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.”
* * * * *
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.”