Miss Cleeve threw her a very sharp glance of which Lily pretended to be
quite unaware.
"Really, dear," she said in a very even voice. "Keys sometimes are
lost, you know. But there's nothing to take you to the Blue Room, that
I know of."
"Nurse goes in there sometimes. I've seen her coming out."
"I daresay she likes to see that it's kept dusted and tidy," said Miss
Cleeve, in a preternaturally calm voice. "Now run and wash your hands
for lunch, dear."
Lily felt thoroughly baffled by Miss Cleeve, and could not decide
whether or not the governess had penetrated the motive of her artless
enquiries.
Because she felt ashamed of her own attempts at solving the mystery
that was in the air, she was sure that she was being naughty again.
When she went downstairs to the dining-room, her mother and Miss Cleeve
were already there, talking in furtive tones to one another. Eleanor
broke off the instant that Lily appeared and looked at her in rather
a startled way, but Miss Cleeve, with the same determined naturalness
with which she had spoken upstairs, uttered her final remark quite loud:
"So I thought perhaps a word to the wise, Mrs. Stellenthorpe----"
"Quite right, Miss Cleeve, thank you. I shall take care. Anyway it
won't be very long now before----"
They both looked at Lily, who suddenly felt so uncomfortable that, to
cover her own confusion, she almost involuntarily cried out: "Before
what, Mother?"
Her mother and Miss Cleeve exchanged glances in a way that made Lily
feel unutterably small and foolish and ignorant.
To her deep mortification, she felt her face burning with angry
scarlet, although without knowing why.
"Poor little thing!" said Eleanor, and actually laughed, causing all
Lily's inchoate disconcertment to culminate in a silent, furious
resolution, that never again would she ask any of them about anything,
so long as she lived.
The impassioned, childishly formed determination was not of a nature
to endure. The inexplicable resentment that had caused it, Lily never
forgot.
She could not have told what sudden intuition first made her suspect
the truth, but when Eleanor, with certain circumlocutions and
euphemistic phrases, told her that she might pray to God to send her a
baby brother, Lily felt that she had known all the time that this was
what all the mystery had been about.
"It's a great secret and you mustn't talk about it to anyone," Eleanor
whispered.
Lily had no wish to talk about it to anyone. She was by that time
thoroughly convinced that the arrival of a baby was something
necessitating endless concealments and misrepresentations, and
therefore of a highly shameful nature.
She was sent away to the seaside with Miss Cleeve for nearly six weeks,
and when they came back again, the little brother was established
in a blue and white cradle, and the Blue Room had been unlocked and
transformed into a night nursery.
Lily gathered from various things that the servants said, that her
mother had been ill, and that the illness was in some manner connected
with the baby's coming. The subject puzzled her, and troubled her
thoughts very often, but she felt sure that it was wrong to desire
enlightenment, and she knew that if she asked questions she would
receive either jocular or untrue replies, or the shocked "Hush!" of
enforced reticence.
Eleanor having a horror of pet animals, from which she feared the
contraction of mysterious and unspecified diseases of the skin, Lily
was safeguarded from any direct encounter with the crudities of Nature.
Her imagination therefore continued to evolve theories and explanations
that her common-sense rejected, but that frightened and distressed her
none the less, and that sent her furtively in quest of the information
which she believed to be illicit, to such forbidden books of reference
as the "Encyclopædia Britannica."
After Kenneth was born, Lily, to her unconscious relief, ceased to be
the sole object in life of her parents, her governess, and her nurse.
She spent less time in the drawing-room, and after Miss Cleeve had left
for the day, remained in the schoolroom and read endlessly.
"Not too many story-books, my little darling," Eleanor occasionally
said with a hint of disapproval in her tones, but as the books in the
schoolroom were all story-books, and she was not allowed to touch the
ones in the drawing-room, Lily continued to indulge her taste for
fiction, although with the usual underlying feeling of guilt that
seemed automatically to attach itself to whatever was pleasant.
There were curious _nuances_, never put into words, as that to read
a new story-book was more reprehensible than to re-read an old one,
and even when a recent birthday had occasioned the arrival of some
delightful blue or red volume, the very giver of it might be apt to
exclaim, with a sound of vexation, on seeing Lily immersed in it:
"_Another_ new story-book!"
Lily grew to be so apprehensive of these expressions of disapproval
that sometimes she slipped the new book, with its incriminating,
shining binding, into one of the brown paper covers that concealed the
wear and tear of the old books.
This manœuvre was one day penetrated by Miss Cleeve, who did not seek
any explanation of it, but merely told Lily on general grounds that she
was a most sly child, and didn't seem to know the meaning of the word
"honour."
Lily wept and felt that it was true.
Gradually she came to consider her passion for reading as another
sign of her own depravity, much confirmed in this view by the grave
pronouncements of her father, who said to her from time to time:
"Dear child, you know you don't want to have your little nose buried in
a story-book at every spare moment."
It was the question of buying sweets, all over again. Certain
propensities, for reasons never specified, were evidently so
undesirable that the existence of them might not even be admitted. One
was told that one didn't want to do such things, and all the time was
conscious of wanting to do them very much indeed.
Evidently, such desires must never be openly admitted.
The atmosphere became more and more charged with concealments, as time
revealed more and more of the complexities of life.
When Kenneth was nearly a year old, he caught scarlet fever. The
infection was in the village. Miss Cleeve succumbed, and Eleanor,
panic-stricken, sent Lily away by herself for the first time in her
life.
It was expressly explained that she was not going to school. No.
There would never be any question of that. Lily was simply going to a
beautiful peaceful convent, not at all far away, where she would be
very happy with the kind Sisters and play with the pupils.
The scheme was Eleanor's. She had an ideal, totally unbased upon
experience, of a convent school, that was of an extreme and highly
sentimental picturesqueness. In her mind's eye, mild-faced nuns paced
perpetually up and down a garden, and innocent children, in a more or
less permanent state of preparing for their _première Communion_, were
instructed in the arts of music and embroidery and _ancienne politesse
française_.
She combated Philip's strong objections to letting Lily go within the
sphere of Catholic influence.
"It isn't as though she were older," Eleanor urged. "She's only a baby,
Philip. And it will be for such a little while. Please God, we can have
her home again by Christmas."
It was really the last argument that had most weight with Philip, and
the desire that his wife's mind should be at ease about their darling.
Neither had the slightest conception of the utter unfitness for any
form of independence in which they had brought up their child.
Philip himself took her to the convent, emphatically telling her in the
presence of the Mother Superior that she must always say her prayers
night and morning just as she had been taught them, and that she was
not to think of herself as having been sent to school.
The reiteration of this last axiom rather disappointed Lily. It sounded
much more grown up and like other girls to be sent to school, and
school, according to many story-books, was an exciting place where
one distinguished oneself easily and made interesting friendships and
learnt to play games.
Lily was afraid that a convent might prove to be a very tame affair, by
comparison. In effect, she never did learn to play games there, since
the only one in vogue--a complicated system of running about wildly in
the playground from one chalk-mark to another, called The Rescue of the
Holy City from the Infidels--proved beyond her comprehension from the
first to the last day of her stay.
Nor did she make interesting friendships, because any friendships at
all were entirely forbidden and rendered impossible by a quantity of
rules that were enforced by perpetual _surveillance_. Neither did
she distinguish herself, excepting by the unprecedented number of
humiliating and babyish mistakes that she seemed to be perpetually
making.
Lily, for the first time in her life thrown amongst other children,
heard from their unsparing lips various brutal truths about herself:
She was a most frightful baby for her age.
Anybody could see that she'd been made a regular spoilt child of at
home.
It was most awfully affected, the way she was always using grown-up
words.
It was simply _silly_, always to get red and cry at the least little
bit of chaff.
It was perfectly indecent to wear such a disgustingly short frock--the
nuns said so.
Lily was only too thankful to exchange her brief velveteen skirts for a
blue serge uniform dress, that flapped against her ankles and of which
the collar-band scratched her neck.
But even the uniform did not save her from committing other outrages
upon propriety, hitherto unsuspected. A brand-new category of
sins sprang into being, all of them classed under the heading of
Immodesty--a word that Lily had never heard mentioned before.
Legs were particularly immodest. To show them, to cross one of them
over the other, to mention them by name, was all highly immodest.
So was any allusion to any part of the human anatomy below the
shoulder-blades.
There was an uneasy suggestion that it might at any moment become
immodest to talk about any male creature other than a priest, the
convent gardener, or one's own father. Even brothers seemed to be
better left out of the conversation.
The hideous immodesty latent in the taking of a bath could only be
defeated by a cold, shroud-like garment of white calico, that fastened
just above the wearer's collar-bone, was buttoned at the wrists, and
fell in folds to the ground.
A bath, accompanied by a bath-chemise, was in readiness for each pupil
once a week.
Lily jumped trustfully into her first bath at the convent, pleased at
finding that she was expected to take it without supervision, which she
had never done before, got out again very quickly upon the discovery
that the water, on a dank November day, was nearly cold, and dried
herself imperfectly in the chilly amplitude of the bath-chemise,
which she supposed to be a towel of a new kind. The same afternoon a
scandalized nun enquired whether Lily was in the habit of taking a bath
"without wearing anything?"
"All naked? Yes," said Lily, nodding assent.
Then it appeared that not only was her practice immodest, but so was
her language. The nun was not at all angry, she was very kind, but
the vicarious shame that she quite obviously felt on Lily's behalf,
remained unforgettable.
The affair could only be classed with Lily's other great outrage
against decency, which was never destined to pass altogether from her
memory.
The first time that she fell ill at the convent, which she did with
the rapidity of a very much over-coddled child suddenly bereft of even
ordinary supervision in the affairs of the body, Lily was sent to the
Infirmary. She had fainted during breakfast.
"Poor little dear! You shall go to bed at once," said the kind old
Sister in charge. "Where's your dressing-gown, dear?"
"In the dormitory."
"Then I'll fetch it for you. Get ready for bed as fast as you can."
Lily, interpreting this literally, made every speed in divesting
herself of her clothes, forgetful that her night-gown was not lying
waiting on the newly made Infirmary bed.
But the Sister would bring it, she decided, and sat close to the
comfortable blaze of the Infirmary fire. Only a diminutive vest
inadequately concealed her from the appalled gaze of the returning
nun. Lily found herself enshrouded in both night-gown and dressing-gown
on the instant, and directed to get into bed.
The nun was very forbearing, and only said, when the first shock had
passed:
"A modest little girl would never have done that. What _can_ your poor
guardian angel have thought?"
The Protestant Lily, however, was less concerned with the hypothetical
embarrassment of her guardian angel, than with this new view of herself
as a little girl lacking in modesty.
She was homesick while she was at the convent, and a good deal bullied
by her contemporaries, nevertheless the discipline was of a more
wholesome kind than any she had yet known, and the total absence of
any real element of education in the teaching that she received was
partially compensated by the nuns' conscientious observance of Philip's
prohibitions, and the amount of dogmatical religious instruction that
she thereby escaped.
She might even have profited by the three months she spent at school,
if it had been the conventual habit to pay any slightest regard to the
more modern laws of hygiene.
Lily was not naturally a practical child, although she possessed a
certain fundamental common-sense, and a precocious ability to profit by
experience once acquired. Certain simple hygienic practices of which
the regular observance had been enjoined upon her at home, without any
explanation as to the necessity for them, she had acquiesced in blindly
as a matter of course, without the slightest realization of the fact
that they were connected with the preservation of her bodily welfare.
As the extreme modesty enjoined by the nuns did not permit of any
supervision in such matters, even as regarded the youngest of the
children in their charge, a state of affairs naturally followed that
resulted in the very rapid deterioration of Lily's health.
Moreover, there prevailed at the convent, as at the very large majority
of European educational establishments, the monstrous custom of
curtailing the amount of sleep required for the proper development of
growing youth.
Lily, although, like the other junior pupils, she was seldom in bed
before nine o'clock, suffered less than they did--and very much less
than the seniors, young girls all more or less at a stage of physical
and mental development that made the utmost demand upon each one's
constitution. Lily, at all events, need not obey the clamorous bell
that summoned the school at a quarter to six every morning, in order
that all might be assembled in the chapel by half-past six. She
remained in bed until it became imperative to get up, dress herself--a
task that she had not been allowed to perform unaided hitherto, and
to which she was consequently highly inadequate--wash herself with an
equal absence of thoroughness, partly because she was unaccustomed to
ice-cold water, and partly because it was immodest to unfasten one's
night-gown before various garments had been shuffled on underneath
it--and then join the other children, who had now been fasting for more
than an hour, for breakfast.
The food they were given was abundant, although inferior in quality,
and completely lacking in variety. Each day of the week had its
appointed menu, which was never departed from.
Sweets and chocolates were permitted only on Sundays, when, to equalize
distribution and encourage generosity, the assembled gastronomical
wealth of the establishment was placed upon the long tables of the
refectory at dinner-time. No favouritism was permitted, so that each
box or dish must be sent the length of the table by its owner, each of
whose fellow-pupils would accept one specimen of the contents.
Naturally, the abstention of the week enhanced the necessity for
profiting to the full by the plethora of Sunday, and Lily was not
the only child who, when the day of rest and plenty was over, wished
miserably, and for more than one reason, that Sunday privileges were
allowed to extend over the cheerlessness of the week.
Philip came once to see his daughter, and was dismayed, without
altogether knowing why, at her appearance when she was sent to him in
the parlour.
The many inches of additional skirt by which the convent authorities
had striven to obliterate the recollection of Lily's original display
of brown stocking, made her look absurdly tall and thin, and her hands
and little, slim wrists seemed to have grown bony.
Philip, scrutinizing her face anxiously, decided that she had lost some
of her colour and that there certainly were black rings round her eyes.
Her hair seemed to be in need of brushing.
To his enquiries, Lily replied, after the fashion of almost all
children, that nothing was the matter. Yes, she liked the convent.
Had anyone been talking to her about religion? No, she didn't think so.
This relieved Philip's chief personal anxiety on Lily's behalf, and
after cautioning her gently upon the use of slang and the care of her
hands, he bade her say her little prayers every day, and be a very
good child, and said that he hoped she would be home by Christmas.
He went away inexplicably depressed.
Eleanor instantly felt the weight of that depression, but as Philip had
seriously resolved that his wife must, for her own good, be subjected
to no further anxiety whilst the little boy continued ill, he gave her
a hollow and unsmiling account, which he made as brief as possible, of
Lily's welfare and happiness. It would have been quite impossible to
Eleanor to receive a statement of her husband's at any but its face
value.
She pretended, even to herself, that she believed Philip's account,
and only cried in the middle of the night, telling herself that it was
because she was over-tired.
Whether or not this last was the cause of her weeping, it was certainly
a fact.
With quite irrational self-immolation, she had refused to entrust the
care of Kenneth to a trained nurse, and devoted herself to him day and
night in a veritable orgy of maternal sacrifice.
Kenneth recovered, although probably less rapidly than he would have
done under professional care, and Eleanor fell ill.
She had the fever very slightly, but after a time, she tentatively
asked that Lily should be sent for from the convent.
"I must see her once more, Philip."
It was entirely characteristic of Eleanor Stellenthorpe that with all
her impassioned idolatry of her favourite child, it never occurred to
her that she might spare Lily's sensitive youth an emotional scene such
as the one of farewell that she contemplated.
But Philip, although heavy with the sense of impending calamity, and
the spoken weight of an unfavourable medical verdict, was incapable of
abandoning his life-long endeavour to alter the nature of painful facts
by dint of refusing to acknowledge them.
"Don't talk like that, Eleanor dearest," he begged her. "It sounds just
a little morbid, and of course you'll be well again by Christmas."
Accordingly, nothing distressing was put into words, and Philip and
Eleanor, neither of them inwardly deceived by their spoken denial of
despondency, suffered separately and in silence.
For two days before she died, Eleanor was unconscious, but it was not
until after her death that Philip said, with heart-broken sincerity:
"I gave up hope from the moment she fell ill. From the first, I really
knew that she would never get well again."