Chapter VIII

"Aha!" cried Aunt Clo in a loud, ringing contralto.

She stood on the small, empty platform and waved her hand above her head with a spacious, graceful gesture, as Lily got out of the train.

Miss Stellenthorpe's short, iron-grey curls were uncovered and parted in a masculine style on one side of her head, and she wore a dark-blue, fisherman's jersey and a pair of dark-blue knickerbockers. Her large, well-shaped legs and feet were bare.

"Aha! Good! Good!"

She kissed Lily upon both cheeks in an emphatic, foreign sort of way, and gazed at her with a fondly humorous smile.

"_Ecco!_" said Aunt Clo.

She hurried Lily across the little platform, affectionately grasping her arm, and talking so cordially all the while that her niece felt quite unable to interrupt her.

At last she said:

"My luggage, Aunt Clo. I'm afraid there's a trunk----"

"A trunk! _Dio mio!_ Let us not forget the trunk!"

Aunt Clo sped back again, appearing not at all disconcerted, and disposed of the trunk question with much animation.

"The trunk," she exclaimed to Lily in mock-bombastic style, "the trunk is provided for. All is well with the trunk. It appears at the gate of Il Monasterio _au plaisir de ce brave Lorenzo_."

There were many French phrases and a few Italian ones scattered through Aunt Clo's conversation, and she frequently gave a strangely foreign construction to the sentences that she spoke in English.

Lily was impressed by her fluency, by the perfection of her French, and by a certain humorous candour that Aunt Clo displayed in voicing her opinions.

Nevertheless, she could not quite kill her remembrance of having, as a child, disliked Aunt Clo.

Outside the station was a very small waggonette with a striped red and yellow awning. A sleepy, good-natured-looking peasant, his shirt open at the neck, sat on the box.

"_Ecco_, Umbertino!"

Miss Stellenthorpe waved her niece into the waggonette and sprang in after her. The vigor of her ascent seemed out of all proportion to the dilatory progress that they made along a baked and arid-looking road, the fields on either side unrelieved by any shade.

"But the vineyards round Genazzano!" said Aunt Clo expressively. "_Patienza!_"

Genazzano proved to be a small village consisting of one cobble-stoned street, winding up the side of a steep hill, and an ancient grey pile that stood raised from the roadside at the top of half a dozen irregular steps.

"The _Cathedrale_," Aunt Clo introduced it.

A mattress, imperfectly concealed behind a heavy red curtain, hung before the entrance to the cathedral after the Italian fashion.

A small, brown-skinned child was squeezing its way inside, and a sturdy peasant woman, carrying a baby and a basket, was pushing her way out.

"_Buon' giorno, Teresa mia!_" cried Aunt Clo, waving her hand.

The woman smiled in reply.

"This is the country of the Miraculous Virgin," Miss Stellenthorpe told Lily. "The Madonna of Genazzano. The statue is in the cathedral and we have a wonderful procession once a year. Ah! _ce cher Genazzano!_"

Tenderness radiated from her face and voice.

The waggonette drew up before a small iron fence that enclosed a tiny stone house, built along the four sides of a square. A little cloister ran all round the house, and the space in the middle formed a courtyard where shrubs flowered in painted green pots.

There was no garden, other than the small and apparently untended courtyard, but within the house, Aunt Clo waved through the window at a thick trellis covered with vine tendrils and fig-leaves, and framing a sturdy arbour beneath which stood a rustic bench and table, and said:

"_La Tonnelle._"

Beyond lay a sloping track of ground on which the vines grew round poles that stood in long, converging lines, reminding Lily of a miniature edition of a Kentish hop-field.

"Truly have not my lines fallen to me in pleasant places?" Aunt Clo enquired musingly. It was perhaps a slight relief to Lily that her tone required no reply. A bald negative or affirmative seemed so inadequate a rejoinder to Aunt Clo's rounded, elaborate periods.

When they were sitting in the _tonnelle_ that evening, however, just before the falling of the brief Italian dusk, Miss Stellenthorpe made enquiries to which more detailed answers were necessary.

"And what of Philip--what of your father, Lily?"

Lily answered as fully as was compatible with that old obsession that it was disloyal to present one's near relations to the gaze of another in any aspect save that particular one in which they might choose to regard themselves. She knew that Philip often described himself as a broken man, and conscientiously did her best to put a picture of a broken man before Aunt Clo.

"_Aha!_" said Aunt Clo, and "_Ecco!_" and nodded with deliberation, as though merely acquiescing in the recital of a state of affairs that had long been known to her.

"_Nous nous aimons de loin_," she said with resignation. "It doesn't do to remove the crutches before a lame man is ready to walk. I myself have stood without a prop all my life, and I wanted to see your father and mother strong and straight and unsupported, too. But perhaps I was hard and hasty. I was young. They clutched at the artificial supports that I tried to make them spurn--they resented the council of perfection.... Well, well ... I thank whatever gods there be, that I myself have learnt to stand upright and face the sunlight."

Aunt Clo drew up her tall person as she spoke, and threw back her head in a gesture expressive of freedom and gallantry.

Later on, when Lily and she had dinner together, Miss Stellenthorpe became less metaphorical and more colloquial.

Her appearance was a surprise to her niece. She had discarded the blue jersey and the knickerbockers for an admirably fitting drapery of flame-coloured brocade, closely following the lines of her fine figure, and a Greek fillet encircled her head. Her arms were bare to the shoulder and Lily, glancing surreptitiously downwards, saw that she wore flame-coloured stockings and shoes that were laced sandal-wise.

"Certainly, I descend to the conventions in the evening," cried Aunt Clo, not altogether truthfully, as her gaze followed Lily's. "Would you believe it, Lily, that I shocked Genazzano profoundly when I first lived here!"

Lily felt that she could believe it easily.

"'But,' they cried, 'the signorina shows her legs! She wears clothes like a man! It is immodest!' Imagine it--such a point of view here in Genazzano, which is like an earthly Paradise. I was confounded."

"'But is this Suburbia?' I asked. One expects Suburbia to be shocked--or even the provinces. Lily!" cried Aunt Clo in a tone of playful accusation. "I believe your father would be shocked. My legs--the legs that God gave me--would shock your father, if he saw them uncovered."

Once more the very fervour of Lily's inward acquiescence kept her silent.

"Oh, these people who are shocked!" said Aunt Clo with a musical groan. "But Genazzano is now used to my knickerbockers--who knows but that one day your father may be reconciled to the thought of uncovered legs? Or would he say--ha, ha!--would he say that they were immodest? an indecent spectacle?... I believe that's what he would say!"

Aunt Clo, speaking with mournful roguishness, seemed disposed, in a breezy, open-minded sort of way, to attribute the most prurient-minded views and expressions to the rest of humanity.

She told Lily that there was a girl in the village who was suspected of being about to have an illegitimate child. She was only fifteen.

"I have sent for her to come up here to-morrow. Naturally, her relations can get nothing out of her. They have frightened her, and made her believe that she has done something to be ashamed of."

She leant forward and scrutinized Lily's face by the indifferent light of the two oil-lamps in the room.

"_Biglia Mia!_ But I've made you blush! It suits you, and is charming--but why--why?"

Lily was indeed blushing, deeply annoyed with herself for so doing, and yet irresistibly compelled to it by Aunt Clo's open mention of subjects that were never referred to at home, and had only been furtively whispered about by the least endurable of the girls at school.

"I--I suppose I'm not used to hearing those things talked about," she stammered. "I've never been told anything--I'm not even sure that I know what 'illegitimate' means, exactly."

"Philip's child--Philip's child!" almost moaned Aunt Clo. "I might have guessed it! He would never face life himself, and he brings up his child to suppose that ignorance means innocence. Oh, horrible!"

She shuddered and almost sprang from her seat. "Come out under the starlight, my child--you want no fruit? That's right--you and I must have some talk."

Lily felt ashamed of the irrepressible feeling of disappointment with which she followed Miss Stellenthorpe, whirled away from her beautiful untasted plateful of ripe figs.

But, of course, illegitimacy was not a subject to be discussed over dessert.

Aunt Clo, however, said nothing more about illegitimacy. She began instead to tell Lily how, long ago, she had solemnly warned Philip and Eleanor that they were refusing to face Truth; to look at facts as they were.

"It was about the poor little Yvonne. She would have been saved, if they had brought themselves to acknowledge her weakness, instead of trying to persuade themselves and the world that she was like other children. Let me see--you were two years younger--but you can remember?"

"Yes," said Lily rather curtly.

Vonnie had been so seldom mentioned, since her death, and then always in such consecrated phrases that Lily felt Aunt Clo's outspokenness almost as an indecency.

"Aha! _nous avons changé tout cela_--but when you were mites together, I remember very well how superior you thought yourself to poor little Vonnie. Hardly your fault, child--you were the favourite. They never disguised it, although, of course, they never would acknowledge it, in so many words. _Ah, quel système!_"

Aunt Clo shook her head.

"Dear little one, how much you've improved since then!"

There was delicate approbation in her tone, and in the large, genial, scrutinizing eye that Lily could just perceive, gleamingly turned upon her in the moonlight.

Although, theoretically, Lily supposed herself to be striving after perfection, it caused her a distinct feeling of resentment to hear that she had "improved," but she dishonestly attributed her annoyance to her growing conviction that it would be in better taste if Aunt Clo were rather less candid in criticism of her niece's nearest relations.

With her disconcerting penetration, Miss Stellenthorpe seemed to be aware of some such unsympathetic atmosphere surrounding her.

"You mustn't resent my plain speaking. _Pour moi, il n'y a que la vérité._ When we have known one another a little longer, my Lily, you will realize that truth is an obsession with me. Nothing but the truth. Deceit in any shape or form is the one unforgivable sin!"

Lily gave a fleeting glimpse to certain aspects of herself with a feeling of veritable horror, and a most sincere resolution that these must be for ever concealed from her hostess.

It was impossible not to desire Miss Stellenthorpe's approval. She was so spaciously generous in her appreciations, so gravely despondent in her well-weighed condemnations.

It was true that Lily was sometimes surprised at the courses taken by appreciation or condemnation alike.

There was the case of the village girl, Carla. Nothing could be more evident than that Aunt Clo's impassioned interest in her situation amounted to positive enjoyment. Lily heard her aunt's voice in fluent rhetoric, morning after morning, encouraging and upholding Carla, exhorting and rebuking Carla's tearful mother, eloquently proclaiming her championship of Carla to her own servant, to the young man who brought the milk, to the postman, in fact to anyone of the little community of peasantry at Genazzano who would listen to her.

"Of course the man is the parish priest at Sta. Lucia--I don't doubt it. So, thank God, there can be no question of making him marry her. Thank God for that, say I!" Aunt Clo fervently told Lily at breakfast one morning.

"But wouldn't it be better if she was married before--before----?" Lily blushed again, bewildered.

"Never!" said Miss Stellenthorpe, striking the table with her open hand. "It would be a far greater wrong than the first, to compel that poor child to marriage."

The point of view implied was so new to Lily that she immediately felt, in her complete reaction from the standards set before her in her childhood, that it was probably the right point of view.

But as, for some inexplicable reason, she very much objected to those prolonged dissections of the _affaire Carla_ in which Aunt Clo was so ready to indulge, Lily gently turned the conversation to a christening which she had seen take place in the cathedral on the previous afternoon. Aunt Clo was always ready to be intensely interested in ceremonies celebrated by the Catholic or other alien denominations, that would have bored her extremely in the Church to which she belonged.

But on this occasion, she showed but little enthusiasm on the subject of the postmaster's twins.

"Ah, and they've a child not a year old yet--and Heaven alone knows how many Augustino and Maria have had altogether. Criminal, criminal! When will they learn the folly and wickedness of breeding in that reckless way!"

Lily could suggest no helpful solution to a problem of which she scarcely grasped the outline.

To her it merely seemed as if Aunt Clo had no approbation to spare for babies unless they were illegitimate ones.

Staying at Genazzano, Lily began for the first time to experience in some slight degree what is meant by the liberty of the individual.

Aunt Clo showered books and opinions upon her, but encouraged her to form her own judgments of either. Not only was there no disloyalty in differing from Aunt Clo, but she seemed positively to prefer argument to acquiescence. Certainly, to adduce an opposite point of view, generally led to a lucid and eloquent exposition, embellished by many polished French phrases, of Aunt Clo's opinions of the subject in question, but she always said--"Aha?" and "So!" very kindly indeed to Lily's diffident interpolations.

There were certain, quite trivial, little things, nevertheless, which Lily felt that her aunt would despise in her, and the compulsion under which she thought herself to conceal these kept alive in her the old guilty feeling that she was not really like other people and was only pretending to be grown up.

She would rather have been detected by Miss Stellenthorpe in a forgery, than in the infantile practice of eating sweets, so insistent was her certainty that Aunt Clo would be far less contemptuous of the former predilection than of the latter.

Yet they had never discussed the matter, although Aunt Clo, in the midst of reminiscences of a day spent in Paris in company of a wealthy American friend, once said, in her emphatically descriptive style:

"He was so full of _petits soins intimes_, dear person! There we were in one of those enormous glittering _pâtisseries_ shops, and I couldn't prevent him from loading me with great boxes of _pâtes de guimauve_, and huge Easter eggs of pink crystallized sugar ... and all the while there was the most heavenly riot of scent and colour in a flower-shop next door. If only one could have exchanged all the _bonbons_ for one single bunch of violets!"

Aunt Clo heaved a sigh of retrospective regret, and not for the world would Lily have owned to her own degraded preference for _pâtes de guimauve_ and pink crystallized sugar above all the bunches of violets that Parma could produce.

Lily reflected impatiently that when she was a child it had been naughty to want sweets, and now that she was grown up, it would be childish. It seemed that there was no time of life at which such a desire could ever be laid claim to honourably. As for Aunt Clo, she often seemed to be quite unaware that such a thing as food existed.

When they went for expeditions, and visited Roman churches and museums, Lily was greatly ashamed of the undoubted fact that her enjoyment was constantly haunted by the fear that Aunt Clo, towards twelve o'clock, would exclaim in a breezy manner:

"_Il Palatino_, now, my Lily! Shall we take a base advantage of the Germans and Americans, who will all be flocking in search of food, and have the glory of the place to ourselves?"

And Aunt Clo would spring vigorously up the steepest paths, under the hottest sun, and very likely remember nothing more about luncheon at all until it was time to take the tram to the station for their train, when she might observe with one of her most negligent gestures:

"Have we eaten? I forget! But _qu'importe_, in the midst of this--and this--and _this_!"

Once they even missed the train that should at least have returned them to Genazzano in time for tea, because Aunt Clo leaped out of the tram just before the station was reached, at the sudden realization that Lily had never been inside the Church of Sta. Maria degli Angeli.

Impervious alike to hunger, thirst, and fatigue, she remained on her feet for nearly an hour in the dim, cool church, pointing out in an impassioned undertone the reasons why certain frescoes were to be admired, and shuddering away from others to which the chief drawback appeared to be that all tourists always looked at them first.

Aunt Clo's knowledge of Art in all its branches seemed to be almost illimitable, and she gave Lily a copy of a thin book of her own, that bore upon the title-page: "Beauty: a Finger-post. By Clotilde Stellenthorpe. _Privately printed._"

The Finger-post pointed to the great necessity for surrounding oneself with Spaces, and Silences, and occasional Splashes--of light or colour, or sound--and also indicated deleterious features in many hitherto accepted standards. It rather inclined to leave the reader with the impression that Beauty, as a whole, had received a thorough revision at the hands of the author of the book, and would henceforth be found to be within the range of the book's appreciators. There was an underlying suggestion that those outside this circle had not yet reached the stage of development at which Beauty could be of any advantage to them.

Nowadays, Aunt Clo no longer wrote about Beauty. She told Lily that she tried to live it, instead. Everything in the tiny house at Genazzano had been chosen for the sake of either form or colour, and the little bronze mirror that hung, sloping, over Miss Stellenthorpe's writing-table possessed a further qualification.

"I like to go through life _le sourire aux lèvres_," said Aunt Clo, markedly accentuating the habitual pleasantness of her expression as she spoke. "It is pleasing, refreshing--to look up and meet a smile. What will you, if it happens to be one's own?"

Aunt Clo laughed outright at her own quaint fancy. "When I raise my head from my writing, I see reflected in my little mirror a pair of steady eyes, a face that holds the lines graven by many experiences, some grave, some gay, and a smile--I hope a strong, steadfast, humorous smile. Time was, my Lily, when the face that I saw in the mirror was that of a tragic muse. Thank God, the phase has passed!"

Aunt Clo not infrequently threw out similar sombre indications that her past had held some deep, unspecified cause for woe.

She was very kind to Lily, although frequently deploring in her the traces of her upbringing.

"You must learn to say Yes to Life!" she cried ringingly from time to time, her hand upon her niece's shoulder, her handsome head tilted backwards. "You know your Nietzsche?"

Lily shook her head, feeling much abashed and conscious that Aunt Clo thought her very young indeed.

"Courage!" said Miss Stellenthorpe. "Ah, _jeunesse, jeunesse_!"

Lily reflected quite irritably that Aunt Clo might just as well have said: "Youth, youth!" and have done with it.