CHAPTER TWO. LILAC (continued 2)

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.”

* * *

The wedding took place on the 25th of April at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square. Aunt Elizabeth did not attend. The date coincided with some mysterious anniversary in her own life which she always kept in prayer and fasting. Neither Lilac nor Gillian could ever be quite sure when this penitential festival would fall, for it came round, not as a day in the month, but as the third or fourth Monday in April, which might be any day between the 15th and the 27th. She had presented Lilac with travelling trunks and cases and a dressing-bag of the finest quality and a length of black satin brocade which would stand by itself. To Toby she sent two copies of what she called “The Scriptures,” one in the Authorized the other in the Revised Version, replete with Notes, Maps, References, Concordances and Subject-Indexes printed in large type on India paper and bound in the limpest, most velvety purple leather. She had also given Lilac a purse containing a five-pound note, four sovereigns, two half-sovereigns, six half-crowns and ten shillings in shillings and sixpences, all new coins of that year.

“No need for you to go to your husband for pocket-money till you’ve got used to him, my girl,” said Aunt Elizabeth as she gave her youngest great-niece a dry and single good-bye kiss.

* * *

Gillian was glad that the old lady did not appear on the day of the wedding. Nothing about it would have pleased her mind. The great, green, Burne-Jones window lighting the white-and-silver bride with her sheaf of Madonna lilies, followed by the six powdered and panniered bridesmaids with their gilded crooks and jaunty flowered-baskets, would have seemed to her equally sacrilegious with the operatic music sung by an exotic soprano and a dusky tenor in place of a sound Britannic anthem while the register was being signed. And the huge wedding-bell, composed of white roses and plaster Cupids, under which Lilac and Toby stood to receive congratulations in the drawing-room of the Grosvenor Hotel afterwards, a surprise planned and executed by old Winona, would have pleased Mrs. Mortimer as ill as the champagne and the confetti (silver hearts and horse-shoes these), which flowed and floated through the afternoon.

Gillian took Lilac up to the hard, unfamiliar hotel bedroom strewn with dressmakers’ boxes and tissue-paper where the bride had dressed that morning and now was to change into her travelling-clothes. The room was crowded with people. There was Lilac’s new maid, a rather awful being, who had packed everything so thoroughly that there had been nothing left for Gillian to help with the night before, and there was Sophie, of course, and the awkward other bridesmaid who had to come up too, and Mrs. Barraclough whom they couldn’t very well keep out, and odds and ends of people who tapped at the door and said, “May I come in just for one second?” and Winnie Roehampton who dashed in very slim and cool in a leaf-green sheath frock of the most miraculous cut, and said, “Well, my dear, I was Lady Bottomley once and I hope you’ll make a better job of it than I did,” and skimmed out again before Lilac had time to thank her for the benediction.

But Sophie cleared the room for the sisters for a final moment, and Lilac cried a little in Gillian’s arms before she went down to Toby and the confetti.

“Jilly,” said Lilac, “promise me one thing. When I come back, when you see me again for the first time, you won’t open your eyes and stare at me, will you?”

“No,” said Gillian; “but why should I stare?—and why should you mind if I did?”

“Oh, Jilly, Jilly,” said Lilac, “I don’t believe you know.”

IX

Gillian had a dazed, deafening headache. She couldn’t stay on and chatter to the wedding-guests. She couldn’t go on and dine at Claridge’s before the theatre-party with which the day was to end.

Old Winona had another Macfarlane to look after her now. Gillian was absolved from her duties and was going to take a proper secretarial course in order to fit her for real life, a business for which life at 99 was no sort of preparation. So Gillian was free to go home to the Club by herself; Mrs. Barraclough was making a complete orgy of it with the Roehamptons and the Glyndes.

She took off her preposterous hat, shook the powder out of her hair, put on a hooded cloak and slipped out of the busy, indifferent hotel into the April twilight and walked down to the river.

It was a soft, dim evening, heavy with spring. The plane-trees on the Embankment were shaking the fine splinters of their stamens out of the little tasselled bracts that opened with soft popping noises in the still leafless boughs. The air was as clouded and green-grey as the water; the figures hurrying to get out of the Park before the gate closed for the night moved on the other side of the river as if behind glass in an aquarium.

Gillian leaned across the parapet and let the breeze that blew down-stream cool her aching flushed face. The tide was low. A few desultory gulls, the stragglers of the main fleet which had put to sea with the onset of mild weather some weeks earlier, scavenged quietly in the mud at the water’s edge. A police-boat prowled up from Vauxhall; two barges keeping to mid-channel travelled with the ebb, their sails set to catch what airs might stir to aid them. The evening was not so much peaceful as indifferent. Gillian lingered on, and an increasing desolation preyed within her. What was it that Lilac had done?

“Lilac will always know that she is paying for a fake.” That was what her father had said. Was Toby a fake? Lilac had wanted him. She had wanted him so much that she had at last stretched out her soft arm and taken him by guile with her rosy, tapping fingers. Gillian never remembered that hand, creeping into the lamplight and shaking all poor Toby’s unhappy resistance, without a shock of wonder. What exactly was it that Lilac had done to him? How did she know she could do it? It was predatory, her gesture, yet it gave away something that could never be taken back again. Lilac had been paying, paying deliberately, for Toby. But was it Toby, the essential Toby, that dim, kind, gentle Toby who loved horses and fine engravings and had such clumsy hands and such vague, beseeching eyes that Lilac had bought with the lilt of a song from a fairy-tale? Or was it what Toby stood for? Was it only the power to buy everything, to go everywhere, to make, if she chose, such a crammed and monotonous wilderness of any house as Old Winona had made of 99, that Lilac really wanted in Toby? wanted it so much that she had confused Toby, who was not in the least magnificent with the magnificence she could reach through him? Gillian thought with a slow gust of remorse of that far-off, unconsidered Millicent who too, in her day, had wanted Toby, and who was now—neither she nor Lilac had ever stopped to ask if she were dead—at least she had never spoken of Toby’s first wife to Lilac. What Toby had said to Lilac about her was their own affair; but Gillian might have spared her a thought.

Lower and lower in her own esteem she plunged, down into the dark undergrowth where motives lie tangled in egoism and vanity. Jealousy of her sister; envy of Lilac’s freedom; feeble self-pity for her own loneliness—as if she didn’t want to be alone—assailed her as she groped in the shadows of her heart. What an aftermath of a wedding! Why couldn’t she be happy because Lilac was free, because she had both hands full of what she most wanted? Gillian wanted freedom too. But it wasn’t, after all, freedom that someone else’s money could give her. Lilac had freed herself with one hand by fettering the other. In a way she was more bound than Gillian, who could never hope to be freer than she was now.

Gillian’s headache was gone; it had faded out with the daylight. The sky was quite black above the Embankment lights now, and the tide was rising and taking fresh reflections, long swords of light from the lamps on the bridges, as the waters broadened beneath them. Gillian turned her face to go home, her self-reviling over. But there was still an ache of disappointment in her thoughts. What was it she had asked of this day, that thing for herself, that secret and peculiar enjoyment which had not been given to her? Long ago, when she was a child, she had known this unsatisfied ache. “I’m not hungry, but I know there’s something very delicious I’ve not eaten,” she had explained to her father. Now the ache was there, but she knew what she had missed. It was the climax of the wedding-service which had never come; the moment when, in her prayer for Lilac, she had hoped, had meant to reach out and touch her father’s spirit if it could be possible that that spirit remained aware of her. She had promised herself to wait with closed eyes for the words:

“... whose daughters ye are so long as ye do well and are not afraid with any amazement.”

and they had never been spoken.

Lilac and Old Winona together had had the service thoroughly pruned. The Bishop had tweetled an inaudible little sermon over the married pair, the murmurs of which were drowned to the congregation in the creaking of the bridesmaids’ gilded flower-baskets as they stood separated from the bride and fidgeting in the aisle for the end of the performance. There had been little need for consecrated phrases at the Pantomime Wedding.