Collected Works of E M Delafield, page 127
Perhaps it was true.
Julian knew that to his wife was it frequently given to rush in where others might not only hesitate, but positively refuse, to tread, and he knew that Mark’s simple gratitude for her interest in him was as genuine as it was outspoken.
He wondered, sometimes, at that very simplicity, in a man of acute sympathies and unfailing intuition such as Mark again and again proved himself to possess in almost every relation into which he entered. There were even times when he asked himself, in utter perplexity, whether Mark could himself be as sensitive as his quickness of perception for sensitiveness in others appeared to denote.
He thought that he had seldom seen Edna look more relieved than at the dissipation of the constraint amongst her tea-party, caused by Mark’s entrance.
“Will you ring for tea, Mark?” she asked smilingly. She had the trick, not uncommon to a certain type of woman, of assuming a more proprietary tone and manner when speaking to a man not her husband.
Julian’s restless and observant mind almost automatically registered the subconscious irritation instantly produced in the other two women.
Miss Farmer, turning to young Cooper, asked him if he would be so very kind as to reach her little bag, which contained a handkerchief.
Miss Sandiloe, more actively resentful, as well as far more self-confident in the youthful security of possessing good looks and an evident admirer in the shape of Cooper, was bolder.
“Oh, Mr. Easter, I’m awfully glad you’re here. I mean, really I am. I’ve got some killing things to tell you, about the Coll. We’ve got some freaks there now, really we have.”
“What have you done with the young gentleman who wanted to learn enough shorthand to get him a post in a newspaper office in six lessons?” enquired Mark, as usual full of interest.
“Oh, him! It wasn’t him I was thinking of so much, really, though he certainly is a caution. I mean, really he is. But he’s come off the six lessons stunt, all the same.”
“Well done! Have you persuaded him to take a course?”
“I don’t know what I’ve got to do with it, I’m sure,” Miss Sandiloe said, with a self-conscious laugh. “But I’m taking him for private tuition now, three times a week, as well as him going to the usual classes, and he’ll be in the Speed in no time.”
Miss Farmer, looking more animated than when making impersonal and agonised conversation with her hostess, joined in.
“Miss Marchrose is taking the High Speed room now, Mr. Easter. She’s got a beautiful pronunciation so clear, it is.”
Lady Rossiter smiled a kind, faint smile, that to her husband’s perceptions, admirably succeeded in underlining her determination to avoid noticing Miss Farmer’s slip.
“It’s so wonderful of you, I think, to be so devoted to your work,” she said. “That is one reason why I love the society of workers. They are always so eager about their work, and I think it is so wonderful of them.”
Edna did not generally repeat herself, but the curious hostility vibrant in the air surrounding her philanthropic enterprise was making her nervous.
“I’ve always been keen on my job,” said Cooper complacently, “but I ought to have been an engineer. I should have liked that.”
“But then why not have followed your vocation?” Edna enquired, with tilted eyebrows.
Cooper shook his head.
“It’s an expensive training, Lady Rossiter. If I’d had the capital, I should have liked it, though.”
“I understand,” gently said Edna, with a whole world of implication in her tone, at which Cooper looked rather astonished, and Miss Sandiloe decidedly resentful.
“Daddy!” said a sudden voice.
Everybody looked at the forgotten Ruthie, who stood on one leg beside her father’s chair.
“Daddy, I’m afraid I shall forget my piece, if I don’t say it soon,” said Ruthie in an excessively audible aside, and with the evident determination of displaying her histrionic attainments to the assembly.
Mark laughed, with the injudicious tolerance that he was all too apt to accord to the ill-timed demonstrations of his offspring.
“Not now, Ruthie. Perhaps Lady Rossiter doesn’t want you to say your piece at all.”
Few suggestions could have been better founded upon fact, and Lady Rossiter made no attempt to contradict Ruthie’s father.
Julian wondered if it was altogether undesignedly that Miss Sandiloe instantly exclaimed:
“Are you going to recite to us, dear?”
“Yes, I am,” said Miss Easter in loud, confident tones. “I always recite when I go out to tea.”
The relentless inevitability of the proposed entertainment deprived even Miss Sandiloe of further utterance for the moment.
“You will not be asked again if you give yourself such a bad character,” said Mark in a rather hopeless voice.
“Oh, yes, I shall. Lady Rossiter always likes me and Peekaboo to come; she said so! We can come whenever we like.”
Sir Julian’s regard for Mark Easter alone prevented him from disclaiming aloud any share in the unlimited hospitality so rashly proclaimed by his wife in the days of Ruthie’s and Ambrose’s comparatively innocuous babyhood, and so unscrupulously worked to death by them ever since.
“Is Peekaboo a pet?” asked Miss Farmer kindly.
“Not always,” Ruthie replied literally. “Sometimes he’s a very naughty boy. Sarah has locked him up in the boot-cupboard this afternoon, because “Hush, hush,” hastily said Mark, “We don’t tell tales out of school.”
Julian wondered grimly what story of misdoing the exhortation to fraternal charity might cover. The unforeseeable and disastrous ingenuity of Ambrose’s misdeeds was only to be compared to the skill with which his partner and instigator in crime invariably managed to extricate herself at the eleventh hour from complicity and leave him the solitary victim of blame and punishment.
Tea and cakes, arriving opportunely, staved off Ruthie’s recitation, and brought the relief of movement.
Lady Rossiter crumbled a very small sponge-cake behind the silver-kettle, and said in a general sort of way that she hoped everyone would make a very good tea and eat a great deal. She herself always thought of Sunday tea as one of the principal meals of the day, as it would only be followed by cold supper in the evening.
Whether cold supper was to be the portion of her guests or not, however, the piled plates of buns and the large cakes, bearing a certain superficial resemblance to preparations for a school-treat, were better patronised by Ruthie than by the members of the College staff.
“We mustn’t leave it too late to be starting back,” Miss Farmer said nervously. “I mean, it’s quite a longish walk.”
Julian gauged the measure of Edna’s discouragement by her omission to insist graciously upon an expedition first round the garden.
“You must come again one Sunday,” she said, not, however, making precise mention of any date. “I should like you to see my view of the sea. There is a beautiful little glimpse to be had from a corner of the garden.... You must so need a draught of blue distance after working inside four walls all the week.”
“Thank you, Lady Rossiter,” said Miss Farmer meekly, turning a pale brick-colour.
“Thanks,” said Miss Sandiloe, her nose in the air and her voice aggressive; “but really I can get all the view I want of the sea from Culmouth. My window looks right over the bay that’s why I took the apartments I did. Are you ready, Horace?”
“Ready,” said Mr. Cooper, with an alacrity that might be partly attributable to the unprecedented use of his Christian name Miss Sandiloe’s not too subtle retaliation for Lady Rossiter’s frequent “Mark.”
“Come along, Ruthie,” said Mark Easter. “We’ll walk with you part of the way if we may, Miss Farmer.”
The teacher looked pleased, and they followed Miss Sandiloe and her admirer, Mark adjusting his long, easy stride to the very obvious limitations of Miss Farmer’s patent-leather shoes.
Edna looked after them, wearing a rather exhausted expression.
“I am very tired, Julian. I shall go to the boudoir and enjoy the silence till it’s time to dress. Nothing is so restful as complete silence, after all.”
Julian honoured the assertion by making no reply to it whatever.
“I have been told,” said Edna, with gentle solemnity, “that my spirit is burning itself away. I know you don’t sympathise with that necessity for pouring out, Julian this afternoon, for instance, has taken a great deal out of me but I noticed that you gave out nothing at all not one spark. Isn’t it rather a pity? One can do so little, materially, but the things of the spirit... Ah, well, I grudge none of it.”
She went upstairs, however, very slowly, and leaning heavily upon the banisters.
Julian’s gaze did not follow her.
IV
“WE found a treasure,” Mark Easter enthusiastically told Sir Julian. “Miss Marchrose is the best worker I’ve ever struck. And she’ll do anything doesn’t mind what she turns her hand to. You’ll have to see her, Sir Julian dashed good-looking girl into the bargain.”
Sir Julian was not insensible to the attraction of the last qualification, but he felt no security of endorsing Mark Easter’s ready acclamation of a pretty face. His own taste was eclectic and the witless pink and white, the unsubtle contours that constitute the ideal feminine to the average Englishman, held no appeal for him.
He soon saw Miss Marchrose at the College, in the room adjoining Fuller’s office that had been designed for the personal use of the Lady Superintendent.
She was talking to Mark Easter, standing beside him in the window, and the afternoon sun struck full upon her, revealing every little finely-drawn line of fatigue round her eyes and mouth.
Sir Julian’s first sensation was of involuntary, surprised satisfaction at the slim, tall distinction of her whole bearing; the next, one of surprise at Mark Easter’s verdict on her looks.
“Ten years ago, perhaps,” he reflected. “Now she probably varies according to her state of health. But she’ll never be called pretty.”
Nevertheless, it seemed to him easy enough to trace a softer, rounder contour to the oval face, and to erase in imagination the shadows underlying black brows and hazel eyes, and the tiny, indelible marks that some past bitterness had left at either corner of the closelycurved mouth that was Miss Marchrose’s most undeniably beautiful feature.
Her hair was brown, a soft dead-leaf colour that held no gleams of light and framed her square forehead loosely. Julian, looking at her, received the impression that her face held possibilities full of colour and animation, and yet was more often only faintly coloured, and shadowed with weariness.
“Charming at eighteen and probably not admired, except by an occasional connoisseur and now absolutely dependent for looks on the state of her vitality,” he summarised her to himself.
But he ceased to entertain any doubts as to the vitality of Miss Marchrose when he heard her speak.
At the first sound of her voice he recognised that therein lay the charm which had made Mark Easter declare her to be good-looking. The soft beauty of a woman’s speaking voice such as that of Miss Marchrose might well prove responsible for greater delusions.
The contrast between the extraordinarily musical inflexions of her tones and their rather curt, businesslike utterances almost amused Julian.
He remembered Fuller’s complacent recommendation, “Hard as nails, I should think,” And surmised that Miss Marchrose had addressed him with the same abrupt, impersonal manner.
Unlike the majority of women, she seldom smiled. When she did so and presently Julian noticed that Mark Easter could elicit that quick, soft change of expression more often than anyone else it altered the character of her face very much, and made her look much younger, and rather appealing.
Her powers of organisation were admirable and, as Mark had said, she was ready to concentrate her whole energies upon her work, indifferent, apparently, to the after-office hours which constituted the whole reality of life for those who only lived through the day’s business in order to attain their freedom at the end of it.
“I hope you have found comfortable accommodation in Culmouth,” Sir Julian said to her.
“Yes, thank you.”
Miss Marchrose appeared so little expectant of any further interest in her welfare that Julian almost wondered whether her definition of officiousness might not prove to coincide with his own.
A month after her arrival, however, Mark Easter told the Rossiters that Miss Marchrose was lodging at a farm outside Culmouth, nearly half an hour’s walk from the College.
“It wouldn’t be far for her to come over here, if you thought of asking her, Lady Rossiter,” said Mark. “I’m afraid she must be rather lonely, for she knows no one down here.”
“I wonder why she came here,” Edna remarked.
“For love of the country, I think,” Mark answered, with sufficient assurance in the assertion to make Julian wonder if he had received a confidence.
“I want to know this Miss Marchrose,” said Lady Rossiter with decision. “I think I must go to the College to-morrow I have been quite a long time without seeing any of my friends there. Dear Mr. Fuller! I love Mr. Fuller he and I have such long talks over the welfare of the staff.”
“I shall be in there all day to-morrow. Won’t you look in and let Miss Marchrose give you a cup of tea?” said Mark.
“Of course I will. They love dispensing a little hospitality, don’t they, and I’m always most ceremonious about returning their calls here. Not that Miss Marchrose has come over yet with the others.”
Mark looked a little perplexed, and Julian, unexpectedly even to himself, said rather curtly:
“You won’t be able to ask her to make one of your Sunday Band of Hope expeditions, Edna.”
“No?” said his wife, still smiling. “I know there are wheels within wheels, and one reason, I think, why they trust me is that I respect all the little prejudices and etiquettes that mean so much to them. Give Miss Marchrose due warning, Mark, will you, that I shall call at tea-time to-morrow and see if she is not too busy to let me have some tea. I want to get into touch with all of them, you know.”
Julian, in rather grim anticipation of the process as regarded Miss Marchrose, announced his intention next day of accompanying his wife to the College.
“My dear, I am not often honoured, but shall we not rather overwhelm the young woman?”
“I don’t think she is easily overwhelmed.”
Edna laughed musically that is to say, Sir Julian felt convinced that she herself so designated the low, controlled sound of amusement that she so seldom enough judged it a propos to emit.
But her voice was very serious the next instant, and had even dropped a semitone, as she made enquiry:
“Julian, can you tell me yet whether she is really connected with poor Clarence’s tragedy?”
“No, certainly not I haven’t tried to find out.”
“I wonder why, when you knew that the whole question touched me very nearly. Nothing has much sacredness to you, Julian, has it?”
“I see nothing sacred in the amorous extravagances of your cousin Clarence, certainly.”
“And you care very little whether the woman who is charged with the welfare of all those young men and women - sharers, after all, of our common humanity can give them true, pure-hearted love and service and fellowship,” mused Edna. “And yet to me those ideals which you dismiss so lightly seem the most important things in all the world. You see, Julian, love seems to me to matter more than anything in the whole world.”
“In the case of a Lady Superintendent for the College, a knowledge of shorthand is more important,” said Julian indifferently.
He had long since fallen into the habit of uttering the cheap jeers that had once inadequately served to protect him from blatant references that now had almost lost effect.
“God forbid that I should condemn anyone who am I, to judge of another? but I can’t pretend to you, Julian, that it won’t become a question of conscience with me, if I find that a position of such responsibility towards my boys and girls is held by a woman who could throw a man over heartlessly, break her given pledge, just at the moment when he was more in need of her than ever before.”
“If she was heartless, he may have been well rid of her, as I said before.”
“At what a cost! His first faith shattered, poor boy. You remember what that nurse told me about him.”
“I remember perfectly, but I should think both Clarence Isbister and the girl he married would very much rather have it forgotten.”
“I don’t forget easily, Julian.”
“Then in kindness to Clarence, I should advise you to keep your recollections to yourself. I doubt if he would thank you or anyone else for reminding the world that he ever saw fit to beat a tattoo with his head on the walls of his nursing-home for the sake of a young woman whom he afterwards forgot all about.”
“We can never tell that. Certain wounds do not heal, although they may be hidden from sight.”
“Then I’m sorry for Mrs. Clarence.”
“I wonder if Miss Marchrose knows that he has married,” said Edna, rather viciously.
“I wish you would not take it for granted that this is the same woman,” said Julian irritably.
Edna laid two fingers upon his sleeve in a manner designed to emphasise her words.
“I shall take nothing for granted. But you see, Julian, I can’t take life quite as you do quite as callously, as cynically. There is a big responsibility for those of us who see a little ah, such a very little way it is further into the heart of things. We can only hope, and give, and spend ourselves and judge Julian, who disliked being touched, moved his arm out of reach, and replied to these humanitarian sentiments unsympathetically.
“Your remarks have not the slightest bearing upon the case, Edna.”
He thought to himself bitterly, not for the first time, that a stronger man would reject the weapons of obvious, meaningless satire, but nervous irritability again and again drove him to seek an outlet in words that he despised.
