Chapter IX: "To-day--I give battle!"

Aunt Clo's voice sounded as though the prospect filled her with mingled elation and concern.

"Can you amuse yourself, my Lily, if I leave you for the day? Books--piano--flowers--birds----" Aunt Clo enumerated the resources of her establishment with large and expressive wavings of her well-shaped hands over the breakfast-table.

"I can write some letters, and you have lent me so many books. I shall have plenty to do."

"_Benissimo!_"

"Shall you be away all day?" said Lily tentatively. She had already learnt that Miss Stellenthorpe rather welcomed enquiries on subjects of which the importance apparently required an extreme reticence of reply.

A shade of gravity at once fell across her face. "Ah! who can tell? If the mission is to be successful, a day is not too long ... but I am very much afraid. Not fearful, you understand, _cara_, but--let me say--aware of responsibility--immense responsibility."

Lily felt that she, too, must look serious, in sympathy, and regretfully realized that Aunt Clo was about to rise abstractedly from the table, although her niece greatly desired another breakfast roll. Sometimes, interested in discussion, Aunt Clo would sit over a meal interminably, her elbows on the table, her hands supporting her keen, handsome face. At others, she would rise impatiently, flinging her napkin to the ground, and appearing regardless of the incompleteness of her niece's meal.

Lily had never yet found the necessary courage to remain in her place and continue stolidly to eat. Aunt Clo had a curious faculty for throwing into relief the grossness of material needs.

She now stood at the open window and addressed Lily slowly and sadly.

"Little one, do you know what it is to see a frail, foolish, lovely butterfly dashing itself against a lighted globe? To seek desperately to turn it elsewhere, to set it free into the cool, dark night outside--and yet to see it return again and again in search of its own destruction?"

Lily nodded. She always found it difficult to reply adequately in words when Aunt Clo became, as she often did, metaphorical.

"I go," said Miss Stellenthorpe, her hands extended, palms uppermost, "I go to try and deliver the butterfly from the lamp to-day. I can tell you no more, my Lily."

She left the house with the same mixture of portentous foreboding and exhilaration in her bearing, saying to Lily in farewell, as though her new simile still pleased her:

"Who knows but that I myself may come back with singed wings! Not for nothing has one the privilege of spending oneself upon others!"

"I hope it will be all right," said Lily--inadequately, she felt, as usual.

Aunt Clo also appeared to be conscious of the inadequacy, for she replied very gravely indeed:

"Ah! That is what it can never be. _Addio!_" She waved her hand above her head and strode away, clad in the blue jersey and the knickerbockers which she never discarded in the day-time, except when proceeding on a sight-seeing expedition to Rome.

Lily turned back into the house, and felt rather guilty because she was relieved by the prospect of spending a whole day in solitude, free from the slight tension of spirit that always assailed her in the lofty atmosphere wherein Aunt Clo seemed usually to exist. She felt still more guilty a little later on, when she went in search of a book.

Aunt Clo had recommended several volumes to her niece from the many, bearing the stamp of the London Library, that lay about the house.

"Pater," had said Aunt Clo. "Incredible that you have not yet made acquaintance with the beloved Pater! Or Fénelon. Do you know Fénelon? Then there is the little '_Cinque-cento_' series--light, of course, but full of appeal. Or you may care for old friends, perhaps--I have Froissard, Ruskin, d'Annunzio--but not in a translation, I fear. Take your choice, _bambina mia_--I make you free of all my most precious companions."

Lily tried hard not to remember Aunt Clo's generous suggestions as she made her way to a small and remote bookcase that she had observed, on the first evening of her arrival at Genazzano, in a corner of the passage. The books were small and old-fashioned looking, and Lily had had no difficulty in discovering that almost all were children's books, that no doubt dated from Aunt Clo's incredible childhood. And Lily liked children's books, just as she liked toys, and sweets, and other babyish diversions, and she was just as profoundly ashamed of the one predilection as of the other.

She had read the volumes pressed upon her by Aunt Clo, and had liked one or two of them, whilst finding the majority strangely wearisome, but all the time there had lurked at the back of her mind a longing recollection of those children's books that were never taken from the shelf.

She knew that she would really enjoy them much more than even the novels conceded to her youthful tastes by Aunt Clo: "Jude the Obscure," "Daisy Miller," and "Sandra Belloni," none of which she had felt herself able to appreciate, or even to understand.

It was all part of that old sense that she was not a real, live person at all, but only a little girl pretending.

The relief of dropping the pretence was undeniable. Lily chose "The Little Duke" because it had pictures, a book called "The Magic Beads" because she liked the name, and a volume of fairy-tales because she always loved fairy-tales. She took them out into the garden.

She was a little bit ashamed of herself, because she felt so happy, knowing that it was childish pleasure in the story-books, and the sunniness of the day and her own feeling of freedom, that made her happy.

She had so often been told that happiness is the attribute of youth that she believed it, although she herself was young and not particularly happy. And as she had also heard youth spoken of contemptuously, or else with amused patronage, Lily had retained an impression that happiness was something slightly to be despised, especially when springing from trivial causes.

She had lunch by herself and kept "The Magic Beads" propped open on the table in front of her, and ate several more of the enormous purple figs than she would have eaten had Aunt Clo, with her superhuman indifference to food, been sitting, very erect and animated, opposite to her.

The afternoon was even lazier and more blissful than the morning had been, the joy of it somehow enhanced as it became more liable to interruption. But Miss Stellenthorpe had not returned by five o'clock. Evidently the butterfly was showing determination, in its pursuit of the flame.

It was nearly six o'clock when Lily heard sounds that caused her to bestow the three small and shabby volumes into her work-bag, which she had guiltily extracted from disuse from the bottom of her trunk for the purpose, and hasten to the little iron gate in welcome.

Aunt Clotilde was not alone, and she looked, if possible, even more exhilarated than she usually looked after some particularly strenuous exertion.

"_Ecco!_ I return with a friend, my Lily!"

Was this the butterfly, or the lamp?

Lily at once rejected the former hypothesis, and felt doubtful even of the latter, as she exchanged greetings with Aunt Clo's friend.

He was a very tall Englishman, in whose long face Lily discovered some freakish resemblance to a good-looking camel, and he had small, tawny eyes that twinkled, and very crisp curly hair, touched with iron-grey. His shoulders were so broad and his carriage so erect that even Aunt Clo seemed unimposing beside him.

Lily did not learn his name at once, since Miss Stellenthorpe had merely waved their introduction with both hands, and since throughout the evening she called the visitor either "Amico," "my very dear Friend," or "Mon cher."

It appeared that Aunt Clo's very dear friend was serving on a Royal Commission for the investigation of something unspecified, that compelled him to sojourn in Rome, now a hot and arid desert.

"But della Torre, you know the young Marchese della Torre, of course? Well, he is actually kind enough to stay on in a corner of the Palazzo della Torre, and make me his guest. What a good fellow he is--I met him once or twice in England, that's all--and now he turns up trumps like this! Isn't he a brick?"

The hearty English colloquialisms positively rang through the little room still vibrant with the cosmopolitan inversions and polished elegancies of Aunt Clo's habitual speech. Aunt Clo, however, was more animated than ever, and commented vivaciously several times upon the good fortune that had brought about the encounter with her friend.

"Would that I could offer you the hospitality of _mon toit de chaumière, amico_! But alas! even my grey hairs would not protect me from the tongues of _ce bon Genazzano_. I dare not do it," cried Aunt Clo in humorous despair. "But we meet again, is it not so?"

"I hope so! I should hope so indeed. Won't you and your niece come in one morning, and let us do some sight-seeing together, and then perhaps you will allow me to have the pleasure of giving you lunch at the Grand Hotel?"

He addressed himself to Miss Stellenthorpe, but after her gracious and sprightly acceptance of the invitation, the Englishman's kindly, twinkling gaze turned triumphantly to Lily.

She smiled at him shyly and almost involuntarily, attracted by his eagerness and simplicity, and perhaps by the manifest admiration in his glance. "Why not to-morrow?" he cried. "Do come in to-morrow. What could we go and look at to-morrow?"

"Why not San Pietro?" said Aunt Clo.

"As a matter of fact, I've been there already," said the guest with great simplicity. "But by all means----"

"_Amico_," said Aunt Clo, with some severity in her voice, "you do not see San Pietro in one visit--nor yet in two, nor perhaps two hundred. _Je vous donne rendezvous_ at the Bronze Door at eleven to-morrow morning. _Va bene?_"

Lily looked forward to the proposed excursion and hoped that the Marchese would be as agreeable as was his friend.

She learnt from Aunt Clo that the name of the latter was Nicholas Aubray, that she had met him first in Paris, several years ago, and had then personally demonstrated to him the beauties of the Louvre.

"Not altogether a Philistine," said Aunt Clo thoughtfully. "There are possibilities there, my Lily; undoubtedly, possibilities. _Ce bon Nicholas!_ I wonder what he finds in common with Giulio della Torre!"

Lily wondered too, when she met the Marchese della Torre on the following morning. He looked much younger than did Mr. Aubray, was extremely good-looking in an elegant pink-and-bronze style, and was meticulously clad in a beautifully-cut grey suit, with a soft shirt, a pink tie, pink socks, and shining brown boots. Miss Stellenthorpe's acquaintance with him was slight, she had told her niece, but she addressed him as della Torre, in Continental fashion, and extended the back of her hand for him to kiss. The Marchese also kissed Lily's hand, and she fancied that she saw amusement lurking in Nicholas Aubray's long, lean face.

She had expected that Aunt Clo, as usual, would live up to her rôle of _connaisseuse_ in Beauty, and would deliver eloquent and pungently-worded dissertations upon the more eclectic subjects for admiration that surrounded them.

But it speedily became astoundingly evident that Aunt Clo's erudition was out-matched. Lily and Mr. Aubray, obediently waiting to be told what they might admire, found themselves overlooked in the clash of conflicting authorities. The Marchese gracefully countered all Miss Stellenthorpe's artistic and historical allusions with others even more recondite, and appeared to have command of ejaculatory phrases in at least six languages to her three.

"Michelangelo--_il maestro_!" said Aunt Clo reverently, gazing up at the dome.

"You forget Bramante!" cried the Marchese in tones of courteous anguish. "_Aïe!_ you forget Bramante!"

"Most certainly I do not forget Bramante," said Aunt Clo with dignified annoyance. "But I put the Maestro first."

The Marchese bowed with a gesture that far outdid, in its appreciative humility, the tone of Aunt Clo's tribute, through which an undeniable asperity had pierced.

"_E le due San Gallo?_" murmured the Marchese.

"Penuzzi!" Aunt Clo retorted with flashing eyes.

"Rosellino," said the Marchese politely, but securing the last word, since Miss Stellenthorpe had nothing ready with which to defeat the recollection of Rosellino.

"Your aunt is a wonderful person," said Nicholas Aubray in lowered tones to Lily. "She knows everything about Art, I suppose?"

"Yes, I suppose she does."

"She and della Torre must revel in one another's company. He's a most artistic fellow, very well read and full of information. I knew they'd have a lot in common."

At the triumph in his tone, Lily turned to look at him. He was evidently not in the least ironical, but full of genuine pride and satisfaction at an encounter which he obviously accepted entirely at its face value.

Lily felt momentarily ashamed of her own secret inclination to detect a concealed and embittered resentment at the other's pretensions on the part of either of the two exponents of Art.

She was half puzzled and half attracted by that characteristic simplicity of Nicholas Aubray's, that, to her more critical perceptions, was later on to account for his curiously limited capacity to judge correctly of his fellow-creatures, and that so oddly counteracted his unmistakable shrewdness of mind.

She found in him a very sympathetic companion, as they wandered together round the interior of the immense building, leaving behind them fragmentary echoes of the sprightly Spanish proverbs with which the Marchese appeared to be countering Aunt Clo's interpolated French exclamations and Latin quotations.

There was a feeling of relaxation in freely pointing out certain obvious glories and universally acknowledged masterpieces, such as Aunt Clo regarded as only to be commented upon by the general public, and Lily felt it to be even more of a relief when Mr. Aubray calmly suggested, at the end of half an hour, that they should go outside and wait for the others.

"You'll get tired, if you stand about for so long in the heat," he observed matter-of-factly, and with a consideration to which she had, at Genazzano, become unused.

They sat down outside in the shade, and instead of abstract and impassioned discourse upon all that Beauty stood for, Lily found herself embarked upon such trivial and comfortable personalities as she could not help welcoming, after the long course of unbroken conversational altitudes upon which her hostess habitually promenaded her.

Nicholas Aubray actually seemed to think that anything about herself was interesting!

She told him about her home and about Bridgecrap, and he laughed whole-heartedly when she confessed that she was no good at games, and seemed to think it of so little account that Lily was encouraged to make a daring confession.

"Sometimes I read children's books--just because I enjoy them. It makes me feel as though I was only pretending to be grown up, you know."

"Oh, you splendid person! I think that's simply ripping!"

"You don't think I ought to be ashamed of it?" cried Lily, delightedly conscious that he did not.

"Good heavens, no! I think it's splendid. Why shouldn't you like children's books? I read fairy-tales myself and enjoy them immensely."

"Do you really?" Lily was enchanted.

"Tell me some more about yourself," begged Nicholas Aubray warmly, and Lily was young enough to respond candidly to the invitation.

"We must make some more of these expeditions," was the conclusion reached by Mr. Aubray, when he and Lily had spent an hour in eager conversation eminently satisfactory to them both.

"I was a good deal bored at having to stay on and on here, excellent fellow though della Torre is, but this meeting with you and your aunt has made all the difference in the world. You'll come with me again, won't you?"

"Oh, I should love to!"

"Hurrah!" He looked quite boyishly delighted, and flung his hat into the air and caught it again.

"Now what about lunch? Food--food! I'm starving!"

He reiterated the announcement with the same unabashed exuberance to Aunt Clo herself, having returned into the Cathedral, to Lily's rather awed astonishment, for the express purpose of summoning her away.

"Come along, come along. We want our meal!"

He was just as vehemently enthusiastic about their excellent and prolonged luncheon at the Grand Hotel as he had been about St. Peter's or in denunciation of Lily's deprecatory confessions of her athletic short-comings.

Aunt Clo's own vitality, to the strength of which she often made carelessly thankful allusion, was as nothing beside that of Nicholas Aubray.

But to-day, Aunt Clo appeared to have fallen rather below her usual standards of high-spirited graciousness and gallantry of intellect.

She even said "_Ay di me!_" in a rather wearied fashion as she sank into a chair.

"I'm afraid you are quite tired out," solicitously said the Marchese, in his fluent English idiom.

"I am not easily wearied of body," returned Miss Stellenthorpe, smiling sombrely.

"Food--that's what we all want!" Nicholas Aubray declared. "I may not always be hungry, but thank God I'm greedy, as the man said in _Punch_."

He laughed heartily at the hackneyed jest, and Lily noted with a slight feeling of disappointment that his laugh was perhaps the least attractive thing about him. It came too frequently, although always spontaneously, and was what the French call _saccadé_ in character. Moreover, his laughter at his own indifferent humour, rooted more often in light-heartedness than in wit, was over-prolonged.

An adjournment for rest at the Palazzo della Torre was politely suggested by the Marchese, and Lily rather hoped that the invitation might be accepted, but Miss Stellenthorpe again gravely repudiated any suggestion of fatigue.

"But you make the siesta, surely?" cried the Marchese, astonished.

"Never," said Aunt Clo austerely.

The stately proclamation of her own immunity from the prevalent custom of an afternoon sleep during the hot weather, appeared somehow to restore to Aunt Clo her usual equanimity.

She bade an agreeable farewell to the two men, by whom an expedition to Frascati was proposed for the following week.

"We'll make a picnic of it," cried Nicholas Aubray joyously. "Take plenty of sandwiches and things, and eat them under the trees."

But even Nicholas Aubray's needless insistence upon the grosser aspects of the day's requirements did not, as Lily half feared, cause Miss Stellenthorpe to flinch.

"I'm glad," said she graciously that evening at Genazzano, "very glad to do all in my power _pour égayer un peu les choses_ for Nicholas Aubray. Tell me, my Lily, how did our friend strike you?"

"I liked him very much."

"Liked!" Aunt Clo shrugged away the conventional phrase in her most characteristic fashion.

"How significant that contrast was, _n'est-ce pas_? The frankly _bourgeois_ enthusiasm of our friend--his _naif_ admiration for the obvious--and then that affectation of preciseness, that pedantic effrontery of young della Torre! It amused me, Lily--it amused me greatly."

Aunt Clo's mouth took on an embittered curve at the recollection.

"Let me recommend you to cultivate that young man rather more, _bambina_, when next our quartette sallies forth in company. He repays study, I assure you. Besides," added Aunt Clo with some acidity of tone, "I will not conceal from you that a whole day spent in listening to so much youthful arrogance would try my nerves considerably. He is your contemporary, my Lily. I shall leave you to deal with him."

Lily felt vaguely sorry to hear it.

"He is much younger than Mr. Aubray, isn't he?" she asked.

"By at least ten years, I should imagine," said her aunt emphatically. "Nicholas Aubray must be nearing forty. But the heart of a boy still. _Ce cher Nicholas!_ He should have married, as I have often told him. Now della Torre, who could well learn rather more of life in the wider, bigger sense of the word, is actually in search of a wife, as I know. But fools have ever rushed in----"

Aunt Clo ended with raised eyebrows and a sigh, leaving no doubt, in Lily's mind, that her own destined rôle in the Frascati expedition was that of recipient of the Marchese's polished conversation.

Perhaps her efforts were not sufficiently decided.

Perhaps Nicholas Aubray, with a certain joyful obtuseness that he was disconcertingly apt to display when dealing with the human equation, still triumphantly furthered the intercourse of the two fine spirits between whom he had elected to find so rare an affinity. Perhaps, as Lily herself suspected, the Marchese liked a youthful and ignorant hearer less well than one with whom discussion was at least possible, even if unprofitable. At all events, he explained Frascati to Miss Stellenthorpe, and twice informed her that she had been misinformed regarding the remote ancestry of the family of Aldobrandini, while Lily and Nicholas Aubray loitered beneath the trees, and Nicholas told Lily that he lived by himself in London and was often very lonely.

"But to you, I suppose, I seem almost old. Too old to want new friends?" he asked her with a wistful air of desiring contradiction, and at the same time throwing out his broad chest and straightening his always straight shoulders with obviously unconscious vanity.

Lily remembered her father. He was over fifty, and she certainly did not look upon him as being old, if only because she knew that he would have regarded the application of such an adjective from a child to a parent as being both disrespectful and disloyal.

Nicholas Aubray was at least twelve years younger than Philip Stellenthorpe.

She reassured him whole-heartedly and was gratified at the satisfaction in his face, which he displayed with the frankness of a child.

"I thought you and I would be pals, somehow, from the first moment we met. Don't you think it's a great thing to have a pal?"

Lily felt herself to be unreasonable for intensely disliking the word that he had selected.

"That's a word I like--_pal_!" said Nicholas Aubray, striking one hand into the palm of the other. "Isn't it a splendid, hearty sort of word? That's what I should really like _us_ to be--regular _pals_."

There was silence between them for the fraction of a moment, and then he added wistfully: "You don't think it's cheek of me to suggest it--you don't think it's absurd, at my age?"

On the instant, his odd, intermittent appeal made itself acutely felt once more.

"I should like it," said Lily, flushing. "I--I think it's an honour for me."

"No, no--it's all the other way round. What a splendid thing life is! Don't you think it's splendid, on a day like this, when one's just struck a bargain like ours? Real pals--that's what you and I are going to be. I can't tell you how much it's going to mean to me. Of course, you've got heaps of friends of your own age already I suppose. Perhaps there's even----"

He paused.

"I haven't any business to ask, I suppose. But since we're to be pals, you won't mind. You know I'm not asking from impertinent curiosity, but from very keen interest in anything that belongs to you." His voice had become very serious.

"Tell me whether there's anybody very special, that you take a--a great interest in, won't you?"

"No, there isn't," said Lily in a low voice. She did not feel humiliated by the unromantic admission, because she was acutely aware that it would somehow intensely gratify her listener.

She heard him exhale a long breath.

"Do you know that's a relief to me! I was somehow certain you were going to say that there was some young spark--and somehow I didn't want there to be."

He burst out laughing.

"There's no fool like an old fool, is there? I want my new-found little pal to myself, you know. I don't want to share her thoughts with some young blood at Oxford or God knows where----"

He went on laughing, in catches, long after Lily felt that her own faint smile had died upon her lips.