Chapter TWO: Lilac (2)

“Does that last bit go in the letter?” asked Gillian.

“Surely, Miss Macfarlane,” said Lady Bottomley with a bitter smile, “you must have noticed that the letter ended with the closure of the third person.”

“Shall I write that one in my own writing or in yours?” asked Gillian.

“Third-person letters go in your own hand. It marks the distinction more clearly,” pronounced the lady.

They were seated in the boudoir, an upholstered chamber overlooking the Park. In spite of the heat of a mid-July forenoon the French windows were closed and curtained as precaution against draughts, which, as Lady Bottomley explained, “not only give me a cold in the head, but blow down my precious photographs.”

The precious photographs stood in ranks on slippery tables in front of the window and, in every variety of frame, clambered over the walls and up every tier of the ornate overmantel. Some of them were of people and were signed. Others were of places and were dated: none was without an inscription. One or two had little memorial wreaths affixed to their frames, and on a table placed before a life-size portrait in oils of the first baronet dressed for his first levee, stood an array of silver vases in which it was one of Gillian’s duties to arrange fresh flowers every morning. On her second day she had suggested filling a pair of very fine branched candlesticks which were doing nothing in the library where she sat when imitating her employer’s handwriting after lunch, and lighting candles to burn among the flowers.

“It would be lovely to have them of different colours. I know where you can get green and red candles,” she urged.

“A very Popish notion,” said old Winona. “I beg, Miss Macfarlane, that you will not speak of it again.”

But she was not angry with Gillian, and she was pleased that the girl had noticed how fine the candlesticks were.

“Museum-pieces,” Gillian had called them, and Lady Bottomley adopted the phrase and applied it indiscriminately to many of her treasures which Gillian herself would have catalogued as pure Waring and Gillow, or early _train-de-luxe_.

Gillian had grown accustomed to the daily shock of leaving the colour-washed little flat in the Club with its open windows, plain curtains and rush-seated wooden chairs for the fringed and patterned seclusion of Knightsbridge, and had lost the inclination to giggle at each fresh revelation of what unbridled wealth could do in the way of making a house uninhabitable, before there was any sign that the third baronet lived there himself.

One morning, however, she had nearly lost her self-control on discovering that Lady Bottomley’s dressing-room was enriched by a bath which was silver-plated and covered in by a padded lid of bright rose-coloured velvet, buttoned with porcelain upholstery buttons, each bearing the Bottomley crest in the proper heraldic colours with the baronet’s hand very bloody and the Saracen’s eye looking, with its spoked lashes quite like a bicycle-wheel, very blue, painted in the centre.

“By hand, miss,” as Dashwood, Lady Bottomley’s obsequious and alarmingly golden-haired maid had insisted when asking Gillian to wait in the presence of this luxury while she ascertained whether her ladyship, who was keeping out of draughts in bed that morning, were quite ready to deal with her letters.

One of these letters was a post-card dated “Newmarket, Tuesday,” and signed “Toby.” “Can you put up me and Stephen for Sandown?” it asked.

“Now,” said Gillian, as she read this missive and realized that Stephen Glynde might come upon her any day, “I can’t possibly pretend to Stephen that he doesn’t know his own bridesmaid. I do hope Lilac will be equal to the crisis.”

Lady Bottomley, who thought she might have caught cold while driving round Regent’s Park at Gillian’s instigation at six o’clock the previous evening, took an extra dose of ammoniated quinine and decided that at any risk she must entertain her son’s friend.

“We must send telegrams,” she pronounced as soon as she had realized the import of her son’s request, “one to Sir Reginald Bottomley, Bart., Newmarket. That is sufficient address; the other to the Honourable Stephen Glynde, who is, I presume, at Newmarket with my son.”

Gillian, who remembered that Sophie was at Glynde and had been there since Ascot because the Eaton Square house was closed, bit the information off the tip of her tongue and took down in her own writing two long, delighted telegrams, one signed “Mother” and the other signed “Winona Bottomley” and copied them out in her imitation of their author’s writing without question, feeling that this attention was due to the family and its friends.

Lilac was down at Glynde, so there was no need to disturb her with news which Sophie, who was extraordinarily uninformed of her husband’s movements for a quite reasonably happy wife, might very well not be able to pass on to her.

Gillian was bidden to stay on and dine at Knightsbridge in order to help Lady Bottomley through the unwonted labour of choosing which of the two elaborate spare rooms should be filled with flowers and writing-paper and sticks of scented sealing-wax, and have bath-salts and shaving-soap disposed in its polished bathroom by the train of rubber-tyred housemaids who, shepherded by kind and melancholy Atkinson, trooped into the boudoir to receive her detailed instructions.

It was extraordinary, thought Gillian, as she walked down Sloane Street and past the Guards’ Barracks to the Embankment in the moonlight, extraordinary and rather pathetic that this very kind and cumbered lady should not have troops of friends on whom to lavish the overflow of her incredible riches. She was, as her name suggested, Canadian by birth, and her family had long since faded out of communication with their relative who had married the first baronet in the days of his experimental and impecunious youth. Some of the wonderful letters Gillian was employed to transcribe, often from pencilled notes made in her absence, were to cousins in Montreal. These were only sent when some reference to the house of Bottomley appeared in the Press. Gillian had to go through the post for Press-cuttings very carefully every morning. On the days when any came in, Atkinson took a cab and went forth to buy twenty copies of every paper in which they occurred. After the orgies of the Bottomley Orphanage Bazaar at which Lady Bottomley had been photographed in the very act of receiving the Royal Princess who had opened it, the cab bearing the papers in which the picture appeared was so crammed that Atkinson had been obliged to come back sitting with the driver all the way from Fleet Street to Knightsbridge.

Gillian had enjoyed that day. Two cuttings of each notice, two cuttings of every photograph (several versions had escaped into print) had to be made and pasted into the two great leather-bound Press-cutting albums in which the records of twenty years were garnered. The first baronet had kept one for his own reading and another for his wife’s, and the practice was continued in piety by his widow.

“I shall of course,” she had told Gillian with an even more than usually majestic intonation, “I shall of course make over the late Sir John’s volume to his grandchildren when they come of age.”

“I didn’t know he had any,” Gillian had spoken in the haste of surprise.

“Not yet, Miss Armstrong.” Lady Bottomley had begun to make use of the right name from time to time, though still reverting to Macfarlane, especially in the early morning.

And, then, when the cuttings had been pasted down, the crested address-book was opened, and its scantily filled pages were gone through until everybody named in it had been honoured with a copy of all the papers duly marked in red with “See Page 7.” Gillian addressed the wrappers in her own or her imitation writing according to old Winona’s direction, and Atkinson bore them away and applied and gummed them down to their contents in his pantry. It was all very ritualistic and unreal, but Gillian enjoyed it.

“I suppose,” she went on, as she leaned over the parapet and watched the river flowing at low tide towards Lambeth with a silver, moonlit edge on the curve of each black ripple, “I suppose that’s why she’s so lonely. Real people couldn’t bear to be near her and she couldn’t bear it either. I can, because it keeps you far enough away from anyone to be paid by them. It doesn’t matter if I do laugh at her a little so long as I earn my wages. But you’d burst if you tried to be her friend.”

She let her mind float away along the river till it took her to another summer night, six years ago, when she had watched another tide swim by under the same moon. Then she had been with her father at Altona on that sudden, miraculous journey he had taken, retracing some adventure of his youth, just before he set out for Burma and his death.

The broad waters of the Elbe, brackish with the sea that moved within them, and spangled with the lights of travelling ships, had carried his memory back to a time in which she, who had been his friend ever since she could remember, had no slightest share. He had spoken to her as to a new-made friend, of a climax in his life to which no memory of hers could even dimly reach.

“It was all over, the man to whom it happened was dead in me long before you were born, before even I so much as knew of your mother’s existence. The house behind the chestnut-tree in that lithograph we bought this morning might be the house I left twenty years back, Gillian. Sun on the yellow walls; closed white shutters, a flight of stone steps going up to a glass door, and inside—Illusion. And I sat under the shadow of that tree and looked up through the thick leaves and saw the tall spikes of chestnut-blossom flaming like white wax candles in the heat, and it was all no good. All that stillness and beauty were empty. I had come to the end of my own deception. All the time I had known. All the time I had heard the voice within saying, ‘This is not real. You are playing false with yourself. Take it if you must, but do not try to pay for it because you have not the coin in which such things are trafficked.’ And I had tried to coin their coinage, because I had to pay; and I couldn’t go on. I can’t tell you what it was. You need never know. I mean, child, it is not necessary to salvation for a girl to know all things. ‘Its shadow upon life enough for thee’—you remember Andromeda. But you’ll be safe so long as you remember to wait until the inner voice agrees _after_ you’ve tried. It’s no use hesitating before the Unknown. You must try for yourself, but you must not go along a road you know is not your road just because you’ve tried it. You must be able to turn back. You must be able to say, ‘This road is closed.’ Don’t pay tolls at the wrong bar twice. One day you’ll need all you’ve got. You’re the kind that pays for everything, overpays always, but I’ve taught you to look for the lasting values, and you’ll not pay for fakes without knowing what you’re about. It’s the people who bank on fakes who leave their souls in Hell. Lilac will pay for fakes in her time. But she’ll pay because she wants them, and she won’t pay a penny more than they’re worth. It’s you, Gillian, who may make bad bargains. Remember that, and wait till you’ve said,

“Das unbeschreibliche.
Hier ist’s gethan,”

before you go bankrupt.”

And then they had gone to supper with Hans Adler the painter, and had laughed and eaten and sung the Mörike-lieder till they cried, and had eaten again, and drunk extremely sweet and extremely luscious things, some iced and some buttered, and had had an utterly ridiculous, truly Germanic time.

IV

Lilac had come back from Glynde.

She stood in the open doorway of the bedroom as Gillian came up the stairs. Mr. Gordon had put out the landing-lights and Gillian had only just managed to get in before he locked the courtyard gates for the night.

“How late you are,” said Lilac.

She was in her nightgown, and her pretty hair was sticking out all round her head in a honey-coloured halo, as it did before she had brushed it and tied it into lilac ribbons at night.

“Goodness,” said Gillian. “Have you had dinner?”

“Bother dinner,” said Lilac. “I’ve had two eggs and all the milk. Where have you been till this hour?”

“At 99,” said Gillian, “getting ready for Stephen. He’s going to be there for the night.”

“I know,” said Lilac, “with Toby.”

Gillian put her arm round Lilac and drew her inside the room. “Lilac,” she said, “are you in love with Toby?”

“Yes,” said Lilac, “isn’t it damnable?”

* * * * *

They lay awake talking until dawn. Lilac didn’t know how Toby really felt. She had known there was some hitch in his life but it was Mrs. Barraclough who had been the first to tell her about the wife in America.

“Sophie and Stephen don’t know, at least if Stephen knows he never told Sophie, and I’ve not told her either,” said Lilac, “and Toby so helpless. He’s rather like you, Gillian. He misses the point. The first thing he ever said to me, I mean, the first thing to show he’d noticed, was, ‘What rippin’ teeth you’ve got,’ and you know, Jill, it isn’t my teeth at all, it’s my hair that most people like because of its colour, and the curls. But if he loves me at all it’s for my teeth, and,” said Lilac with wisdom and despair, “it isn’t enough. There are mountains to remove, and you don’t remove anything much because you like another person’s teeth.”

“What made you come back, then?” said Gillian. “I thought it was always absence that made a man find out——”

“Oh, Jilly darling, I know, and if it had been anyone else I’d have stayed away till he did. But that’s the worst of being in love one’s self—you simply _can’t_ be clever about it. It’s easy enough to be _l’autre qui se laisse aimer_. I can do that. Look at that horrid little Rollo, and Mr. Percival Grantham. Donkeys”—and Lilac sat up in bed, and waved her arms in the moonlight and shooed donkeys out of her life.

“Well,” said Gillian, “he’ll have to know about me now. Do you think he’ll stop loving you for your teeth when he sees me pasting cuttings into the grandchild’s album?”

“I just can’t think,” said Lilac, clasping her arms so tightly round her knees that she laid a hand over each elbow. “He might suddenly love you terribly, just because he’d loved me a little. He’s rather like you. He doesn’t see any harm in the most dreadful things.”

“Goodness,” said Gillian, “what sort of things?”

“Poetry,” said Lilac, “and pictures. He’s got that print of Father’s—the one Mother burnt, the Dürer. He took me to an exhibition of the most awful things, and bought it. It cost fifty pounds—no, guineas.”

“Do you mean _Die grosse Fortuna_?”

“Yes, the fat woman on a skipping-rope. And there were the most dearest little grey and blue pastels, ships that pass in the mist, in the next room for half the money.”

“He sounds rather nice,” said Gillian. “I thought it was only horses.”

“Oh, it’s horses as well. And Sophie’s been an angel. I’ve been riding every morning at Glynde. She’s given me a perfectly new habit of my own for my birthday. It’s much harder than riding-lessons in that dreadful _manège_ at Lausanne, with the tame horses and the smell of tan.”

“And Monsieur Avranches—’_dans la main gauche, mademoiselle Arumstrongüe, dans la main_ GAUCHE’—oh, Lilac!”

“Yes—and only half an hour at a time. But at Glynde it’s a groom who doesn’t say a word and humps you along—I’m so stiff and sore, Jilly.”

“Lover’s pains,” said Gillian, “and learning to ride properly. I think you have a very good time.”

“Gillian”—Lilac was very solemn—“will you promise me that you’ll never tell Toby that you cried when Mother burnt that dreadful engraving? I used to think you shammed liking it to curry favour with Father, and when I saw Toby buy it I told him my father had had it too, but I didn’t tell him what became of it, and he doesn’t know there’s you. Sophie didn’t tell him. Sophie doesn’t know that I meet him in town—at least, she didn’t till yesterday.”

“You’re bang in the middle of the tangled web,” said Gillian, “and you know how bad I am at tangled webs. But I’ll try to say nothing but ‘Yes, Sir Reginald. No, Sir Reginald,’ like a parlourmaid. Perhaps if I did it with a lisp it would put him off so frightfully that there’d never be any chance of getting to pictures in our intercourse.”

“Oh, Gillian, don’t do anything stupid. It would be no good for him to think I’d got a lisping idiot for my only family.”

“I expect,” said Gillian, “that whatever I do’ll be wrong while you are in this state. But you know you can trust me not to compete.”

“I know I can trust you not to _try_ to compete,” said Lilac; “but you’re so innocent you’ll probably think you’re doing putting-off things when really you’re doing the other kind.”

“What kind?”

“Oh, well, what had you done to set your Jane Bird blazing with adoration? I’ve never seen anyone in such a state. She couldn’t eat or sleep because you’d been wronged, and I met her in King’s Road every day last week; probably she hasn’t come round the other way home on the off-chance of meeting you that way.”

“I met her on Friday,” said Gillian, “but I didn’t think it had anything to do with me. Besides, even if it had, Jane Bird’s quite a different matter.”

“You wouldn’t, and it isn’t. And, you see, you don’t know a thing about it.”

“I certainly don’t know much about Jane Bird,” said Gillian; “but she’s a strange person—exciting too. Almost the most exciting person I’ve ever known.”

V

Lilac had forbidden Gillian to share her admiration of _Die grosse Fortuna_ with Sir Reginald Bottomley, but she did not know, she could not have known, that his august mother had gone through the complete works of Swinburne in the eight volumes which he had brought home from Oxford and had cut out, with a pair of nail-scissors, all the passages she considered unsuitable for a gentleman’s library. Nor could her worst nightmare have suggested to her that Toby would discover the mutilation of his property at the same moment as Gillian did. But this is what actually happened.

Gerald Armstrong’s Swinburnes, the little red _Atalanta in Calydon_ and the little fat Moxon _Poems and Ballads_, had gone to Sotheby’s with his other first editions when his books were valued, and Gillian, who had nothing but the Tauchnitz _Selections_, had been bothered all morning because she could not remember how

“Some angel’s steady mouth and weight of wings
Shut to the side...”

went on. So, just before tea, while Lady Bottomley was resting, she took the library-steps into the far corner where she had seen the tall, dark Chatto & Windus books standing on a high shelf, and was sitting on the top of them, one hand clasping the pole, and her mouth wide open in dismay at the ruin she had found, when a mild voice below her feet said:

“How do you do?”

Gillian put the book on her knee and looked over.

“I’m terribly shocked,” she said. “Did you know that lots of _The Triumph of Time_ and most of _Before a Crucifix_ had been cut out of these?”

“No—have they?—how annoying. May I look?”

“But, of course. They’re yours. It’s a dreadful pity. And they’ve not been done at all neatly.” She handed the books to their short, pleasant, rather nervous owner, who took them from her and helped her down from the ladder, saying he supposed she was the latest Miss Macfarlane.

“Well,” said Gillian, “I answer to the name. I’ve got another for holidays.”

They took the remaining six volumes down and had made a list of dilapidation before the chimes rang for tea.

“I wonder why some of them have been left in,” said Toby.

“Well, if they’d all come out there’d have been no book left,” said Gillian.

“Yes; but I don’t think that would have stopped whoever began to cut them up.”

“Lots of people don’t understand the least little things,” said Gillian.

Toby looked at her sharply.

“No,” he said. “Perhaps it’s as well.”

Gillian wondered if he suspected his mother, and was sure he did when he said nothing about the excisions when they joined her for tea.

As they sat in an uneasy silence while Lady Bottomley poured out the scented Ceylon tea she always drank, Gillian let herself fall into the abyss of guilt that so often yawned for her after any completely self-forgetting hour. This quiet man with his large grey eyes and small brown moustache was so unlike the Toby she had imagined, and the discovery of what had been done to his books had so inflamed her mind that for the moment Lilac’s complicated affairs had faded from existence, and here she now was, his accomplice, almost his friend, before he even knew her name. Was this what Lilac called “doing the other things”? Gillian wondered. She had done things. She was certainly now, without knowing how she came to be doing it, standing between Sir Reginald and old Winona.

And how dreadful it was to be so afraid of anyone you belonged to as the third baronet was of his mother. Was he afraid or ashamed? Weren’t they both the same thing? Why _would_ she use that large gold sugar-tongs? Why would she put two lumps of sugar and all those blobs of cream in Gillian’s tea? Why did neither of them say a word except in answer to her own remarks? Gillian felt herself growing more and more dreadfully bright as she babbled on. If the monosyllables continued much longer, she knew she would say something awful. She felt herself turning to poor Toby and saying:

“Lady Bottomley tells me you were at Eton and Magdalen Colleges,” which was exactly what Lady Bottomley had told her in the expansions of yesterday. That would be a really putting-off thing. Wasn’t she the very worm of vulgarity for wanting, for not really wanting but for thinking of saying it? How dreadful to have crumpets for tea in July!

And then Stephen came in. And Stephen, who was so dull, so solemn, so correct, Stephen whom she really hardly knew at all, changed everything back into the amusing, preposterous fun it had all been until these last ten minutes.

“Hullo, Gillian!” Stephen said when he saw her, “why aren’t you down at Glynde with Sophie and Lilac? Is that confounded High School mewing you up in London through the dog-days?”

And there were explanations and introductions, and Lady Bottomley, instead of being upset, was elated that Gillian had a sister whom her son had met at Glynde, and Stephen and Toby, who weren’t doing anything particular that evening, said they’d both come and see Lilac and hear news of Sophie after dinner, and Lady Bottomley said Miss Lilac must come to lunch with _her_ Miss Armstrong the next day, and they’d find some nice concert to go to in the afternoon. Gillian was so out of breath with it all that it took Lilac ten minutes to piece together a coherent story out of all the scraps and laughter she carried home with her, particularly as William caught the infection of excitement and sang “God Save our Gray” at the top of his voice until they covered his cage with Lilac’s Burberry. And that only made things worse, because, after a moment’s silence, William observed in a dulcet voice, “Toby—Toby—prritty Toby.” “Just as if,” said Lilac, pale and husky with rage, “just as if we’d said nothing else for months. I wish you’d kill that bird, Gillian.”

And she meant it. Gillian was afraid of Lilac when she went white with passion like that. She carried William’s cage over to the Middletons’ flat and asked the Mrs. Middleton who really was a missionary’s widow to take him in for the evening. Mrs. Middleton had “a way” with parrots, and, though it didn’t seem to work quite so well with cockatoos, she was always very kind about trying to soothe William’s song, when Gillian had other things to do. Lilac had once declared that she’d overheard Mrs. Middleton reading the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer to William just as she used to do to the heathen: but all William was ever heard to add to his vocabulary from the Middleton flat was Jessie Middleton’s drawl, “Oh, Mother, _must_ I?” followed by a prolonged imitation of Jessie Middleton’s yawn.

Love, thought Gillian, as she knocked at Mrs. Middleton’s door, was doing rather horrid things to Lilac; it was making her cruel—Lilac who couldn’t bear even to kill clothes-moths—and suspicious and extravagant. And dishonourable. After all, there was Toby’s American wife—at least there might be, though, now she had seen him herself, Gillian was bound to admit Toby didn’t look in the least married to anybody.

“Isn’t it damnable!” was what Lilac had said last night. And to-night she wanted to have William killed.

VI

It was hot in the little book-lined room up under the roof of the Mordaunt Club. Gillian sat on the window-sill and leaned out over the dark well of the courtyard across which beams of light from the other open windows made slanting, transparent, misty bridges. She sat out of the circle of lamplight made by the painted shade over the oil-lamp which stood on a table in front of the largest bookcase.

Stephen was in the light. It shone on his red, fine skin, on his smooth, shiny hair, on the patent leather of his shoes, on the shining curve of his dress-shirt that bulged, ever so little, over the dull repp of his white waistcoat. Gillian was liking Stephen more every minute. He was so comfortingly at his ease in life. Here, in their little book-room; that afternoon, before the appalling splendours of old Winona’s tea-table, he was just the same Stephen as he was at Glynde. He wasn’t like Toby, who had been nervous even though he chattered in his own library and sulky in his mother’s drawing-room, and who now sat in the corner of the red-leather chesterfield making jerks of speech and ruffling up the pink-and-blue Samarkand rug with his feet. Lilac sat in the other corner, quite in shadow, very slim in her thin white frock with its wide angel sleeves that hung down over her hands as they lay folded in her lap. Her eyes, dark with excitement, looked black in the shade, and the fluff of her fair hair seemed grey with no light to bring out its golden shimmer.

“Been to the Russian Ballet?” jerked Toby.

“Not again,” said Lilac.

Money was sometimes a disadvantageous possession—sometimes. Stephen hadn’t half as much as Toby, but he had been born into his place in life, and it never occurred to him to doubt his perfect right to be wherever his life took him. You could see he never thought about paying for anything; he took it for granted that things were paid for! Stephen was free. Toby, who could buy real Dürers in St. James’s Street and have horses at Newmarket, was afraid. Money had robbed him of the place he was born into and he didn’t fit in the place it had bought for him. He was too nice to be apologetic, but he was always ready to be a little angry. He said “How annoying!” over everything that went at all wrong. He’d said it about his Swinburnes; and when Lady Bottomley had said that she’d promised he should open a bazaar in September; and when he’d dropped the spoon out of his coffee-cup saucer as he took it from Lilac just now.

It was odd that Lilac, whose every movement was so finished and effectual, and who knew exactly not only what she wanted but how she was going to get it—it was perhaps not really odd that Lilac should want this gentle, undecided Toby. It was clear that he wanted her. Of that Gillian had been sure from the moment he had come into the flat. You could see that Toby saw, that he _could_ see nothing but Lilac. It was dreadful, Gillian felt, to have that feeling about another person, particularly if you had a wife in America and couldn’t have the person you wanted like that. It was rather dreadful of Lilac to let him want her when he couldn’t have her. Dreadfully cruel. Perhaps Lilac didn’t know. Perhaps Toby had never looked at her in this way before. Lilac couldn’t let him go on like that. She was keeping very still, almost as if she were half asleep. She must be making up her mind to put a stop to it; not to see Toby again. Nobody could bear to be wanted so badly, to be looked at with such unhappy eyes.

Then, very quietly, and without looking at Toby, or at Gillian, or at Stephen, softly and slowly, but deliberately and not at all as if she were dreaming, Lilac raised one hand and smoothed back the long loose sleeve from the arm that still lay in her lap. Stephen was lighting a cigarette and didn’t notice. But Gillian saw. And she saw how Toby leaned forward a little and stopped in the middle of asking something quite dull to let his eyes drop from Lilac’s face to her hand. And Lilac raised her hand and pushed it along the top of the chesterfield, playing a little, light, slow five-finger exercise on the red leather until her bare arm up to the elbow, lay out beyond the shadow, cream-pale and soft, the skin taut and smooth over the wrist-joints, with tiny sparkles of gold hair catching the yellow lamplight as the round finger-tips tapped out their noiseless tune.

“Guess what I’m playing,” said Lilac softly, in the voice of a young witch casting a spell. “It’s something you know,” and her two long front teeth gleamed in the shadow, breaking the rose of her mouth as she spoke and smiled.

“I can’t guess,” said Toby hoarsely. “Tell me,” said Toby, as though his life depended on being told.

“No—you must guess,” said Lilac, her voice shaking a little in her throat with laughter. “You know it quite well,” and she emphasized the “quite” delicately so that it rang in the air like a chiming bell.

Toby bent on his elbows; his crimson hands clutched each other between his spread knees. His head, thrust into the circle of lamplight, showed his damp hair sticking to his brow.

“Lilac, I _can’t_ guess. Not while you do that.”

Gillian slipped down from the window-seat.

“It’s _Ach du lieber Augustin_, the tune the pipkin sang when it boiled, in the story of the prince who went back into his kingdom and slammed the door,” she said.

Lilac jumped up from her corner and the sleeve fell back again over her arm.

“Oh, Gillian, how mean of you!” she cried. But her voice was happy and satisfied as it had not been before that day. And presently Stephen took Toby away. They were driving down to Esher that night, as Toby had horses arriving from Ireland with a new groom whom he didn’t quite trust, and he wanted to be on the spot himself first thing the next morning.

* * * * *

Lilac went to lunch next day, and on to the nice concert with Lady Bottomley. She arrived, very pretty and rather pathetic in the large crinoline hat trimmed with the pink rose she’d bought in Sloane Street, and the mauve ribbon she’d salved from part of Sophie’s largesse, while Gillian was pumice-stoning the copying-ink from her fingers after her morning’s work. All old Winona’s letters were preserved in duplicate, even the third-person refusals to add to her cheque-signing toil. Gillian had already traced the original hands and the varying imitations of six of her predecessors through the flimsy pages of the copy-files which, also bound into crested volumes, filled a shelf below the newspaper-cutting tomes in the library at 99. Gillian had been taught by her father to burn all letters, even his own lively, brilliant letters written when she stayed behind at school and he sent her his diaries with their little pen and pencil drawings on every page. So she added her daily sheaf to this unvaluable collection, consoling herself with the quotation from La Rochefoucauld, which she could never quite get by heart, about considering the kind of people to whom He gave the most of it when you wanted to know what God really thought of money.

“And, of course,” said Gillian, being honest with herself as she scrubbed her inky hands, “it wasn’t God who gave old Winona money to spend on having a quite young crest put on everything she possesses, but John Bottomley who did make the best bicycles that ever spun and deserved to be ‘a perfect Crocus’; and Toby will do beautiful things with it when old Winona dies. I wonder if she’ll have a tomb all made of precious stones. I do hope she will. I do wish she would. And order it now, while I’m with her like the Bishop, at St. Praxed’s.”

But there wouldn’t be any ordering of jewelled monuments for a day or two at any rate, for by the time Gillian came into the drawing-room Lilac had made such headway with Toby’s mother that that lady was insisting that Gillian must take the week-end until Tuesday and go with her sister to Glynde.

“And, of course,” said Lilac, “if Gillian is not quite rested by Tuesday, I can come back and do your letters myself for a day or two. I don’t pretend to be as clever as Gillian, but I’m _very_ industrious, and I’d try not to let you miss her too dreadfully, Lady Bottomley, indeed I would.”

Lady Bottomley was archly playful.

“I am sure, Miss Lilac, that you would be a delightful secretary, but I always spend August in Ireland, where my male secretary attends to all my requirements, and _my_ Miss Armstrong will only have to look in for an hour or two in the mornings when she gets back from Glynde. I should be sorry,” and she tapped Lilac’s cheek with the whole bunch of her fingers, “for such a pretty little person as yourself to leave her friends on my account. Mr. and Mrs. Glynde would never forgive me for robbing them of such bright eyes.”

So Gillian went to Glynde with Lilac by the five-o’clock train out of Victoria on Friday afternoon. And when they got there, there was no Toby.

Stephen met them with the car at Lewes.

“Toby’s gone to America,” he told them. “He was very bored at Sandown and didn’t seem to care whether the Buster won or not. I think he’s gone after that wife of his.”

“Oh,” said Lilac. “You don’t think he’ll bring her back, do you?”

“Alive or dead,” said Stephen. “Dead, possibly. I dare say he’s gone out to murder her. There’s sure to be one of the properly free states where a decent fellow like Toby can kill a wife from time to time! How long have you known about her?”

“Only since I went to Lady Bottomley,” said Gillian. “I thought you and Sophie didn’t.”

“Sophie don’t,” said Stephen; “but Toby told me the whole story, and he says he told Lilac.”

“Yes,” said Lilac, “he wrote to me about it, yesterday. But I’d known for some time. And I told Sophie.”

“You did, did you?” said Stephen. “That’s all to the good,” and he changed the subject.

VII

Lilac did not marry Toby till the spring. And Toby did not murder his wife, though old Winona went into deep mourning on the receipt of a cable from San Francisco one day in the following October. The cable was duly filed. It ran:

“Millicent is no more. Do not announce it in _The
Times_.—REGINALD.”

“I quite feel with my son,” said old Winona. “The death of so unworthy a woman as the late Lady Bottomley is not a matter we, as a family, can publicly countenance. But my own change of title must be announced. Will you look up in Kelly, my dear, for the form in which a dowager announces the resumption of her original title?”

But Gillian could find nothing helpful in Kelly or even in Whitaker, and, after an afternoon’s research, was told to telegraph for the lady whom Mrs. Barraclough called Winnie Roehampton.

“My daughter-in-law knows by experience how to deal with knotty points in the social code,” said the ex-dowager.

Lady Roehampton discouraged the attempt at a public resumption of her ex-mother-in-law’s rights. She was an elegant and vivacious creature with very flaxen hair and a complexion so brilliant that, though actually the work of nature, it laid her under the constant suspicion of resorting to art. Her manner, which at first seemed friendly, was on closer acquaintance seen to be the outward expression of an undiscriminating candour. She had no reticences, and also no rancours. To her things and people just were. She neither classified nor blamed. But she lacked the philosophic detachment which enables others who share her outlook to stand aside and watch their fellow creatures commit the follies they themselves are too balanced to stigmatize, too interested to prevent. Life was not pure spectacle to Winnie Roehampton. She knew what drama meant to the actors and she was a shade too unintelligent to remain passively unkind in circumstances over which she could have any possible control.

“My child,” she said, drawing Gillian into the shelter of one of the palm-groves in the hall after telling Atkinson to call off that powdered menial as she would let herself out, “take her to Jay’s. Let her buy up the whole shop. They’ll tell her to an inch how much crêpe indicates the resumption of whatever a baronet’s widow resumes when her son has been divorced by his wife. Oh, yes! That’s what’s happened. Didn’t you know? Let her get new visiting-cards—she might have a little black arrow put through ‘Winona.’ I wish I’d thought of that before. Never mind. You can tell her I thought of it on the way down. But keep her out of _The Times_. You needn’t tell her Millicent isn’t dead—after all, I _may_ be doing Toby an injustice—unless you can’t restrain her any other way. But you might suggest that she’d better wait till Toby gets back, as it’s quite on the cards that he’s bringing a perfectly good new wife of his own with him.”

“I think,” said Gillian, “the little black arrow is quite enough for me to suggest. I’ve seen the cable, you know.”

“So have I. That’s what convinces me. Millicent isn’t the kind of woman who dies of anything but extreme antiquity or violence. And she’s now about thirty, and you don’t suppose Toby has done anything violent.”

“No, of course not,” said Gillian faintly, seeing again Toby’s bent head and strangling hands thrust forward into the lamplight as Lilac’s arm slid along the top of the couch behind him.

Her hesitation was misunderstood.

“Oh,” said the Countess of Roehampton, without a trace of self-consciousness or embarrassment, “Dora Barraclough has told you about Jim Bottomley’s accident? She’d exaggerate, of course; I’ve always said it was my fault. But I didn’t plan it. I was quite sorry when it happened. And you can see how I’ve been forgiven. Call me in again if she gets difficult. One of Roehampton’s aunts is a lady-in-waiting, and I’ll get her trained intellect to bear on the situation.”

“Thank you so much, Lady Roehampton,” said Gillian from the doorstep, ignoring the more sensational aspects of the lady’s Parthian speech. “I’ll get Dashwood to take her to Jay’s this very afternoon.”

VIII

The only person who made any difficulty about Lilac’s marriage was Aunt Elizabeth Armstrong, whose real name was Mrs. Mortimer. She was what Toby called a reinforced relation. Toby could be quite amusing if you gave him time. Mrs. Mortimer had been a Miss Armstrong, Gerald Armstrong’s only aunt, and had taken him after his mother’s death when he was quite a child with her at such times as he was not at school. When he grew up and went to Oxford, and not till then, Aunt Elizabeth had bestowed her hand on the West African clergyman to whom she had plighted her troth in early life. Mr. Mortimer did not long survive his marriage, and little Ellen Mortimer, a young half-sister who was semi-dependent on him, came to live in England with his widow, and, much to her indignation, married Gerald Armstrong quite quietly one afternoon when he was home on leave, going out to do so at a registrar’s office in an old hat, and coming back with him to tea as though nothing had happened.

There was something of the born supplanter in little Ellen Mortimer, so it seemed to Aunt Elizabeth, who did not greatly care for women. And it was like little Ellen to have two daughters and no son. Aunt Elizabeth, who filled the office of grandmother on both sides to Gerald’s and Ellen’s children, made the best of Gillian, whose second name was Elizabeth. But Lilac was a thorn in her flesh. Little Ellen had been sly, but demure and quiet in her dress, as became a Christian lady. But Lilac only resorted to slyness when overt methods failed and her taste in dress was what Aunt Elizabeth called “shouting,” which wasn’t in the least what other people mean by “loud,” but indicated a general effect calculated to make the casual observer look twice and look approvingly.

Aunt Elizabeth lived at Highgate in a little bow-windowed house at the top of the hill which you entered from the road, thinking it quite an ordinary house, only to discover that the parlour-window at the back hung over a precipice dizzying down through tree-tops, and smoke-wreaths and chimney-stacks to the great lake of the city out of which the dome of St. Paul’s rose, a small round island in the east, and the four chimneys of the Chelsea power-house stood against the far horizon in the west like the masts of a sailing-ship with all its canvas furled.

Aunt Elizabeth set no store by the view from her parlour-window. She did not obscure it, as she obscured that of the road in the front of the house, by strong, white Nottingham lace curtains; but her motives were not æsthetic motives.

“No need to curtain these windows,” she said. “Only the birds of the air can see into them from the outside, and the fewer the curtains the better the dusting.” Aunt Elizabeth’s house was very well dusted. It was also quite reasonably comfortable. Its furniture belonged to the mahogany age, but there was no horse-hair left, though you could feel that Aunt Elizabeth had lived with horse-hair in her time. Also, it was quite surprisingly free from any traces of Mr. Mortimer’s vocation. None of the African mats, beads and other devices which filled Mrs. Middleton’s flat in the Club, had its counterpart in Aunt Elizabeth’s parlour. “Heathen rubbish,” she called them all, “and some of it worse. How Agneta Middleton can bring herself to set up that shameless idol she has on the mantelpiece in a Christian land I cannot conceive, and if,” said Aunt Elizabeth, “that Mrs. Barrymore of yours wasn’t a poor thing, she’d have had it taken away and burnt.”

“But Mrs. Barraclough thinks it is an ornament. She doesn’t feel about it as you do. It doesn’t seem to her to be a god as it does to you,” Gillian had protested.

“God, indeed,” said Aunt Elizabeth; “devil, my girl, that’s what they are, however your Mrs. Barrington makes excuses for them.”

Aunt Elizabeth always got the names of the people she called “poor things” just a little wrong. It made them seem even poorer than she said they were, and was a deliberate classification, not in the least akin to old Winona’s large confusions. She had never once stumbled, as a person liable to true confusion might well have done, over the name or names of her prospective great-nephew-in-law. “Poor Reginald” she called him from the first, and she withheld her blessing on the match for some days under the impression that, being Irish, he must necessarily be a Roman, and so worse than the heathen of whose conversion it was always possible to entertain an active hope.

Lilac made it quite clear to Gillian, without any direct reference to the subject, that Aunt Elizabeth was to be allowed to understand that Toby was the bachelor he appeared to be.

“If she can be brought to approve of my marriage,” was what Lilac had said, “she’ll forgive me for not going to live at Highgate.”

Mrs. Mortimer had been quite willing for Gillian to go to the Mordaunt Club, and be under Mrs. Middleton’s eye when Ellen died. The Club was within an hour’s journey of Pelham House. But she had quite supposed that Lilac would sojourn with her at Highgate. That neither she nor Lilac really liked one another was no reason, in Mrs. Mortimer’s self-disciplining view of life for them, as widow and orphan of the same blood, to live apart.

But Lilac had been firm. Gillian was not fit to live alone. All she’d got to furnish the flat with was a ton of books, a cast of the Winged Victory, and an old brass toasting-fork which, said Lilac, just showed. Besides, Lilac couldn’t live out so far as Highgate herself. And Aunt Elizabeth saw to it, as Lilac very well knew she would when it came to the point, that all the lacunæ made by the sale of her nephew’s really valuable things and the habit of living in semi-furnished houses which little Ellen had contracted in the course of their nomadic married life, were properly filled with good cutlery and fine linen sheets to go with the outlandish curtains and wild cups and saucers Gillian herself had bought at strange shops of post-Maple ideas.

“And how is Gillian any fitter to live alone now?” asked Aunt Elizabeth, when she had been made aware of Lilac’s engagement. “Is she going to share your home?”

“No! How could she, dearest Aunt Eliza? Toby and I aren’t going to have a home for ever such a long time. We’re going round the world for our honeymoon, and that’ll take almost a year.”

“And where will you be if the Lord should send you a child? Gadding about on the face of the waters, I dare say.”

“Oh,” said Lilac, blushing, but defiant, “He won’t send one till we get back. Toby and I have decided that.”

“Wicked, impious creatures!” said Aunt Elizabeth, shaking her head, on which, in spite of Lilac’s efforts, she wore just the same kind of cap, three rows of Brussels lace frilled on to a high-crowned ‘shape,’ as her mother had worn before her. “I shall pray without ceasing that the Lord may see fit to defeat your ungodly purpose.”

“Well, don’t say anything to Toby about it, or to Lady Bottomley,” begged Lilac.

“I shall do the Lord’s bidding,” was Aunt Elizabeth’s reply. “If He bids me to speak, it will not be for you to prevent me, my girl.”

So Lilac took good care that Toby was not left alone at any time when the Lord might be likely to move Aunt Elizabeth to declare His views; and by the exercise of that secret diplomacy which always baffled Gillian to detect in the working, managed to keep her quasi-grandmaternal relation and her prospective mother-in-law apart.

“I dare say you would enjoy seeing them meet,” she retorted when Gillian pointed out how fine a conflict might arise between two such autocrats, “but it’s my wedding and I’m not going to have it spoilt.”

“I’m sure they’d not spoil it,” said Gillian. “Aunt Elizabeth is so relieved that you’re going to be married in a Protestant church that she doesn’t mind its being a fashionable one, and she won’t know how like a pantomime it’s going to be till she’s there. And you know she won’t brawl in church.”

“No. Not _in_ church. But she might persuade Toby and his mother to have the horrid bits left in. She thinks her Prayer-Book was just as much given by inspiration of God as the Bible.”

“Are there any horrid bits?” said Gillian.

“Gillian, you idiot. You’ve read the Service, haven’t you?”

“Lots of times,” said Gillian. “I think those vows are rather terrifying. It’s such a long promise—forsaking all other, too—you can’t know who’s coming—but I like it because of the ‘so’—‘as.’ I can’t think why people will say ‘as long as.’ It’s no easier.”

“Oh, _that_,” said Lilac. “That’s all right, and I’m not going to be common and suffragetty about ‘obey.’ It’s the other bits. Even you, my poor Jill, wouldn’t want to be mixed up in a remedy against sin.”

“I don’t know,” said Gillian slowly; “if it were a remedy, it would be rather beautiful to be part of it—_against_ sin.”

“There are times,” said Lilac with bitter incisiveness, “when I think you can’t be quite right in your head.”

They were on their way to Dover Street to try on the bridesmaids’ dresses. There were to be six bridesmaids—two little Glyndes, the two small Roehampton children, a stout but very rich friend of whom Lilac had not lost sight since the Lausanne days, and Gillian herself. And they were to be all dressed as Dresden china shepherdesses in dresses copied from a complete half-dozen originals that figured among the many presents from the bridegroom’s mother. For old Winona, who was coming out of her black garments and going into maroon with feathers on the resumption of her dowagership, had insisted on giving and choosing the bridesmaids’ dresses herself. It wasn’t regular, but still, as Lilac said, this was a subscription wedding in which Glyndes and Armstrongs and Mortimers all had stakes, so why shouldn’t everybody have a share? And, having once allowed the prospective dowager to take a hand in the preparations, it was useless to attempt to stay that hand from munificence. Besides, she was already very fond of Lilac. Their ideas were seldom in conflict. In the matter of abridging the wedding-service, for example, she was entirely of Lilac’s mind. There was nothing Calvinistic or Biblical about old Winona.

“She really is very nice and refined about some things,” said Lilac. “Much better than Toby is. Did you know that she’d snipped the worst bits out of his Swinburnes when they moved from Blackheath to Knightsbridge after he’d left Oxford?”

“I knew someone had chopped up the books dreadfully,” said Gillian. “I shall give Toby a new unbarbered set for his wedding-present.”

Toby gave Gillian _Die grosse Fortuna_ and the large _Saint Eustace_ two days before the wedding. Lilac had come upon the print when they were looking through Toby’s things together one day, and had told him that Gillian liked it. She was taking her own pictures, a large coloured reproduction of Greiffenhagen’s _Idyll_ and a photogravure of Balestieri’s _Beethoven_ away with her in the small case of her own personal possessions which was being stored at Knightsbridge, and Toby, very modestly, proffered his two Dürers to fill their places on either side of the tall bookcase in the little room.

Gillian accepted them in speechless content.

“And I suppose,” said Lilac, “that you’ll hang them there, both of them, and tell me they’re both beautiful.”

“So they are,” said Gillian.

“The one with the dogs is amusing, and I like the little hill with the castle on it behind,” Lilac conceded. “But as for the other—well, all I can say is that you’d better not let Mrs. Gordon see it if you want to stay on at the Club without me. She’d think it was a caricature of herself. Which it might very well be.”

* * * * *