Chapter III

"There are some gypsies on the common, Father."

"Are there, my pet? You and Miss Cleeve had better keep to the road, for the present, then. Very likely they have illness about. Those people are not very careful."

"There was such a thin little boy. He looked as though he didn't get much to eat," said Lily tentatively.

"Well, well, my darling, we'll hope he does. Did you find any blackberries on your walk this morning?"

"Only a few. They're not yet ripe. But, Father----" Lily was ten years old, and nowadays when she saw that her father and mother were deliberately evading a subject upon which she desired information, something that seemed stronger than herself drove her on to urge the point, with an affectation of being unaware of their disapproval.

"Do you think that little boy was really starving, perhaps?"

"No, no, my child." Philip moved uneasily and glanced at his wife. "People don't starve in England nowadays."

"We won't talk about sad things like that, Lily dear," said Eleanor brightly. "People needn't be poor unless they want to, you know. They can always find work."

"Why hasn't everyone got a house then? Why can't that little boy live in a house like we do?" Lily demanded meditatively.

There was a silence weighty with disapproval.

Then Philip remarked simply and with finality:

"Don't ask foolish questions, my little pet."

Lily knew herself defeated and was guiltily conscious of having deserved rebuke by her deliberate pursual of one of the many topics that, for reasons never explained, should not be talked about.

During the year that had elapsed since Vonnie's death, the number of these subjects seemed to have increased enormously. Not only was Vonnie not to be talked about, but anything connected with death, funerals, and mortality generally must be avoided, and it was a general axiom that what Philip occasionally referred to as "sad, painful, distressing things" were never really fit subjects for discussion.

Curiously enough, the nervous sufferings of Lily's whole early childhood, culminating in the emotional crisis that she had undergone when Yvonne died, at this period deserted her. She was now merely sensitive in a petulant way, subconsciously antagonistic to all her surroundings, and obsessed by a resentful certainty that her father and mother did not understand her.

This ungracious conviction she once haltingly attempted to explain to Eleanor, early faced with the endeavour that has defeated so many, that of avoiding the only form of words obviously designed to express what she wished to have understood, and finding instead some other formula in which it might be conveyed with equal lucidity and yet less outspokenness.

The results were a number of self-contradictory statements from Lily, followed by tears.

"But what is it that I don't understand, my baby?" Eleanor urged her to return to the attack.

"Me," quavered Lily, suddenly explicit.

Her mother winced very visibly indeed.

Lily felt unutterably naughty.

"My dearest," said Eleanor at last, "how can a grown-up person not understand a little child? You're talking nonsense, you know. There can be nothing in a little girl of ten years old that's beyond the understanding of a grown-up, experienced person. And to say that a _mother_ doesn't understand her own child, is to suggest something that can't possibly be. Some day you'll know what I mean."

"When?" said Lily.

Eleanor's absolute belief in the creed that she had enunciated perforce carried a certain conviction to Lily's bewildered and undeveloped mind.

"When?" she repeated.

"When you have a little child of your own," her mother replied simply.

There was nothing more to be said.

Until that far-away, unbelievable time when one would be sufficiently old to have a little child of one's own, it must be taken on trust that all grown-up people, especially one's father and mother, understood one perfectly, although they made one feel all the time as though they did not.

Lily's thoughts and her feelings became speedily more and more muddled and confused.

Her discontent, which originated in sheer perplexity, took the form of argumentative and tiresome contradiction of the rules imposed upon her.

"She used to be such a dear, little sunny thing," cried Eleanor piteously. "Of course, I know there's an awkward age for all children to go through but I never thought of Lily's beginning it so young."

She cried and looked pale over Lily's naughtiness very often, and Lily was tortured by remorse and self-accusations that were without any effect upon her behaviour.

One day her father, who was tacitly supposed to know of her naughtiness, but to find it too grievous to be mentioned openly, spoke to her.

"You will regret it bitterly later on, my child, if you grieve your mother just now. There are reasons which you can't understand why she should be spared in every possible way, at present."

Were these specific reasons, or only the usual mysterious ones held over one's head by the authorities, and generally supposed to have obscure reference to God?

Lily presently came to the conclusion that some definite event was impending, and that she was supposed to know nothing whatever about it. Things were said to her of which it was obvious that she was intended to make general application only, and to which, with intuitive certainty, she instantly attached a special meaning.

"You must always be a very good little girl to your mother, and pray to God that He may take good care of her."

Why should Father suddenly say that, when it was an old-established certainty that Lily knew she ought to be a good little girl, and had prayed for her mother every night ever since she could remember, as a matter of course?

Sometimes it almost seemed as though they wanted to see how far it was possible for them to go, before Lily would make any sign of having noticed that there was a mystery.

"Nurse, I want you to bring those things that I spoke to you about into my room this morning."

"Yes, madam."

And then five minutes later:

"My little Lily must stay in the schoolroom and do her lessons very nicely this morning, and not go running about the house too much. Trot along to Miss Cleeve, my pet."

As though Miss Cleeve had ever dreamed of allowing Lily to run about the house during lesson time! Such a thing was quite unheard of, and Eleanor's casual tone did not for an instant deceive Lily into supposing that the prohibition had been a casual one.

On another occasion, a still more careless enquiry:

"You know you must never come into upstairs rooms without knocking at the door first, don't you, darling?"

A rule that Lily had known and had been made to observe, since she was three years old.

It appeared, therefore, that there was some urgent necessity for enforcing the rule now. Lily discovered that the door of the Blue Room was locked, all of a sudden.

She felt a strange inability to question her father or mother, but she tried to entrap Miss Cleeve into an admission, unconsciously imitating the air of carelessness with which Eleanor had tried, as Lily dimly felt, to entrap her into asking some question, to which a reply might be given that would direct curiosity into an innocuous channel leading nowhere.

"Oh, Miss Cleeve! Did you know the door of the Blue Room had been locked?"

Lily gave a high-pitched, nervous giggle. "Perhaps the key's been lost!"

Miss Cleeve threw her a very sharp glance of which Lily pretended to be quite unaware.

"Really, dear," she said in a very even voice. "Keys sometimes are lost, you know. But there's nothing to take you to the Blue Room, that I know of."

"Nurse goes in there sometimes. I've seen her coming out."

"I daresay she likes to see that it's kept dusted and tidy," said Miss Cleeve, in a preternaturally calm voice. "Now run and wash your hands for lunch, dear."

Lily felt thoroughly baffled by Miss Cleeve, and could not decide whether or not the governess had penetrated the motive of her artless enquiries.

Because she felt ashamed of her own attempts at solving the mystery that was in the air, she was sure that she was being naughty again.

When she went downstairs to the dining-room, her mother and Miss Cleeve were already there, talking in furtive tones to one another. Eleanor broke off the instant that Lily appeared and looked at her in rather a startled way, but Miss Cleeve, with the same determined naturalness with which she had spoken upstairs, uttered her final remark quite loud:

"So I thought perhaps a word to the wise, Mrs. Stellenthorpe----"

"Quite right, Miss Cleeve, thank you. I shall take care. Anyway it won't be very long now before----"

They both looked at Lily, who suddenly felt so uncomfortable that, to cover her own confusion, she almost involuntarily cried out: "Before what, Mother?"

Her mother and Miss Cleeve exchanged glances in a way that made Lily feel unutterably small and foolish and ignorant.

To her deep mortification, she felt her face burning with angry scarlet, although without knowing why.

"Poor little thing!" said Eleanor, and actually laughed, causing all Lily's inchoate disconcertment to culminate in a silent, furious resolution, that never again would she ask any of them about anything, so long as she lived.

The impassioned, childishly formed determination was not of a nature to endure. The inexplicable resentment that had caused it, Lily never forgot.

She could not have told what sudden intuition first made her suspect the truth, but when Eleanor, with certain circumlocutions and euphemistic phrases, told her that she might pray to God to send her a baby brother, Lily felt that she had known all the time that this was what all the mystery had been about.

"It's a great secret and you mustn't talk about it to anyone," Eleanor whispered.

Lily had no wish to talk about it to anyone. She was by that time thoroughly convinced that the arrival of a baby was something necessitating endless concealments and misrepresentations, and therefore of a highly shameful nature.

She was sent away to the seaside with Miss Cleeve for nearly six weeks, and when they came back again, the little brother was established in a blue and white cradle, and the Blue Room had been unlocked and transformed into a night nursery.

Lily gathered from various things that the servants said, that her mother had been ill, and that the illness was in some manner connected with the baby's coming. The subject puzzled her, and troubled her thoughts very often, but she felt sure that it was wrong to desire enlightenment, and she knew that if she asked questions she would receive either jocular or untrue replies, or the shocked "Hush!" of enforced reticence.

Eleanor having a horror of pet animals, from which she feared the contraction of mysterious and unspecified diseases of the skin, Lily was safeguarded from any direct encounter with the crudities of Nature. Her imagination therefore continued to evolve theories and explanations that her common-sense rejected, but that frightened and distressed her none the less, and that sent her furtively in quest of the information which she believed to be illicit, to such forbidden books of reference as the "Encyclopædia Britannica."

After Kenneth was born, Lily, to her unconscious relief, ceased to be the sole object in life of her parents, her governess, and her nurse. She spent less time in the drawing-room, and after Miss Cleeve had left for the day, remained in the schoolroom and read endlessly.

"Not too many story-books, my little darling," Eleanor occasionally said with a hint of disapproval in her tones, but as the books in the schoolroom were all story-books, and she was not allowed to touch the ones in the drawing-room, Lily continued to indulge her taste for fiction, although with the usual underlying feeling of guilt that seemed automatically to attach itself to whatever was pleasant.

There were curious _nuances_, never put into words, as that to read a new story-book was more reprehensible than to re-read an old one, and even when a recent birthday had occasioned the arrival of some delightful blue or red volume, the very giver of it might be apt to exclaim, with a sound of vexation, on seeing Lily immersed in it:

"_Another_ new story-book!"

Lily grew to be so apprehensive of these expressions of disapproval that sometimes she slipped the new book, with its incriminating, shining binding, into one of the brown paper covers that concealed the wear and tear of the old books.

This manœuvre was one day penetrated by Miss Cleeve, who did not seek any explanation of it, but merely told Lily on general grounds that she was a most sly child, and didn't seem to know the meaning of the word "honour."

Lily wept and felt that it was true.

Gradually she came to consider her passion for reading as another sign of her own depravity, much confirmed in this view by the grave pronouncements of her father, who said to her from time to time:

"Dear child, you know you don't want to have your little nose buried in a story-book at every spare moment."

It was the question of buying sweets, all over again. Certain propensities, for reasons never specified, were evidently so undesirable that the existence of them might not even be admitted. One was told that one didn't want to do such things, and all the time was conscious of wanting to do them very much indeed.

Evidently, such desires must never be openly admitted.

The atmosphere became more and more charged with concealments, as time revealed more and more of the complexities of life.

When Kenneth was nearly a year old, he caught scarlet fever. The infection was in the village. Miss Cleeve succumbed, and Eleanor, panic-stricken, sent Lily away by herself for the first time in her life.

It was expressly explained that she was not going to school. No. There would never be any question of that. Lily was simply going to a beautiful peaceful convent, not at all far away, where she would be very happy with the kind Sisters and play with the pupils.

The scheme was Eleanor's. She had an ideal, totally unbased upon experience, of a convent school, that was of an extreme and highly sentimental picturesqueness. In her mind's eye, mild-faced nuns paced perpetually up and down a garden, and innocent children, in a more or less permanent state of preparing for their _première Communion_, were instructed in the arts of music and embroidery and _ancienne politesse française_.

She combated Philip's strong objections to letting Lily go within the sphere of Catholic influence.

"It isn't as though she were older," Eleanor urged. "She's only a baby, Philip. And it will be for such a little while. Please God, we can have her home again by Christmas."

It was really the last argument that had most weight with Philip, and the desire that his wife's mind should be at ease about their darling.

Neither had the slightest conception of the utter unfitness for any form of independence in which they had brought up their child.

Philip himself took her to the convent, emphatically telling her in the presence of the Mother Superior that she must always say her prayers night and morning just as she had been taught them, and that she was not to think of herself as having been sent to school.

The reiteration of this last axiom rather disappointed Lily. It sounded much more grown up and like other girls to be sent to school, and school, according to many story-books, was an exciting place where one distinguished oneself easily and made interesting friendships and learnt to play games.

Lily was afraid that a convent might prove to be a very tame affair, by comparison. In effect, she never did learn to play games there, since the only one in vogue--a complicated system of running about wildly in the playground from one chalk-mark to another, called The Rescue of the Holy City from the Infidels--proved beyond her comprehension from the first to the last day of her stay.

Nor did she make interesting friendships, because any friendships at all were entirely forbidden and rendered impossible by a quantity of rules that were enforced by perpetual _surveillance_. Neither did she distinguish herself, excepting by the unprecedented number of humiliating and babyish mistakes that she seemed to be perpetually making.

Lily, for the first time in her life thrown amongst other children, heard from their unsparing lips various brutal truths about herself: She was a most frightful baby for her age.

Anybody could see that she'd been made a regular spoilt child of at home.

It was most awfully affected, the way she was always using grown-up words.

It was simply _silly_, always to get red and cry at the least little bit of chaff.

It was perfectly indecent to wear such a disgustingly short frock--the nuns said so.

Lily was only too thankful to exchange her brief velveteen skirts for a blue serge uniform dress, that flapped against her ankles and of which the collar-band scratched her neck.

But even the uniform did not save her from committing other outrages upon propriety, hitherto unsuspected. A brand-new category of sins sprang into being, all of them classed under the heading of Immodesty--a word that Lily had never heard mentioned before.

Legs were particularly immodest. To show them, to cross one of them over the other, to mention them by name, was all highly immodest. So was any allusion to any part of the human anatomy below the shoulder-blades.

There was an uneasy suggestion that it might at any moment become immodest to talk about any male creature other than a priest, the convent gardener, or one's own father. Even brothers seemed to be better left out of the conversation.

The hideous immodesty latent in the taking of a bath could only be defeated by a cold, shroud-like garment of white calico, that fastened just above the wearer's collar-bone, was buttoned at the wrists, and fell in folds to the ground.

A bath, accompanied by a bath-chemise, was in readiness for each pupil once a week.

Lily jumped trustfully into her first bath at the convent, pleased at finding that she was expected to take it without supervision, which she had never done before, got out again very quickly upon the discovery that the water, on a dank November day, was nearly cold, and dried herself imperfectly in the chilly amplitude of the bath-chemise, which she supposed to be a towel of a new kind. The same afternoon a scandalized nun enquired whether Lily was in the habit of taking a bath "without wearing anything?"

"All naked? Yes," said Lily, nodding assent.

Then it appeared that not only was her practice immodest, but so was her language. The nun was not at all angry, she was very kind, but the vicarious shame that she quite obviously felt on Lily's behalf, remained unforgettable.

The affair could only be classed with Lily's other great outrage against decency, which was never destined to pass altogether from her memory.

The first time that she fell ill at the convent, which she did with the rapidity of a very much over-coddled child suddenly bereft of even ordinary supervision in the affairs of the body, Lily was sent to the Infirmary. She had fainted during breakfast.

"Poor little dear! You shall go to bed at once," said the kind old Sister in charge. "Where's your dressing-gown, dear?"

"In the dormitory."

"Then I'll fetch it for you. Get ready for bed as fast as you can."

Lily, interpreting this literally, made every speed in divesting herself of her clothes, forgetful that her night-gown was not lying waiting on the newly made Infirmary bed.

But the Sister would bring it, she decided, and sat close to the comfortable blaze of the Infirmary fire. Only a diminutive vest inadequately concealed her from the appalled gaze of the returning nun. Lily found herself enshrouded in both night-gown and dressing-gown on the instant, and directed to get into bed.

The nun was very forbearing, and only said, when the first shock had passed:

"A modest little girl would never have done that. What _can_ your poor guardian angel have thought?"

The Protestant Lily, however, was less concerned with the hypothetical embarrassment of her guardian angel, than with this new view of herself as a little girl lacking in modesty.

She was homesick while she was at the convent, and a good deal bullied by her contemporaries, nevertheless the discipline was of a more wholesome kind than any she had yet known, and the total absence of any real element of education in the teaching that she received was partially compensated by the nuns' conscientious observance of Philip's prohibitions, and the amount of dogmatical religious instruction that she thereby escaped.

She might even have profited by the three months she spent at school, if it had been the conventual habit to pay any slightest regard to the more modern laws of hygiene.

Lily was not naturally a practical child, although she possessed a certain fundamental common-sense, and a precocious ability to profit by experience once acquired. Certain simple hygienic practices of which the regular observance had been enjoined upon her at home, without any explanation as to the necessity for them, she had acquiesced in blindly as a matter of course, without the slightest realization of the fact that they were connected with the preservation of her bodily welfare.

As the extreme modesty enjoined by the nuns did not permit of any supervision in such matters, even as regarded the youngest of the children in their charge, a state of affairs naturally followed that resulted in the very rapid deterioration of Lily's health.

Moreover, there prevailed at the convent, as at the very large majority of European educational establishments, the monstrous custom of curtailing the amount of sleep required for the proper development of growing youth.

Lily, although, like the other junior pupils, she was seldom in bed before nine o'clock, suffered less than they did--and very much less than the seniors, young girls all more or less at a stage of physical and mental development that made the utmost demand upon each one's constitution. Lily, at all events, need not obey the clamorous bell that summoned the school at a quarter to six every morning, in order that all might be assembled in the chapel by half-past six. She remained in bed until it became imperative to get up, dress herself--a task that she had not been allowed to perform unaided hitherto, and to which she was consequently highly inadequate--wash herself with an equal absence of thoroughness, partly because she was unaccustomed to ice-cold water, and partly because it was immodest to unfasten one's night-gown before various garments had been shuffled on underneath it--and then join the other children, who had now been fasting for more than an hour, for breakfast.

The food they were given was abundant, although inferior in quality, and completely lacking in variety. Each day of the week had its appointed menu, which was never departed from.

Sweets and chocolates were permitted only on Sundays, when, to equalize distribution and encourage generosity, the assembled gastronomical wealth of the establishment was placed upon the long tables of the refectory at dinner-time. No favouritism was permitted, so that each box or dish must be sent the length of the table by its owner, each of whose fellow-pupils would accept one specimen of the contents.

Naturally, the abstention of the week enhanced the necessity for profiting to the full by the plethora of Sunday, and Lily was not the only child who, when the day of rest and plenty was over, wished miserably, and for more than one reason, that Sunday privileges were allowed to extend over the cheerlessness of the week.

Philip came once to see his daughter, and was dismayed, without altogether knowing why, at her appearance when she was sent to him in the parlour.

The many inches of additional skirt by which the convent authorities had striven to obliterate the recollection of Lily's original display of brown stocking, made her look absurdly tall and thin, and her hands and little, slim wrists seemed to have grown bony.

Philip, scrutinizing her face anxiously, decided that she had lost some of her colour and that there certainly were black rings round her eyes. Her hair seemed to be in need of brushing.

To his enquiries, Lily replied, after the fashion of almost all children, that nothing was the matter. Yes, she liked the convent.

Had anyone been talking to her about religion? No, she didn't think so.

This relieved Philip's chief personal anxiety on Lily's behalf, and after cautioning her gently upon the use of slang and the care of her hands, he bade her say her little prayers every day, and be a very good child, and said that he hoped she would be home by Christmas.

He went away inexplicably depressed.

Eleanor instantly felt the weight of that depression, but as Philip had seriously resolved that his wife must, for her own good, be subjected to no further anxiety whilst the little boy continued ill, he gave her a hollow and unsmiling account, which he made as brief as possible, of Lily's welfare and happiness. It would have been quite impossible to Eleanor to receive a statement of her husband's at any but its face value.

She pretended, even to herself, that she believed Philip's account, and only cried in the middle of the night, telling herself that it was because she was over-tired.

Whether or not this last was the cause of her weeping, it was certainly a fact.

With quite irrational self-immolation, she had refused to entrust the care of Kenneth to a trained nurse, and devoted herself to him day and night in a veritable orgy of maternal sacrifice.

Kenneth recovered, although probably less rapidly than he would have done under professional care, and Eleanor fell ill.

She had the fever very slightly, but after a time, she tentatively asked that Lily should be sent for from the convent.

"I must see her once more, Philip."

It was entirely characteristic of Eleanor Stellenthorpe that with all her impassioned idolatry of her favourite child, it never occurred to her that she might spare Lily's sensitive youth an emotional scene such as the one of farewell that she contemplated.

But Philip, although heavy with the sense of impending calamity, and the spoken weight of an unfavourable medical verdict, was incapable of abandoning his life-long endeavour to alter the nature of painful facts by dint of refusing to acknowledge them.

"Don't talk like that, Eleanor dearest," he begged her. "It sounds just a little morbid, and of course you'll be well again by Christmas."

Accordingly, nothing distressing was put into words, and Philip and Eleanor, neither of them inwardly deceived by their spoken denial of despondency, suffered separately and in silence.

For two days before she died, Eleanor was unconscious, but it was not until after her death that Philip said, with heart-broken sincerity:

"I gave up hope from the moment she fell ill. From the first, I really knew that she would never get well again."