The Ballad and the Source

by Rosamond Lehmann

  She pointed an unspeakable meaning with a venomous snort and chuckle. I saw the old dragon—her feud with our butler—about to rear its hoary head, and said hastily, to distract her:

  “Tell me about Miss Sibyl. What was she like?”

  “Oh, she was a Beauty, was Miss Sibyl. The Young Beauty of the season,” said Tilly, smiling, musing. “There was more beauties then too. There was Lily Langtry—the Jersey Lily. But she wasn’t the only one. … I stood on a chair in the Park to watch ’er drive by.”

  “Who? Miss Sibyl?”

  “Certindly not. Whatever would I want to do that for, when she was in and out of my room all day? Yes, and dressed ’er for ’er first ball. She did look a picture that night, I will say. ‘I shall never care for Society, Tilly. It’s all a trumpery sham. I want to do something different—something to show I’ve a brain as well as a face. …’ She was ’igh-spirited, that was all. She needed guidin’. She was a orphan, of course. I dare say that ’ad somethink to do with it. She’d ’ad a funny bringin’ up from all accounts. There was somebody was ’er guardian—the name’s slipped me— no better than ’e should be. Well-connected­­­­ too. One night there was a ring at the front door and in she flew. ‘Madrona, will you take me in?’ That was the name she called ’er—Madrona. She’d run ’alf across London in ’er evenin’ gownd and sating slippers. She did pant. I never ’eard the rights of it—there was a lot of talk. But there she stayed. Of course she’d often stayed before, just for short visits—the families ’ad been friendly a long way back, I fancy. She’d be goin’ on nineteen then. Oh, she was a wild thing! She did what she pleased and she said what she pleased—but I never thought there was no vice in ’er—just ’igh-spirited; and didn’t ’er eyes give a spark like, if anybody crossed ’er!”

  At this evocative stroke. I felt my inside turn over. Oh yes, I knew Miss Sibyl. Something came up in my throat and almost suffocated me. Tilly went on:

  “But she never tried no tricks with ’er. It was: ‘Yes, darlin­’ Madrona, certindly, sweetest Madrona’—as meek as milk. Talk of love and gratitoode—she went on as if she fair worshipped ’er.”

  “You mean she fair worshipped Grandma?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “She still does!” I cried in triumph. “She’s always talking about her. Oh Tilly, you must see her! Her name’s Mrs. Jardine now. Did she have another husband who died?”

  “Not as I know of.” A complicated expression crossed Tilly’s face. “Oh, ’e died in ’is own good time, I dare say,” she added cryptically. “I don’t know nothink about that.”

  “But you said she was called Mrs. Herbert—”

  “And so she was.” Tilly closed her lips sharply. “I’m not likely to forget that—considerin’ she married ’im from your grandfather’s house. Mr. Charles ’Erbert. I’m not one to put names on people that don’t belong to ’em.”

  I realised that my approach was faulty, and that I must be wily and devious until the tide flowed up again and overwhelmed such scruples as appeared to have arisen.

  “Can I thread your needle?” I said.

  She handed it over to me, and I threaded it and gave it back to her; and she told me to look in her left-hand top drawer if I fancied a fondant. When I had eaten it, I said:

  “Did Grandma love her too?”

  “She did.” Tilly laid down her work and mopped her eyes. Tears often rolled out of them nowadays—tears of age and weak-sightedness. I had got over thinking them tears of grief. “There are some natures,” she said, “that’s treacherous all through. They bites the ’and that feeds ’em. They do it once, and it’s forgiven and forgotten. But the time comes they done it once too often, and you can’t forgive nor forget. Never trust no one, not even your own flesh and blood, that’s once done you a wicked wrong. One day they’ll do you another, you may be bound.”

  “Did you ever know any treacherous people, Tilly?”

  “I’ve come across one or two in my life. And so did your Grandma. To ’er scathe and sorrer.”

  The rhythm was re-established now; the scratch of needle on thimble, the hands’ unconscious, faultlessly delicate movement over and through their work, the voice tick-tocking on with a sort of regular rattling beat in it, calling up in the camphor and time-smelling room the presence of my grandmother, so sharp, so faint, so quick, so dead—a presence more composed of sounds—her laugh, her music, her way of putting a thing—than of images.

  Once, long ago, at a Christmas party, someone turned out the lights and switched on a gramophone with a tin horn. A nasal goblin voice rasped out the words: Edison Bell Record; and then, with a shiver down my spine, I heard the voice of Henry Irving in The Bells. Tilly was like one of those antique gramophones—a shaky, trivial, wheezing medium reproducing skeleton dramas over and over again. The body of human life was drained out, yet a mystery, another, piercing reality remained.

  “What happened?” I said. “Was she—treacherous? Miss Sibyl?”

  “She brought ’er own ruin on ’er,” said Tilly. “And tried to bring down others in ’er fall.”

  I leaned back, feeling weak. I tried to summon up Mrs. Jardine, with all her kind, considerate, fascinating ways, presiding at the tea-table, bandaging us, resting on her sofa with all the thoughts of her solitude, that I had so often tried to imagine, secret behind her calm, stern, noble face; or strolling with the gardener along the herbaceous border, round the kitchen garden, into the greenhouses, energetically discussing, as I had so often heard her, what was to be altered, what planned and planted. But this humane, matronly figure, with all her richness stored in her, distilling quiet, had vanished into limbo. Groping for her, I saw, instead, an icy fiend: Miss Sibyl. I saw her snaky arms coiled round the pillars of the house of my grandparents, great blocks of masonry cracking, about to crash down on her, on all. I remembered her stroking my arm once, saying: “Pretty arms”; adding: “When I was a girl, I had arms like white snakes.” Here was this word again: Ruin.

  “Ruin?” I said shakily. “How did she …? What did she …?”

  “She went wrong,” said Tilly in a stony voice. “That’s what she done. She flounced off to lay down on a bed of red roses, and many’s the time I’ve thought it turned out nettles and brambles under ’er. Many’s the time I’ve said to myself I wouldn’t be ’er, tossing in the watches of the night—not if the Emperor of India stepped down from ’is throne and offered me the ruby from the middle front of ’is crown.”

  She was silent, brooding. No feed line occurred to me.

  “Of course,” she went on presently, “’e was a sober sort of a gentleman. Methodical. All books, books, books, and fiddle, fiddle with ’is precious china, and tinkle, tinkle, tinkle on the ’arpsichord. Not like a real man—for all ’e was a ’andsome well-set-up sort of a feller. A good bit older than ’er. Very ’igh educated, and money—plenty of it. That was a lot to do with ’er takin’ ’im, I wouldn’t be surprised—though she would ’ave it it was ’is blessed mind. ‘He’s got the most distinguished mind I ever met, Tilly,’ she says. ‘A mind I can really respect. I can learn from him. I can look up to him. I could never have married a young man—they’re all so silly.’ She used to sit and chat as it might be you children—only she was more of a grownup young lady, of course—and I was a bit younger in those days. ‘He’s never cared for female society, you know, Tilly,’ she says. ‘He says women don’t understand ideas.’ ‘They understands one or two when it comes to gettin’ married,’ I says. ‘After, if not before.’ It was just my fun—though I ’adn’t ought to of made so bold. Lor’, she didn’t know no more than this reel of cotton what I was after. She’d stare you straight in the face out of them great blue eyes of ’ers; they made you feel small—though it was only my fun. She was as ignorant as a blessed curate, for all her talk and ’eadstrong ways. That was ’er trouble—nobody couldn’t never ’elp ’er nor te
ach ’er. She thought she knew it all. It was others ’oo needed teachin’, accordin’ to ’er way of lookin’ at it. … Well, she married ’im, ideas and all.”

  Tilly fell silent, and I timidly hazarded:

  “Who was it she married, Tilly?”

  “This Mr. Charles ’Erbert I’m tellin’ you about. It was a lovely weddin’. Oh, she was a beautiful bride!—it made your inside work to see ’er. They went off to live in Paris. ’E was in the Dip—whatever the name is—Dippermatic. And that was the last ’appy sight we seen of her. No, she never run in to number fifteen all up on her toes and lovin’ and sure of ’er welcome again.”

  “What! Did Grandma never see her again?”

  “Oh yes. She sor ’er again.” Tilly’s head jigged with increased violence. “When others ’ad cast ’er off, she sor ’er. Till the deed was done that put a finish to it all. Yes, and after. For she sor ’er on ’er deathbed. … Ah, you can wipe out the score when it comes to the last, but you can’t unplay the game that was played and never should ’ave been.”

  This doom-fraught speech, delivered with appropriate power, penetrated me like a probe, exploring depths that terrified me. With passionate reluctance, I insisted:

  “What did she do, Tilly?”

  I must have it, the worst, the Sin, straight out. But Tilly was creating drama. She had no intention of destroying her suspense to gratify a child’s banal curiosity. She busied herself with the fur, turning it this way and that, looking haughty and malicious. Presently she thrust obliquely at her object, from a different angle.

  “I was never one to set myself up to judge the rights and wrongs of a thing. Leave that to the preachers and all the old nosey-parkers that trots off to church in their best bonnets to pray for sinners of a Sunday. Forgive us as we forgive them—Ha! The whited sepulchrums, I know ’em! They gives out a nasty sickish sort of a smell. I can smell ’em! What she wanted was a flesh and blood man to govern ’er. Break ’er and make ’er. Mark my words, ’e was better furnished in the top storey than ’e was elsewhere, was that joker.”

  A convulsion of laughter seized Tilly. Aware of its lewdness, I wrestled fruitlessly to attach nameless implications to a whirling composite picture of wardrobes, chairs, tables, beds, and, at the very tip-top of a perpendicular staircase, one well-set-up gentleman tinkling with china fingers on the harpsichord.

  Tilly continued in a meditative way:

  “It would come over ’er like, gradual, unknown to ’erself at first, I dare say, she could do with a bit less in the attics and a bit more in the basement. She’d dwell on that —only natchral—I been through it myself. And she’d plenty of time on ’er ’ands. Sooner or later it would stick in ’er mind there was somethink wrong. Somethink wrong! —tra-la—somethink wrong. …” A cracked midget’s voice came out of Tilly’s throat, piping and humming. “There was a music ’all song went like that when I was a girl. … Ah dear!” She mopped her eyes.

  I smiled politely, but said at once, to re-direct her wavering grip:

  “Was there something wrong?”

  “That’s as may be,” she answered primly. “It’s accordin’ to ’ow you might look at it if you wasn’t one of them Saintly Sammys throwin’ up their soapy ’ands and rubbin’ ’em over a pretty woman gone wrong. Not that it didn’t seem all peace and purrin’ on the ’earth at the first. The baby come along—pretty prompt, I will say—and oh Lor’!—the letters that was wrote then! You’d ’ave thought the Queen of England ’ad give birth to the Second Comin’! And what ’er eyes and ’er ears and ’er ’air was, somethink never seen on earth before, and she took the breast like a blessed archangel. And Mr. Charles as proud as a dog with two tails, dandlin’ ’er in ’is arms and singin’ ’er to sleep. The ’appiest couple in Christendom they was now. And bless you, the bringin’ up she was to ’ave. She was to stand godmother, of course—”

  “Who? Grandma?”

  “That’s what I said. And they’d picked on I-anthe, because any one called that was bound to grow up into a beauty. … Ah dear!”

  A human expression softened Tilly’s face. She leaned back; and her myopic eyes, charged as I had never before seen them with pity and retrospective sadness, stared out of the window towards the treetops.

  “She did get to be a pretty little thing too—winnin’. She favoured ’is side—and they was a good-lookin’ lot. Oh, ’e thought the world of ’er. ’E ’ad ’is natchral feelin’s, I wouldn’t wish to deny. It broke ’is pride when she ’opped it. It turns a man sour when a woman breaks ’is pride. You couldn’t expect generosity of ’im—though she did. She would.”

  “Miss Sibyl?”

  “Yes, Miss Sibyl. Whatever she done was always right, and oh, the surprise when others didn’t see it that way, and raised objections!”

  “She broke his pride?”

  “Ah, you could tell that’s where it got ’im by the way ’e took it. I’d never go so far to say there was much love spilt when that tray was dropped—not at the end. A broken ’eart’s more easy put together, and don’t leave such nasty jagged edges where the break’s been stuck. ’E was the proudest feller—gentleman—I ever struck. She took and crushed ’is pride.”

  I saw that dual figure, the dove-girl-Mrs. Jardine, wrench something hard, like a seal or a charm, from the breast of a shadowy male figure, and crush it into fragments with the strong, short, ringed fingers I knew. In doubt and perplexity I ventured:

  “She did it when she hopped it?”

  “She did.”

  “How did she do that?”

  “Oh, she tucked up ’er flouncy skirts and was off one summer’s evenin’.”

  “I see,” I said, untruthfully.

  “’E’d give a ring at the bell. ‘Where is Madame?’ ’E’d be all ready dressed up, you see, to take ’er to the opera or the ball. ‘Oh, Madame? She went out some hours ago, Moossew. She left a note for you in ’er boodwar.’” Tilly minced, rolled her eyes stagily in the style of an imaginary French lady’s maid. “‘Ah, thank you, Maree. You may go.’ ‘Oui, Moossew. Mercy, Moossew.’ Up the stairs ’e’d walk, very slow and dignified—smellin’ a rat, I wouldn’t be surprised. There was the letter propped up on the mantel—scented and sealed. ’E opens it. Gone, ’e reads. Gone with the one I love. …”

  “Oh!” I gasped, fatally interrupting. “Is that what she really said?”

  There was a dead pause; then Tilly said peevishly:

  “’Ow should I know? I wasn’t there, lookin’ over ’is shoulder, was I?”

  But presently, observing my mortification, she relented and said:

  “I’ll lay my best seal jacket it was somethink after that style, though. ’Igh-flown. ’Owever she put it, that’s what she done.”

  “She went with the one she loved?”

  “Well, you can put it that way. No doubt she would. And mean it at the time. ’E was a nasty bit of work.”

  “Was his name—was it a gentleman called Major Jardine?” I asked, trembling.

  “No, it wasn’t nothink of the sort. What’s come over you with your Jardine? Gentleman indeed! Is it likely? It was one of them furriners. I can’t lay my ’ands on ’is name. Best forgotten too. An artist, or one of that sort of lot, so I ’eard.”

  “Did Mr. Charles—was he very sorry?”

  “Ah! … sorry …” Tilly shook her head dubiously.

  “More cross?”

  “What she’d done, you see, she’d caught ’im a slap clean acrost the face in front of the ’ole world. And ’im in ’is position! Somethink stronger than sorry ’e’d feel. I’d ’eard a bit about ’er before the scandal. There was a young girl, lady’s maid to Lady—the name’s gone—out there at the time. Swiss, she was, a nice steady girl. She come over to England with ’er lady, and ’er and me scraped up an acquaintance when yer grandmother visited. She told me what a lot of talk went
on. I was ever so grieved and shocked to ’ear it. Of course, mind you, she was a beauty. I dare say the flattery turned ’er ’ead—though I never would ’ave thought it in the old days. She might ’ave wore ’er face back to front for all the notice she took of other people’s noticin’ it. You couldn’t spoil ’er … so I’d ’ave said. But she changed. It’s a funny thing, but some girls do when they gets to be married—in partickler them innocent, wild-spirited­­­­ sort—all over the place and up in the air—straight out of their schoolrooms. Anythink for a sensation!—that’s what three years’ ’igh society marriage done for Miss Sibyl. The more eyes was on ’er, the more outrageious she’d act—just to give ’em somethink extra to wag their tongues about. Like as if it was strong drink and sent ’er frantic. And spend, spend, spend! … Them French dressmakers aren’t too bad; they got ’er up to advantage, I dare say. She was short built, but all in proportion, and carried ’er ’ead like a queen. I’d like to ’ave seen ’er in some of ’er toilets. And goin’ about with a white monkey or some such nasty mucky animal on ’er shoulder. And parties. Gettin’ that little mite—Ianthe—up out of ’er cot in the middle of the night—winter, mind you—in a bit of gauze and spangly wings, to be set on the table in a basket and lifted out as the Spirit of the Noo Year and made to throw rose petals, or some such silliness. But it was all show-off, if you understand. She caused talk, but I’ll lay my oath she never done anythink she shouldn’t. Though she ’ad the men all round ’er. ’E couldn’t master ’er, so ’e let ’er ’ave ’er ’ead. It came like a thunderclap at the end. She run off with a nobody.”

  “Did she take Ianthe with her?”

  I had a vision of a white form, all veils and flying flounces, running in the night through city streets with a naked winged cherub on her shoulder.