  TERMS OF REFERENCE

  “My dear, I hate telling you this — I simply hate it. But I feel I ought to. Don’t you know, when one feels one really ought to?”

  Isobel France stiffened her already very erect shoulders.

  One knew what Maud Maddox meant, at any rate. Detestable woman! Her occupation in middle life was to spread stories that were never altogether lies — one could have confuted lies — but minglings of lies and truth, and always, always disagreeable.

  “Isobel, you know I think you’re wonderful—”

  “I’m not—” Isobel was doubly furious at the attempt to flatter her.

  “Oh, but my dear, you are! And especially with the girls. I always say that it’s wonderful enough to make a success of being a mother, but simply miraculous to make a success of being a stepmother.”

  Isobel France had never had children of her own, although she’d wanted them.

  “Look at the way you married off Myra before she was twenty.”

  “George fell in love with Myra. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “You saw to it that he had the chance of falling in love with her,” returned Lady Maddox shrewdly. “And Myra wasn’t really pretty — at least, not pretty enough to turn the head of a young man with twenty thousand a year.”

  The emphasis told Mrs. France what was coming. Myra — her elder step-daughter — wasn’t especially pretty — but Baba was.

  So it was Baba.

  “Oh course, everybody knows you’ve done everything for them both, taught them what to wear, and how to wear it, and what they can do and what they can’t.”

  “Oh, there’s nothing girls can’t do, nowadays, is there?” countered Mrs. France, with a light laugh.

  “Perhaps not — but there’s a wrong way and a right way of doing things, and that’s just what your Baba hasn’t learnt. Not that anybody blames you, my dear, in the least.”

  “But I don’t understand—”

  Mrs. France simulated perplexity. She felt that she understood only too well. And, of course, Maud Maddox knew that perfectly. She gave her celebrated laugh — the highest, clearest sound imaginable, full of the very spirit and essence of unkindness.

  “How sweet of you, darling! It’s too, too loyal and devoted of you. But surely you needn’t pretend with me. I’m so absolutely safe — and besides, I’m devoted to Baba. That’s why I had to come to you—”

  Isobel felt revolted by the insincerity of it all. She’d have to put an end to it....

  “Tell me,” she said abruptly.

  “My dear!” Maud spread out her white hands, palms uppermost, in a gesture that might equally have stood for dismay, or resignation.

  “No need, surely, to put it into words, Isobel? The dear little goose is being talked about �
�� oh, not in the way that serves simply to épater le bourgeois, I don’t mean — but talked about in a quite, quite nasty way, I’m afraid.”

  “Why?”

  Isobel’s tone was ice.

  “But, my dear, why waste breath? Poor dear Terry Lamotte, of course.”

  “Oh, he’s poor dear, is he?”

  “I don’t know, that he is, particularly. People are sorry for his wife.”

  “Nina Lamotte has her own consolations, I imagine. It’s absurd of her to pose as an injured wife.”

  “Isobel, I didn’t expect this from you, somehow.”

  Maud looked candidly bewildered.

  “Baba’s the wrong age, anyway, to play about with a married man. People won’t stand it. They’ll say it’s because she can’t get herself engaged. My dear, it’s a horrid thing to have to tell you, but I think I’d better. I was asked very seriously by Lady Daleshire if the stories about Baba were true, because if they were, she didn’t intend to let her girl ask her to their every other Wednesday dances.”

  “I see.”

  Isobel’s tone, now, was coldly reflective.

  She was both too well experienced in the laws governing her world, and too intelligent, to under-rate the gravity of Lady Maddox’s information. If Lady Daleshire let it be known that she had stopped asking Baba France to her parties, other people would speedily do the same thing. There would still be plenty of parties for Baba, at houses to which she now went, but to go to those parties because she wasn’t asked to the others, would label her, irrevocably and fatally, as belonging to a set that was just a little beneath the one in which she had made her debut.

  It needed no urging from Maud Maddox to make the position clear to Baba’s stepmother.

  “I see,” she repeated. “But it’s wonderful what people will put up with from a girl of Baba’s prettiness. However, there’s no sense in running risks, of course.”

  She wasn’t, in modern slang, going to give anything away to Maud Maddox.

  The latter, looking rather dissatisfied, rose.

  “I knew you’d understand, my dear,” she murmured vaguely. “And, of course, you know it’s safe as the grave with me. I never dream of discussing anybody’s private affairs, least of all those of my friends.”