Chapter XV

Something which could hardly be called a reconciliation, but which was gracefully apostrophized by Miss Clotilde Stellenthorpe as a _rapprochement_, took place between Philip and his sister after Lily's marriage.

Philip would neither admit that they had ever been estranged, nor that the undoubted fact that Lily owed her acquaintance with Nicholas Aubray to her aunt, was in any way connected with their renewal of intercourse.

It needed Miss Stellenthorpe to carry off the situation with what she would herself certainly have described as _désinvolture_.

"My good, my excellent Philip!" she cried in tones of patronage. "Well did I know that you could not persist in your undignified sulks for ever. It was more than time that you and I met again."

Her excellent Philip, with every appearance of being seriously annoyed, replied unsmilingly:

"Circumstances have been very much against our meeting, my dear Clo."

His eyes were fixed upon the ground, but it would not have been possible to escape hearing the contemptuous snap of Aunt Clo's thumb and middle finger.

"You still refuse to call a spade a spade," she said with mingled scorn and compassion. "I recognized your old weakness when I received our little one at Genazzano."

"Lily is a good, happy little child, I hope," said Philip quite automatically, making use of the formula that he had always opposed to any criticism of his parental methods.

Aunt Clo shrugged her shoulders.

"She is singularly ill-equipped to encounter life. You ask me why I come to such a conclusion, what I find in our Lily? I find in her an invincible ignorance of the true facts of life, the tendency of an ostrich to hide her head from the light, an entire absence of that frank, free outlook that is the birthright of every thinking soul. I find her wrapped in the conventionalities and sentimentalities of a bygone age."

Philip remained perfectly silent, but Miss Stellenthorpe was not thereby debarred from carrying on a spirited conversation.

"Did I then, you enquire, break down the foolish wall of prejudice and ignorance, and show our Lily something of the blue mountains beyond? I reply that I did. My own bigger, wider, clearer vision was what I strove to teach her."

"You gave Lily a most delightful visit to Italy," said Philip in measured tones. "She is very much beholden to you, and so am I. Nicholas Aubray, of course, is an old friend of yours."

"Aha! we turn the conversation!" cried Aunt Clo, with an air of greater shrewdness than was altogether warranted by her penetration of Philip's exceedingly obvious manœuvre.

"_Ce bon Nicholas!_ He will widen the little one's views. You have never taught her to seek for the great things of life, Philip. Perhaps as well! I myself have been storm-tossed and passion-wrecked, and now that the evening has come, I look back upon the day of tempest with a great calm. But all are not fit."

Miss Stellenthorpe shook her head repeatedly, and fixed her gaze upon vacancy.

Philip making no attempt to break the retrospective reverie of his sister, she roused herself from it briskly, with her characteristic laugh, her head flung back.

"But I scarcely know how I came to speak of myself. That is not worthy of either of us. Tell me, my Philip, how goes life with you?"

"I am very well, Clo."

"The body, yes!" cried Aunt Clo with impatient scorn. "But the spirit, the imperishable, the eternal?"

"You know that life is over for me," said Philip, gently and with perfect conviction.

"No!" said Miss Stellenthorpe in a voice like a trumpet-call. And with a still greater effect of emphasis she substituted, "Nay!" a moment later.

"Nay! Can life ever be over while the sun shines, the wind blows, the open road lies before you? Come, my Philip, this is not well!"

Aunt Clo struck a rousing hand between Philip's shoulder-blades.

"_Avanti!_ There is work for us all. Because you have failed once you need not despair."

"Failed?"

"You refused to listen to me--when I bade you face the truth. You deluded yourself with catchwords and pretty phrases, and allowed Vonnie to----"

Philip Stellenthorpe faced his sister with a grey face and compressed lips.

"That will do, Clotilde."

"Ah, coward, coward!" said Miss Stellenthorpe. But she spoke in lower and more doubtful tones and made no immediate attempt to impel her brother to face life with her own unflinching enjoyment of the process.

Her visit upon the whole did not greatly disturb the monotonous and purposeless routine of Philip's days. For many hours at a time Aunt Clo remained invisible, after announcing gravely and with a certain air of sad, steadfast responsibility, that she had many, many letters to write.

"Not idle, trivial notes or pages of foolish gossip, but words of counsel, of cheer to a darkened soul, I trust. There is one _là-bas_, who needs me, needs me greatly. A frail, delicate bird of foreign plumage, dashing its head against the bars of a gilded cage."

Sometimes it was a bird, sometimes a slender bark tossing upon stormy waters, sometimes a pale flower bent before the blast. But always Aunt Clo's support was craved, and always was she ready to devote her time, her energies, her pen-and-ink, to the task.

The Hardinges pursued acquaintance with Aunt Clo with a certain amount of awe, although she was gracious to the three girls and to Dorothy's _fiancé_, as one who watches with benevolence the antics of a tribe of aborigines.

"How young! and ah! how English!" murmured Aunt Clo, with an air of having nothing whatever to do with the nationality in question.

Before Lily and Nicholas Aubray returned from their honeymoon, Aunt Clo had left England again.

"What would you?" she enquired of the interested Hardinges, who listened to her as to an astonishing oracle. "What would you? I cannot breathe in the atmosphere of my brother's house. It has always been so. _Pour moi, il n'y a que la vérité!_ I must have the truth, fearless and outspoken, or I die!"

The Hardinges looked startled.

"What a household, his and poor Eleanor's! You"--Aunt Clo's finger flew out accusingly at Charlie Hardinge--"you were there often, while my sister-in-law was alive?"

"Yes, yes, often enough. The kiddies were badly brought up--badly brought up. I used to tell Philip so."

"I also," said Aunt Clo grimly. "The little Vonnie, now. Well did I see that the child was not destined to live long. I sought to open their eyes--oh, most gently, most kindly--and with what result, you ask? With the result that they declared themselves hurt--they proclaimed me unsympathetic. Me! Ha!"

Aunt Clo gave a short laugh.

"Well, well, well," said Charlie pacifically. "That's all over now, and Lily has a very nice home of her own. I'm sure you must be very proud of your niece, Miss Stellenthorpe. She's a charming girl, and a very pretty girl."

"Lily is as yet a child," said Miss Stellenthorpe, unconsciously quoting her brother.

"I'm glad she has a good husband," said Ethel decisively.

To Ethel's way of thinking, all husbands were good husbands, provided that they were not actively bad husbands.

"Lily is very sweet and gentle," she said, "and very easily influenced. It's a very good thing she married young."

"Easily influenced? Ah! Well, it's at all events a _likeable_ weakness----" graciously returned Aunt Clo, merely resting upon that pleasant sense of superiority engendered by the contemplation of any weakness unshared by the contemplative one.

"I cannot wait to see her, _hêlas!_ There are other claims upon me. Sad, sad, lost ones, groping through a labyrinth," said Aunt Clo darkly.

To the rescue of these straying souls she accordingly hastened.

Lily, settling down into her new life, felt a shamefaced satisfaction that she should escape the slight strain entailed by the effort of living up to Aunt Clotilde's exalted ideals.

It was easier to choose furniture for the drawing-room without the terrible certainty that one's writing-table would be found Philistine, one's colour scheme crude.

Lily enjoyed arranging her possessions, but she was both inexperienced and diffident, and it was a relief to find that Nicholas had eclectic and cultivated tastes.

"Did you invent that sort of panel thing?" said Sylvia Hardinge in awe.

Lily shook her head. She was nearly as much overwhelmed as was Sylvia.

"Nicholas got it. It's Chinese lacquer."

"My goodness!" said Sylvia, with a crispness and crudity of utterance that Lily felt inclined to echo.

Paris had been a curious, transitory stage of dressing up every day, sight-seeing, meeting new people, dining in crowded restaurants. There had all the time been a sense of impermanence, as though it was all a strange experiment that might be relinquished, half regretfully, half with relief, once accomplished.

At first, life in the London flat as Mrs. Aubray, seemed nearly as experimental.

There were a great many new people, already seen in glimpses during that confused and crowded period before the wedding, and scarcely distinguished one from another. Lily turned to Nicholas with a new sense of seeking a comparatively familiar refuge, after a bewildering number of encounters with these kind, strange faces.

Nicholas was out every day now, and Lily first awaited in herself the deplorable state of tearful loneliness that Cousin Ethel had once upon a time described to her as the portion of young wives. But whether because Nicholas, unlike Cousin Ethel's husband, was able and willing to give his wife a subscription to Mudie's Library, or whether because Lily had not been torn from the society of numerous brothers and sisters, no such dejection of spirits assailed her.

Housekeeping seemed to be an extraordinarily simple matter with an experienced cook, admirable servants, and the ample allowance given her by her husband. Lily's most arduous task in her household was the choosing of exquisite and expensive flowers at a Bond Street florist, and disposing them in her drawing-room.

She played a great deal upon the Erard piano, read a great many novels, a little poetry and an occasional volume of memoirs or biography, and tried to think of requirements in needlework that should keep her new maid occupied. It seemed a pleasant, leisurely, rather aimless sort of existence. Not quite what imagination had pictured married life to be.

But Lily shied, mentally, at the fatal word "imagination," the thing which had so often been pointed out to her as a dangerous pitfall.

Kind old aunts of Nicholas, or young married women who, nevertheless, were for the most part older than herself, asked Lily directly or indirectly whether she was happy, and she always assented readily enough.

She had been told that certain things constituted happiness, had been trained to accept her values ready-made, and was consequently able to enjoy with placidity those things which her natural instincts, long since stifled and overlain, would have held in a quite different estimate to that of the people surrounding her.

On Sundays Nicholas was with her all day, and very often they went into the country from Saturday to Monday.

For the first few months after her marriage Lily went to church every Sunday as she had always done, and Nicholas accompanied her. She could hardly have said when it was that she first became aware of his attitude towards religion.

"I wouldn't interfere with anybody's faith, my dear, least of all with yours," said Nicholas, thereby causing his wife, for the first time, to ask herself in what her faith consisted.

"Do you only go to church to please me, then, Nicholas?"

"I like to go anywhere with you, darling."

"But tell me what do you think about religion?"

"I don't know that I know very much about it, my dear. The old aunt who brought me up was a Presbyterian, as I think I told you. I had a good deal of church-going to put up with, as a small lad, and Sunday was a very dull day, when I mightn't play with my toys or get my clothes dirty, and that's pretty well all I know about it."

"And after you grew up, Nicholas?"

"I went through the usual phases, I suppose. I remember telling my tutor, when I left school, that I was an atheist."

Nicholas stopped and looked humorously at his wife, and they both laughed.

"Good! I was beginning to think I'd married a little saint. Atheism is a common complaint amongst the very young, I imagine."

"What are you now, Nicholas?"

"I suppose an agnostic," said Nicholas reflectively. "I can hardly imagine any thoughtful person, over a certain age, being anything else. Though I suppose that's nonsense, when one thinks of the number of deeply religious people that exist in all denominations."

"I suppose you'd call Father a religious man?"

"He ought to have been a Trappist monk," declared Nicholas.

"But that's Roman Catholic! Father is very much prejudiced against Roman Catholics."

"I know he is."

"They have no sense of honour," said Lily seriously.

Nicholas looked at her quizzically.

"How many Catholics have you known, Lily?"

"I was at school at a convent for a very little while, when I was ten, but I certainly didn't get to know anybody there very well. I don't think I should have been allowed to have a Catholic friend."

"Well, I think if I were you I shouldn't judge them quite so severely until you've had some experience of them. I have some very good friends among Catholics, and some of them priests, into the bargain."

Lily looked at her husband, rather bewildered.

"One must respect any sincere form of belief, don't you think?" he said gently, "even though one doesn't happen to share it. It's pure accident that you or I weren't born of Buddhist parents, after all."

"Do you mean that you don't think it matters much what Church one belongs to?"

"I don't think it matters in the least. How can it? The great thing is to try and keep straight, isn't it?"

Nicholas remained meditative for a moment.

"Look here, Lily darling, don't run away with the idea that I want to--to destroy your faith, or any nonsense of that sort. I've never studied these questions, and I don't know anything about theology and all the rest of it. It's quite right you should go to church, and religion is a great comfort to a woman sometimes. I know that."

He nodded with an air of great sagacity.

Lily wondered whether religion would ever be a great comfort to her, should she require comfort. And why should Nicholas specify such comfort as applicable to a woman rather than to a man?

She did not consciously dwell upon the matter for very long, but gradually became accustomed to view the question in the way that her husband evidently did, as a purely temperamental one. It was not long, moreover, before Lily perceived that Nicholas was far from being alone in his point of view. It was shared by the majority of the people belonging to the world in which she now moved with her husband.

On the whole it was a relief to feel that there were other opinions than those held by Philip Stellenthorpe, Ethel Hardinge, or Miss Melody. The friends of Nicholas, indeed, more nearly approximated in their views to the startling enunciations of Aunt Clo, whose unconventionalities of diction soon began to acquire, in the retrospect, a character of the merest commonplace.

Lily sometimes told herself, with a certain amount of secret complacency, that she really was a grown-up Person at last.

It gave her an agreeable sense of dignity to receive in her own house the people who had loomed largest upon the horizon of her childhood.

Miss Melody, allowing herself a summer holiday on the Continent, broke her journey in order to spend an hour or two with her erstwhile pupil, and was frankly captivated by the mingled courtesy and cheery good-fellowship shown towards her by Nicholas.

"He makes me think of Chaucer's 'verrye parfit gentil knyghte,'" she said to Lily. "Childie dear, I feel the better for seeing you in your happiness."

Cousin Ethel, less classically, admitted to deriving similar benefit.

"It does my heart good to see you, Lily! Such a lovely house, and such a splendid husband to take care of you. You're a lucky child."

And Philip:

"This is all very charming, my little pet. You should be very happy and--and thankful."

"Yes, Father."

It did not strike either of them, as Lily made her dutiful response, that even if she had not been happy, it never would have occurred to her to tell her father so.

The months slipped by, and it was a matter of rather pleased surprise to the _naïveté_ of Nicholas Aubray's wife that she and her husband were not confronted by that picturesque episode famed in both art and literature as the First Quarrel.

Cousin Ethel had certainly warned her that there would be "ups and downs," and Lily had taken it for granted that these included occasional minor dissensions between her husband and herself.

"Do you know that Nicholas and I have never had a single quarrel?" she observed to Dorothy Hardinge.

"I shouldn't think anybody would ever dare to quarrel with him. Frank and I have had one."

There was so much of a rather melancholy pride in the announcement that Lily felt justified in enquiring further.

"Oh, it was about my dancing with other people. He wanted me to dance at least every other dance with him, and I wouldn't. He was furious, and for the matter of that, so was I."

"Dorothy! You're never furious," said Lily incredulously.

She could not remember ever to have seen Dorothy otherwise than good-humoured and easy-going and light-hearted.

"Well, I was angry that time. I _foamed_."

Dorothy paused reflectively.

"Of course, we made it up afterwards, and it was heavenly."

"I can't imagine your ever being very angry," said Lily.

"Neither could I," Dorothy admitted frankly. "I always thought I had a beautiful temper, especially compared to poor Janet. But I'm afraid I haven't, after all. Perhaps the truth is that Frank is the only person I've ever known who's really worth quarrelling with."

The explanation, with its odd, un-Hardinge-like quality of discernment, was destined to remain in Lily's memory.

She asked Dorothy to stay with her, and they purchased together the very economically-chosen outfit that Dorothy hoped to take to India with her, which Lily supplemented as often as she dared with presents from herself and Nicholas.

"Thanks awfully, Lily. The blue feather you gave me will go too beautifully with this, won't it? _Seulement je pense que je sais un shop moins cher dans le_ High Street. _Nous pouvons disons ici que nous le penserons_-over."

The Hardinge superstition that none but themselves could understand schoolroom French was an old one, and had served them many an ill turn with Miss Clotilde Stellenthorpe.

When Dorothy's visit was over, and the time before her marriage and departure for India seemed to be lessening very rapidly, Lily realized that, although they had little in common save youth and a year or two's companionship, she would miss her very much.

After all, it had been amusing to discuss frocks and ornaments and purchases together, to rejoice candidly in the glory of Lily's new possessions, and to laugh together at old, foolish, trivial jokes and catchwords that had no merit at all except that of association.

Lily, rather surprised, and very much ashamed, one evening broke into involuntary tears. She did not want Nicholas to know that she had cried, but the tear-stains on her face would not be effaced, and after all, Lily thought that he would understand. There was already a sharply-marked line of division in her thoughts between the things that Nicholas would, and those that he would not, understand.

She told him why she had cried.

"Poor little dear!" Nicholas was very kind and petted her, saying that she was tired, and must take more care of herself. But the next day he was inexplicably depressed, with a tendency to monosyllables and a complete inability to smile.

Lily, only too familiar with such phenomena in her father, felt her heart sink.

"Are you worried, Nicholas?" she ventured.

"No."

He raised his eyebrows slightly, as though wishing to show her that he was surprised at the question.

"You're not vexed with me, are you?"

"I could never be vexed with you, darling," he said, speaking more naturally.

Later, he returned to the subject of his own accord.

"What made my little wife think I could be vexed with her? So long as you don't feel that I'm an elderly fellow who had no business to marry a pretty little girl out of the nursery. Is that it, eh, Lily?"

He laughed as he spoke but there was a kind of nervous anxiety in the look that he turned upon her.

"Of course I don't, Nicholas!"

She raised her lips to his quickly, partly in order to hide the understanding that she felt had leapt into her face.

She saw that Nicholas was sensitive upon the subject of his age. He had found, in Lily's regret at the loss of her old playmate, an implied allusion to the years that separated him from his wife.

It had hurt his feelings.

All this Lily felt with intuitive certainty. Neither she nor Nicholas alluded further to the subject, but he retained his gravity of demeanor until some trifling whimsicality struck his sense of humour, when his habitual spontaneous gaiety returned to him, with all the suddenness of a child's transition from sulky silence to laughter.

Lily was gladdened and relieved by the restoration of her husband's good spirits, and her plastic youth received yet another impression.

She must never let Nicholas know that she was anything less than radiantly happy, or he would attribute it to the disparity of years between them, and his feelings would be hurt.

There was no calamity that it seemed to her more essential to avoid.