Chapter XI

When Lily left Italy, it was with the definite certainty that Nicholas Aubray meant to ask her to marry him.

It appeared that he had discussed his intentions openly with Aunt Clo, who spoke of him to Lily on the evening that preceded her departure from Genazzano.

"Developments unlooked for indeed," said Aunt Clo with a whimsical smile. "But tell me--the idea does not displease you, little one?"

She looked at her niece with an air of interested enquiry as she spoke, but went on talking herself before Lily had time to reply.

"May and December, perhaps! Or so it seems to the youthful eyes of May. But there are worse alliances than that--many, many worse. And some natures, of which it seems to me, my Lily, that yours is one, demand less than others. Those are the happy ones!"

Aunt Clo sighed tempestuously and flung a hand across her eyes. It was evident that she did not count herself one of that favoured band amongst whom she assigned place to her niece.

"The temperament that seeks, and gives, passionately, is not one that I could wish you. _Qui dit aimer, dit souffrir._ Never were words more true! nor, perhaps, had any woman better cause than I to know it."

Miss Stellenthorpe groaned slightly and, having made the inevitable personal application so irresistible in discussing the affairs of others, was able to resume, with her quick, brilliant smile:

"But it is not of myself that I want to speak, _mignonne_! I ceased, long ago, to look upon myself save as a helper, a soul with experience and tenderness behind it, to stretch out a hand and aid the unknowing, the struggling, the unlearned, the _young_. For myself--_che sarà sarà!_ But for you, my Lily, what is it to be?"

"I--I don't know," said Lily, very lamely indeed.

Aunt Clo looked more omniscient than ever, as she gazed at her niece.

"So undeveloped a little soul, is it?" she mused tolerantly. "Love would do much for you, little one--perhaps all."

"But I don't feel sure that--that I'm at all in love," Lily faltered foolishly.

Inwardly she was asking herself with bewilderment why it was that she could not speak sincerely about this thing to Aunt Clotilde. Perhaps it was because it was impossible not to feel that Aunt Clotilde was a good deal more interested in her own analytical dissection of the situation than in the people primarily concerned.

At all events, Lily found Miss Stellenthorpe of small assistance to her, and she had been too thoroughly imbued with the doctrine of distrust of her own instincts to consider the possibility of solving her own problems without extraneous advice. She did not want to consult Philip, because he was her father, and she took it for granted that he would therefore take her decision upon himself, with a strong bias in favour of any course least advocated by herself. Theoretically, Lily had been taught that parents sacrificed everything for their children. Practical experience of Philip's and of Eleanor's anxious, tender tyranny and immutable conviction of their own omnipotence no less than omniscience, in all matters concerning their offspring, had quite unconsciously led her to the opposite conclusion.

She thought timidly of consulting her old schoolmistress, Miss Melody. Had not Miss Melody put herself and all her experience at Lily's disposal, and had she not declared that girls who had been once under her charge at school still turned to her for help and counsel that she gladly and proudly gave?

With this species of mental reservation to strengthen her, Lily left Genazzano without making any definite confidence to Aunt Clo.

"I don't really feel as if I knew my own mind, just now," she said apologetically, and not altogether untruly.

"Ah, _jeunesse_!" smiled Miss Stellenthorpe. "Certainly, child of my heart, you do not love as yet--if you can ask yourself for a moment: _Do I love?_ then it is certain you do not. But it will come--it will come. If not Nicholas, then another. But I think--however, I had best not tell you what I think! Only remember that it is not given to everyone to inspire love in so gallant a gentleman as is Nicholas Aubray. '_Sans peur et sans reproche_'--those words often come to my mind when I think of Nicholas!"

"I like him very much," said Lily, more and more feebly, as Aunt Clo's periods overwhelmed her more and more with the sense of her own utter inadequacy.

Aunt Clotilde's smile became more pronounced, and also more deeply imbued with delicate and patronizing scorn.

"Well, well--the little 'like' may develop into a little 'love'--who knows? You need fear nothing tempestuous, nothing overwhelming, my Lily. Yours is not the passionate temperament. Don't look discomfited, child. I mean nothing derogatory--perhaps I envy you, in certain moments of soul weariness--_chi lo sa?_ But I mean nothing unkind--nothing belittling. Only with me, as you know, Truth is a veritable obsession--entire frankness."

Lily was left with the subconscious suspicion that Aunt Clo's obsession for entire frankness was principally indulged in the direction of an unsparing candour with regard to the deficiencies of other people.

She did not resent Miss Stellenthorpe's diagnosis of her niece's emotional capacities as superficial. With all but the very lowest strata of her consciousness, she was inclined to endorse it. It was less trouble, even if rather less flattering to one's vanity, to take for granted the slightness of one's own demands upon life--and happiness--which latter Lily instinctively thought of as synonymous with love.

She replied to Nicholas Aubray's letters, which came often, with friendly, rather self-conscious epistles, answering his frequent, "Tell me about yourself, little pal," with rather laboriously enthusiastic accounts of her reading, her expeditions to Roman churches and ruins, her impressions of life at Genazzano.

Nicholas had said to her: "I've been told that I write rather good letters. I don't know whether I do or not, but anyhow I shall like writing to you, and I shall just put down anything that comes into my head--as though we were talking."

She found the letters he wrote to her delightful productions, full of an indescribable spirit of spontaneity, and was fully aware of the immaturity that characterized her own replies.

There were not many personalities in their correspondence, but Nicholas, towards the end of each letter, told Lily that he missed her companionship--that he looked forward very much to the time when he should see her again. Lily wondered rather tremulously when that time would come, and specially how it would be viewed by her father.

She tormented herself with various derogatory speeches that she put into Philip's mouth.

"My little pet, you mustn't talk nonsense ... little people of your age don't have proposals from grown-up men, you know.... I shall tell this Mr. Aubray that I can't have him writing to you like this ... a hole-and-corner correspondence...."

No! Even one's father could never say that. Nicholas Aubray had been as punctilious as Philip himself, and had obtained Aunt Clo's sanction to the correspondence before embarking upon it.

Lily wondered whether Aunt Clo, first and last, had acted upon her own initiative, without any reference at all to Philip.

If so, he would still be in complete ignorance of the cataclysmic fact that Lily's whole destiny was shortly to be decided. She phrased it thus to herself in an unconscious attempt to safeguard the dignity of the situation, that she felt would be threatened by Philip's habitual treatment of her as a very young and irresponsible child.

Philip's first greeting of her dissolved the fear, and left her with a wondering sense of intense gratification. True to his life-long restrictions, nothing was put into words, but Lily was at no pains to account for the new pride and pleasure in her that was suddenly displayed by her father.

He openly praised her looks, and said once or twice that "Aunt Clo's accounts of her little companion" had given him great pleasure.

His least indirect reference to Lily's new standing as the desired of Nicholas Aubray was made a very few days after her return, as he bade her good-night one evening.

"Good-night, my child. God bless you and give you happiness. I only want you to be very happy, you know. One is young for such a very little while----"

He sighed, but Lily was reflecting, rather humorously, that never before had he hinted at any possible term to the youthfulness upon which he had so often insisted.

Nevertheless, she was touched by his kindness, and by the new pride in her, which she divined in his frequent, half-surreptitious glances at her and occasional wistful smiles.

Very soon she found courage to mention that which she well knew that they both had in mind: the coming of Nicholas Aubray.

"You remember Aunt Clo's friend, that I told you about, Father?" Thus Lily, feeling unaccountably deceitful in so describing Nicholas, although she knew that Philip knew the exact relation in which Nicholas stood, both to Aunt Clo and to herself, and also that he knew her to be quite aware of his knowing.

Such strange and silent interplays of knowledge were uncomfortably frequent in association with Philip Stellenthorpe.

"I mean Mr. Aubray. I think he might rather like to come and--and see us, if you wouldn't mind."

"Not at all," said Philip graciously. "Your friend is quite a distinguished man, my dear child. Did your Aunt Clo speak to you of his career as a barrister?"

"A little."

"Curiously enough, I recently came across a very striking little pamphlet of his on the subject of the Shipping Law. It is a good deal too technical for a woman, but I found it of great interest, and was much struck by the style in which it was written."

Lily was principally conscious of a secret increase of self-esteem because Philip, indirectly, had spoken of her as a woman.

Such small and subtle appeals to vanity gave greater titillation to her spirits than did the anticipation of again meeting Nicholas.

In the interval between their parting at Genazzano and their meeting again, she had viewed the abstract prospect of a possible proposal of marriage from Nicholas with complacency, sometimes even with a thrill of exultation.

She had played, alike, with the ideas of accepting him as lover and future husband, and of refusing him only to find more overwhelming bliss in some dim future with another. In none of her fancies had she ever thought seriously and sincerely, for the reason that she had never been taught to think at all.

When Nicholas Aubray had accepted the invitation and was actually come, his presence alternately brought enjoyment and embarrassment to Lily.

That Philip was pleased with him was evident, and so completely had Lily assimilated the theory that her parent was above criticism, that it did not occur to her to wonder whether the admiration was altogether mutual until Nicholas said to her with rather a rueful smile:

"Your father doesn't very much care for joking, does he?"

"Doesn't he?" said Lily, vaguely surprised.

Philip's occasional jests with his children were of a melancholy and stereotyped kind, but it had not consciously struck Lily that he was deficient in humour.

"I only mean that I was telling him one or two stupid stories after dinner to-night about things I've come across in Court. I daresay I told them clumsily. Please don't think that I'm being impertinent enough to venture the least shadow of criticism. I only thought perhaps I'd been rather clumsy and _mal-à-propos_. You know, I'm awfully keen for your people to like me a little bit, as well as you."

"Of course they will," Lily assured him. "You and Aunt Clo are friends already. But I haven't very many near relations. There's Kenneth, but he's only a little boy."

"Good!" cried Nicholas. "I like little boys. I'm not afraid of them."

He laughed, and Lily laughed, at the preposterous implication, but it was by just such flashing glimpses of an essentially child-like spirit that Nicholas Aubray endeared himself to Lily.

She liked him so much that she would hardly acknowledge to herself the occasional pangs of revulsion suffered by her liking, when his laughter, rather grating and always over-prolonged, seemed to her to be almost unmeaningly provoked, or when his appreciation of the Hardinges, which in itself Lily welcomed, found bewildering expression in its utter lack of coincidence with her own intuitions.

"Miss Janet Hardinge is more silent than the pretty, golden-haired one, isn't she? I should think she was one of those shy, very reserved sort of people, who are easily overwhelmed."

Lily, who had been at school with the unpopular Janet, and knew her to be neither shy nor easily overwhelmed, felt at a loss.

"Which is your friend?"

"I see most of Dorothy now, but the youngest--the one who's still at school--was the one I liked best, Sylvia."

"'Who is Sylvia, what is she?'" quoted Nicholas Aubray, and again his laughter appeared to Lily to be quite inordinate.

With a sort of superficial attempt at impartial candour, she tried to balance Nicholas Aubray's claim to a sense of humour, vaguely aware that such an adjunct must be desirable in the close companionship implied by marriage.

He _had_ a sense of humour.

Many of his stories of experiences in Court, whether appreciated or not by Philip Stellenthorpe, had made Lily laugh. In Italy, they had laughed together over many trivial things. Lily, when amused, had never appealed in vain to him to share in her amusement.

Slightly bewildered, she derided at last that her own sense of humour had need of extension, in order to cover the area of ground whereon Nicholas Aubray found subject for mirth.

She omitted to note that such ground stretched widely on either side of the line of demarcation that divides the subtlety of irony from the obviousness of mere comicality.

Nicholas stayed with the Stellenthorpes for nearly a week, and Lily took him for walks, and played the piano for his loudly expressed admiration, and was both vaguely disappointed and slightly relieved at the impersonality that generally prevailed in their conversations. She actually surmised in Nicholas a certain shyness that he had not shown in Italy, as though he sometimes doubted his own powers of pleasing and attracting her.

It was inevitable that gratified vanity should play a large part in Lily's view of the clever and distinguished man, so much her senior, who sought to win her favour with a diffidence that filled her with wonder.

Philip's manner towards his daughter had also altered, and on the day preceding the last one of Nicholas Aubray's visit, it needed only her father's pleased yet anxious glances towards herself, and in the tone in which he said: "Why not stay in this afternoon, Lily? I don't like that little cough of yours," to convey to Lily that the two men were to hold a conversation together, and that although she was not to be present at it, her father desired to make sure of her presence in the house. She acquiesced, as she had all her life acquiesced in his obliquely conveyed wishes, in part from the inculcated habit of obedience, and in part from her own moral cowardice.

"I think I shall sit over the fire in the library. Shall we have tea there? It's much warmer than the hall."

"Certainly. We'll join you there."

This time Nicholas, as well as Philip, cast a glance at her that seemed to bear unspoken meanings.

Lily's afternoon in the library was not a reposeful one.

She tried at first to feel pleasure in her own undoubted resemblance to the heroine of a novel. Situation and setting were alike traditional. No doubt Nicholas Aubray was at that moment asking formal assent of her father to the right of proposing to her.

Lily stifled at birth a rebellious fancy that she might have preferred less formality and more impetuosity from her lover.

Her upbringing, assigning to parents a right little less than divine over their children, and her sense that Nicholas scarcely belonged to her own generation, alike enabled her to view his method of procedure as the desirable outcome of his scrupulous chivalry.

She played for a little while with fancies that she herself qualified as childish, concerning a diamond ring, the excitement of telling the Hardinges that she was engaged, and the glory of being married at twenty.

Mrs. Aubray--she would be Mrs. Aubray!

Lily Aubray.

She wrote it down and looked at it, feeling more than ever like the heroine of a novel. Then Lily suddenly told herself that it was her duty to face this question--and again had to stifle an unwelcome idea that the time for facing it had already passed when she had first suggested to her father the visit of Nicholas Aubray. It was extraordinary, the difficulty of facing the question.

Her mind kept wandering to trivial considerations, and she rehearsed to herself the imaginary speeches that Nicholas might make. She could not focus her thoughts at all to the point of supplying her own answers.

"But I must know whether I mean to accept or to refuse him!" Lily expostulated with herself.

She remembered the accepted convention that no woman need allow a man to offer her marriage in so many words if she intends to humiliate him by a refusal.

"A nice girl can always stave off the actual proposal, and make the man understand that it's no use," Dorothy Hardinge had once seriously informed her.

But Lily did not now feel that any amount of subtle "niceness" on her part could possibly stave off a declaration which had got so far as to receive the sanction of her father.

Staring into the fire, she thought that she was making up her mind when she told herself resolutely: "Now, I must decide once and for all whether I'm in love with him or not."

Aunt Clo's words--almost the only ones that had remained with her out of the many so lavishly scattered for her benefit--returned to Lily with a sense of uneasiness.

"If you can ask yourself for a moment, _Do I love?_ then it is certain that you do not...."

Lily did not want to think that it was certain that she did not love Nicholas Aubray.

There were times when she did love him, she felt convinced. She was less certain whether she was "in love" with him.

Oddly enough, the memory of the boy Colin Eastwood recurred to her again and again, not by value of his own personality, but as the object round which certain infinitely vague and delicate emotions had centred.

"But they were such little things," Lily murmured to herself, frowning.

It had mattered whether or no Colin had the place next to hers at the picnics--whether, in exchanging good-nights at the end of a moonlight walk, his last "good-night" had been for her--whether they were partners in the tennis tournament or not--whether they danced the last waltz of the evening together. If he was in the garden while the rest of them were clustered round Lily at the piano, she acknowledged a slight feeling of restlessness that consciously vanished at his footstep--which she could always distinguish--on the threshold of the French window.

It had, somehow, been an incident in the day, if he touched her hand in helping her up some steep bank, or in handing her a tennis ball. Philip's unspecified, but thoroughly understood, condemnation of the whole slight episode had relegated it to the extreme background of Lily's consciousness. It had become foolish, something to be slightly despised--on account, she supposed of Colin's youthfulness and the negative property described by her father as "leading to nothing."

Nicholas Aubray, so much her senior, "led to" something. In some ways, Lily felt that he understood her, and like all young and over-sensitive souls, she craved to be understood.

Nicholas had understood about her liking childish things--he had even appeared to share her tastes. She knew, instinctively, that they had, mentally, much in common.

It was impossible to imagine everyday life lived with Colin Eastwood; but with Nicholas Aubray she could picture to herself a life of companionship, of books and theatres, and friends shared by them both.

"I might have a baby," Lily reflected, after deciding that she would like to live in London.

It pleased her to reflect how fond Nicholas was of children, and it was quite easy to picture him with the blue-eyed baby of Lily's own most private fancies.

Whereas the thought of Colin Eastwood as a husband and father seemed absurd--almost indecent. He belonged to a dream world.

The little things that had seemed to matter so much belonged to the dream world too.

It had certainly never seemed important whether or no Nicholas sat next to her at tea-time, nor had she any particular recollection of ever distinguishing his footfall from that of the Marchese della Torre, or her father's or Cousin Charlie Hardinge's.

The new and mysterious instincts, conjured momentarily into being during a midsummer holiday, had nothing to do with Real Life.

For a moment, Lily visualized strange possibilities, of that dream world inextricably interwoven with Real Life, in such fashion as could never be realized through the medium either of Colin's personality or of Nicholas Aubray's.

"Body, soul and spirit----"

Words, somewhere read, floated across her mind, implying something of union scarcely apprehended, to the very existence of which she had no clue, save only that most deep-rooted instinct which she had been taught to ignore and to distrust. Like a clarion call across the faint stirrings of an all but extinguished breath of life, came the rousing echo of Miss Melody's teaching, impressed by many repetitions:

"No day-dreams, childie! Beware of that imagination of yours--don't let yourself get morbid...."

Morbid! That was the word--the terrible, degrading word, that was never analyzed, which was applied to private thought and the construction of private ideals. They were morbid.

Lily regarded it as a sign of grace that this timely recollection caused her to feel ashamed. She rallied to the call of Miss Melody's wisdom.

"I shan't decide anything in a hurry. I ought to make sure, and so I'll ask him to let me give him an answer in a little while. And perhaps I'll go and stay at Bridgecrap and see Miss Melody and talk to her--it will help me to get my thoughts thoroughly clear, if I put them into words. There's nothing to be at all frightened of--I needn't do anything I don't like--I'm a free agent. I mustn't be morbid."

Lily felt braced and relieved, when she had thus discovered that a line of least resistance still existed, and that the facing of a direct issue might still be postponed, and perhaps almost altogether avoided, by shifting the onus of decision on to Miss Melody's advice.

She trembled very much when Nicholas, late in the afternoon, came and joined her, standing over the great armchair into which she had sunk back.

It seemed to her, that he, too, was nervous as she looked up at him speechlessly.

"I've had a--a very nice talk with your father," he said at last. "I've been talking to him about something which is more important to me than anything else in the world, just now."

Nicholas paused and Lily saw that he, also, was shaking a little.

At the same moment he dropped on to one knee beside her and laid his hand over hers.

"Lily dear," said Nicholas Aubray, speaking with great simplicity, "you know that I'm very much in love with you. Could you care for me enough to be my wife?"

Instead of the exultation of mind she had expected to experience on hearing this, her first proposal, Lily felt an odd inclination to tears. She looked down at Nicholas.

"Do you really want me to?" she asked him falteringly, and like a child.

A sudden laugh flickered in his gaze as it met hers.

"You dear child! Of course I do. Do you think I don't mean it? Why, Lily, I've thought of nothing else since those very first days in Italy."

He looked at her wistfully.

"Do I seem to you too old, my dear? I do love you so much. I think I could make you very happy."

"But you--could I ever--you must think of your happiness too----" said Lily incoherently. "Oh, please, will you let me think it over for a little while and write to you?"

"Then you'd like me to go away to-morrow, back to London?" said Nicholas slowly.

Lily felt ashamed and sorry as she saw the disappointment in his face, but she nodded an assent.

"It must be just as you like, my dear, of course. I could hardly have hoped for anything else, perhaps." He rose to his feet again.

His face was very much overcast as he stood silent, in front of the fire.

Suddenly he threw back his head and squared his shoulders with the gesture she had so often seen, and gave a little laugh.

"Never say die, eh, Lily? You know, I shan't take no for an answer very easily. Tell me, dear, you do like me a little, don't you?"

"Very, very much."

"Then won't you trust me to look after you, and make you happier than you've ever been? I believe I could, Lily."

"I do trust you. Only--it's too serious," said Lily timidly. "I want to make sure that--that I care, too."

There was a silence. Then Nicholas Aubray said abruptly:

"You're right, my dear. You shall have time, all the time you want. But can't you give me a little hope, meanwhile?"

His response to her appeal had moved Lily to that intensity of gratitude and admiration that his chivalry could always evoke in her. The sudden, warm recognition of his generosity roused the like impulses in herself.

"I think it will be all right," she said naïvely.

"You little darling!"

On the instant all his gravity had vanished and he wore the aspect of buoyancy that contrasted so effectively with his grizzled head and broad shoulders.

"There's something I want now, Lily. I wonder if I shall get it--just to send me back to town happy?"

She looked at him rather apprehensively.

"Please, please don't look so frightened, dear! It wouldn't mean anything you don't want, you know."

"What?"

"Mayn't I kiss you, Lily--once?"

The first impulse of a coquetry in reality foreign to her nature stirred in Lily.

"No one ever has, yet," she said, and smiled.

"I know that, my dear. I was sure of it. You're like your name--a little, untouched flower."

A tiny thrill shot through her at the words, the first approach to direct love-making that she had ever heard addressed to herself. She felt sorry when the characteristic British reaction against an open expression of sentiment came swiftly from Nicholas.

"You see, you're actually making me poetical!" he exclaimed, with a hastiness that obviously covered a certain confusion, and if his ensuing laugh was jerky and over-prolonged, it needed but little intuition this time to attribute it to scarcely disguised nervousness.

"What did Father say?" Lily asked, in reality speaking almost at random so that he should stop that unamused, spasmodic laughter.

"He was very kind to me, and gave me leave to come down here whenever I like. So you see, I can come for my answer as soon as you like to send for me. But you're a little fraud, my dear, to turn the conversation like that! Will you let me have _one_ thing to remember?"

He was looking full at her with ardent and yet kindly eyes.

Lily nodded faintly.

As he bent over her she raised her head a little and turned her face sideways to him, closing her eyes. For the fraction of a second Nicholas Aubray hesitated, and then stooped and kissed her very softly on the cheek.

She wondered why, as he straightened himself again, he laughed--this time very low and gently.