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.