The least highly spirited amongst us, however easily cowed by outside
influence, seldom finds it easy or desirable to practise meekness when
dealing with a near relative at home.
This law, which is a practically invariable one, deserves a candid
recognition which it seldom receives.
Certainly it was never openly admitted to exist by Philip
Stellenthorpe, whose house furnished a striking example of its workings
after Lily had finally returned from Bridgecrap.
At school, she had been the victim of a diffidence engendered in the
consciousness of failure.
At home, the consciousness of failure merely roused her to covert and
irritable defiance of criticism.
She was no longer the sensitive and over-intuitive child steadily
denying her own instincts wherever she foresaw that they must run
counter to her father's unalterably sentimental ideals. But neither had
she the moral courage nor the training in honesty of thought that would
have enabled her boldly to analyze the causes of her own discontent.
She was resentful of Philip's arbitrary conventions, for which he never
gave any other reason than that "Father says it will be best that
way," and at the same time she believed her resentment to be wrong and
undutiful.
She thought, and was shocked and unhappy to think, that there were
times when she hated her father, whereas her hatred was in reality
wholly for certain manifestations of his solicitude and affection for
herself.
"A child that is impatient of its parent's love," Philip once called
her, in bewildered pain and disappointment.
Lily felt herself to be unutterably heartless, cried herself sick with
remorse and despair, and then had to bite her tongue to prevent herself
from protesting aloud in exasperation the very next time that Philip
called her his little pet.
A perpetually tête-à-tête existence might well have brought the state
of tension between them to an unforgettable climax, but that the
situation was saved by the Hardinges.
The Hardinges came to live within a mile of Philip Stellenthorpe.
The shock to him was less severe than if they had been people of whom
he knew nothing, and the sacred tradition of Eleanor's day, that "the
children were happiest in their own little nursery," was allowed to
lapse when Lily was between eighteen and nineteen years old, and
Kenneth in his first term at school. Subtle and intangible conflict
and the presence of the cheerful, commonplace Hardinges were.
unthinkable together in the same atmosphere.
Dorothy Hardinge, no longer able to play hockey with any regularity,
philosophically turned her attention to other forms of amusement, and
was quite ready to make a companion of Lily Stellenthorpe. Having
reluctantly put up her hair and lengthened her skirts, she made the
best of privileges that she had never coveted, took her clothes quite
seriously, and discovered frankly, for the first time, that Lily had
at least one undeniable advantage over other girls that had never been
recognized at school, in that she was extremely and unusually pretty.
Janet was less simple-minded, or less generous than Dorothy, and always
made Lily conscious of her faint contempt.
Sylvia was still called Lily's friend, although they had much less in
common than had Lily and Dorothy, now that Lily was accounted grown up,
while Sylvia had three more years of school before her.
Charlie and Ethel Hardinge gave tennis parties and small dances, and
picnic parties, and talked as proudly and volubly of "the girls" as
they had once talked of "the kiddie-widdies."
They included Lily and Kenneth in everything.
"We've got two boys coming to stay with us next week. It ought to be
rather fun," Dorothy Hardinge proclaimed. "There are never enough men
to go round, here."
"There are so few families with sons, and anyway the boys always
seem to be years younger than the girls--like Kenneth," said Janet
discontentedly.
It had been the fashion at Bridgecrap to deride as early Victorian
any assumption of the desirability of masculine society under any
conditions, but Dorothy Hardinge at least had candidly readjusted her
point of view amongst her new surroundings.
"We shall try and give a dance, while they're here. One of them is
father's ward, Colin Eastwood--he's eighteen and awfully nice. Sort of
quiet, you know, but nice. And he's bringing a friend, someone we don't
know. Father said he might. He's at some University or other, and he's
about twenty-two, or something like that. He'll probably think himself
as old as anything, compared to us," said Dorothy with a little laugh
that betrayed excitement.
Lily felt excited, too. She had met very few boys indeed that were
beyond the age of sailor suits, but she had indulged in as many
romantic fancies of possible future conquests for herself, as were
allowed her by the ineradicable memory of the convent theory that
masculinity was _ipso facto_ something to be, as far as possible,
ignored by the modest feminine.
Much reading and an uncontrollable imagination had merely eradicated
the recollection of conventual shibboleths, but Lily was still
sufficiently bound by them to feel very much ashamed when she found
herself wondering whether Colin Eastwood and his friend would think
that she was pretty. Dorothy said that she was.
From time to time, when she had on a new hat or put on a summer
frock for the first time, her father looked at her with an air of
rather melancholy gratification, and then made some small, detached
observation at the very end of the day, when it might be assumed to
have no special significance to the immediate occasion:
"My little Lily is getting quite a grown-up girl, now. It's quite a
duty for little people to take care of their complexions, you know,
we're given these small advantages to be a pleasure to those who care
about our looks."
Lily had thereby deduced that Philip was afraid of her becoming vain,
and that therefore he, also, thought her pretty.
She sometimes took long and furtive observations of herself in the
glass. Her eyes, dark-lashed and rather deeply set, were not nearly
as blue as Dorothy Hardinge's, but her nose at least was straight
where Dorothy's turned up, and her soft skin had no freckles, and was
sun-burned olive instead of red. She thought that her lips were too
full, but at all events they were firmly closed, since she had always
breathed through her nose, which not one of the three Hardinges could
do for any length of time. And her hair was lovely.
Lily would never have applied to it, even in her own mind, such an
adjective--redolent of vanity, according to the code--but nevertheless,
that was what she really thought of it, when she brushed out the long,
silky brown waves.
She counted vanity as being amongst her besetting sins, and strove to
persuade herself that, against the evidence of her own senses, she
really ought to believe herself plain and unattractive.
It was a mark of her own unregeneracy, that this should prove to be so
extraordinarily difficult.
It became more difficult than ever, when Colin Eastwood and Lily began
to meet one another every day at the parties and excursions arranged by
the Hardinges in honour of their two guests.
Colin, as Dorothy had said, was nice, and very quiet. The indications
of his admiration for Lily were so shyly offered that she only became
aware of it by subtle and gradual degrees.
So restrained and delicate was that impalpable idyll of their extreme
youth, that it never became the object of jarring and facetious
comment, as was Dorothy's loud flirtation with Colin's cheerful
and amusing friend, embarked upon within an hour of their first
acquaintance.
Lily, at first, had indeed been inwardly mortified at the promptness of
Dorothy's conquest. The undergraduate was a Real Live Person--so was
Dorothy. So were all the others. Lily, just as at school, felt herself
to be but an indifferent masquerader, through the badly sustained
pretensions of whom they could all see plainly.
She found herself paired with Colin, in all the expeditions, and
thought that it was because he had such nice manners that he always
stayed beside her. But in a very little while she knew that, actually,
Colin manœuvred for the place next her, and that his gaze always sought
hers to share in the frequent jokes and allusions that had so soon come
into being amongst them all.
He liked her better than Dorothy, or Janet or any of them.
It was just such a first romance as is only possible to certain
diffident and highly sensitized temperaments, as yet unawakened to
any thought of the cruder and more obvious manifestations of mutual
attractions. Colin Eastwood was very nearly as ingenuous as Lily, and
quite as shy.
He sat next her at picnics, and looked pitiful if the privilege was
accidentally usurped by others. He once, daringly, and with shaking
fingers, fastened her glove for her.
He asked her to call him Colin, and when she shyly acquiesced he was
transported, but looked at her with a gaze that implored a yet further
privilege.
Lily blushed at first, and then said timidly:
"And will you call me Lily?"
He said breathlessly: "Oh, I should love to." The audacity of the words
made both their hearts beat quicker, so that they could say no more.
When they played tennis at the Hardinges' house, Lily was generally
assigned to Colin for a partner, as it was necessary to equalize the
sets by coupling the weakest player, as Lily indubitably was, with the
strongest.
At first she thought that he must resent her inferiority, but it was
soon evident that he did not even acknowledge it to exist. When she
played well, he praised her rapturously, and when she played badly he
put aside her apologies with assurances that the sun, or the wind, or
some mistaken movement of his own had been against her.
Under the stimulus of his admiration, Lily suddenly blossomed into a
self-confidence hitherto unknown to her, and actually learnt to like
tennis, and to play passably well.
Occasionally Colin was her adversary, and then he served his balls to
her as gently as possible, and she knew it, and was thrilled by his
chivalry, although she never made acknowledgment of it to him in any
spoken words.
Such tiny little things seemed to count. The way one looked, or didn't
look--the seat one chose in the garden at tea-time. The allusions that
proved how carefully certain predilections or desires had been noted.
And there were the photographs.
All of them had cameras, and groups were taken. Colin always placed
himself next to Lily, or sitting at her feet, or standing just behind
her, for these.
Colin took photographs of Lily, because that was such a very pretty
hat, if she didn't think it rude of him to make a personal remark. And
might he take one of her without a hat on at all, for a change?
Lily would just take one snapshot of Colin, because he had put her
camera to rights, and they must see if it had been a successful
operation.
Colin manœuvred the unsuspecting Sylvia into making use of his Kodak,
which was much superior to her own Brownie, so that the photograph
which she took of Colin and Lily, alone together on the tennis court,
appeared to be a sudden inspiration of her own.
But Lily knew that the whole was a deeply thought-out plot of Colin's,
although he never said so. When the films were developed and printed,
however, though Colin exhibited them freely, he let Lily know,
casually, that only she and he were to have copies of that particular
photograph.
The glamour of perfect summer weather lay over it all, and the scent
and colour of the innumerable roses with which the Hardinges' garden
seemed to be eternally decked. It was the beginning of August, when
the halcyon days drew to a close, and on the last evening, they all,
under a red harvest moon, went out to the favourite scene of their many
excursions--a stretch of common land whereon the heather had just burst
into purple bloom.
The undergraduate challenged Dorothy to a race through the thick,
impeding clumps, and they sped far ahead, the youth gaining upon her
every moment, in spite of a long start and the silk skirt that she had
daringly wound round her waist, exposing her frilled petticoats and a
shapely length of leg.
Sylvia and two contemporaries, encountered upon the way, linked arms
and could be heard singing fragmentarily as they went. Kenneth, excited
by the unwonted lateness of the hour, ran with the Hardinges' dog, and
alternately teased and chattered to Janet, always left odd-man-out, and
now relegated to the society of her father, who told her instructive
things about the moon. Lily and Colin lingered far behind them all.
They were not articulate, even now, in spite of the soft allurement of
the melancholy that possessed them both.
In Lily's mind, there floated a fragment once read somewhere:
... _De cet adieu, si douce est la tristesse._
She said tremulously:
"I'm sorry you're both going away to-morrow."
She had not wanted to say _both_, but the word mysteriously forced
itself from her.
"I'm sorry, too," Colin answered fervently. "I shall never forget this
time. It's been the happiest of my whole life."
"I think it's been the happiest of mine, too."
Shyness overwhelmed and silenced them both.
"You don't want to catch up with the others, do you?" spoke Colin
entreatingly.
"No--oh no. They're too far ahead," said Lily hurriedly.
The hillside became steeper, and the gorse-bushes that stood up amidst
the tough springing heather became more numerous.
"I think I'd better go first and--and help you, if I may."
He thrust the stiff, green spires aside, and held out his hand.
Lily tremulously placed hers within his grasp.
They climbed slowly, without speaking.
"Shall we sit down for a minute?" Colin suggested, when the end of the
steep path was reached, and Lily had softly, but definitely, withdrawn
her hand from his.
They leant against a boulder, and Colin detected a tiny tuft of white
heather.
"Let's each pick a piece of it, and not tell anyone where we found it."
Then they exchanged their pieces, rather solemnly and without speaking
much. Colin's fingers lingered round Lily's as she tendered her little
spray towards him, and they looked long at one another in the moonlight.
"I shall always keep mine," he murmured.
"As a remembrance," whispered Lily.
"I shan't need anything to make me remember," said the boy
reproachfully. "Will you keep yours?" he added beseechingly.
"Yes."
Colin kissed his piece of heather and put it into a little pocketbook.
Lily tucked hers tenderly into the front of her gown. Then it was all
over and the others joined them, and they went down the hill again all
together, singing "For Auld Lang Syne," and Lily and Kenneth were left
at their own lodge-gates.
And for the next few days, Lily found the picnics dull, and the tennis
parties no longer events to be looked forward to, and the taking of
photographs not worth while.
Once Dorothy Hardinge said to her, quite calmly: "I believe Colin
Eastwood was awfully in love with you, Lily."
"Father says Colin is frightfully susceptible," said Janet quickly. "I
heard Father and Mother laughing about him."
Lily did not mind the laughter of good-natured Cousin Charlie and his
wife.
She wondered with shy, delicious tremors whether Colin really was in
love with her, and whether some day he would come back again and ask
her to marry him, and take her away to some nebulous dream world in
which all true lovers had their being.
Her dreams and fancies were nearly as unsubstantial as those that she
had woven round imaginary adventures, and told herself from day to
day, at school. She was still only pretending to be like other people.
Really Lily knew that it was all pretence to say that she was now grown
up.
Philip said it from time to time, even while himself still treating her
as a child, with no slightest claim to either judgment or individuality
of her own.
But when he one day found her, more or less surreptitiously, childishly
devouring toffee in the garden, he reminded her seriously and with
displeasure, of her years.
"You don't want to eat unwholesome sweetstuff, between meals, like a
little schoolboy. That's all very well for the nursery," said Philip,
disregarding the fact, resentfully remembered by Lily, that no such
practice had ever been allowed prevalence in the Stellenthorpe nursery.
"I don't like to see you behaving so babyishly, Lily. It's--it's
undignified, and unsuitable. I don't like to see it."
He saw it no more.
Lily, although regarding detection as shameful, was either not
sufficiently convinced of the heinousness of eating toffee at nineteen
years old, or else lacked sufficient self-control to refrain from
surreptitiously indulging her desire for sweet things.
She made inconspicuous expeditions to the village sweet-shop, and
returned with her purchases in her pocket, thoroughly despising herself
the while.
Guilt, and a ludicrously disproportionate terror showed plainly in
her face when she once met her father, on her return by the least
frequented entrance to the house.
"What have you been doing, my little pet?" Philip enquired with
a suspiciousness foreign to his nature, but which must have been
engendered in the most trusting of parents by Lily's confused and
disconcerted expression.
"I just went up to the village," she stammered, and felt herself
flushing.
Philip stared at her in a puzzled manner. "What for?" he said at last.
"Nothing, Father. Just a--a walk."
Lily hastened away from further questions with the sense of her own
degradation strong upon her. She hated herself for having told a lie,
and supposed that she had done so from a natural and ingrained tendency
to deceive in the first place, and an uncontrollable and dishonouring
passion for sweets in the second. She had become incapable of analyzing
impartially the true grounds of her own moral cowardice.
Had her natural honesty of mind been less systematically and thoroughly
warped, she might have received illumination from the sequel of the
affair.
Philip, during the afternoon that followed their encounter, was silent
with that peculiar silence which Lily knew, too well, denoted in him
both grief and perplexity.
Then, at the end of the evening, he said to her suddenly:
"My little child would never do anything foolish without telling me,
eh, Lily?"
"No, Father," automatically said Lily, neither of them awake to the
absurd and improbable inconsistency of prefacing an act of folly by
announcing it in a quarter where it would certainly receive scant
encouragement.
"You must never play little, underhand tricks," said Philip nervously.
It was quite evident that he intensely disliked saying whatever he had
set himself to say, and Lily's heart sank with the familiar feelings of
shame and dismay as she realized that he was obliquely referring to her
morning's walk.
"It's--it's not quite ladylike, not to be open and above-board.
And little people have to be specially careful when they're rather
older. There must never be anything like--well, like setting up a
correspondence, for instance, with some youth or other, without saying
anything about it."
For a moment Lily felt utterly bewildered.
"We don't want to put anything at all unpleasant into words,"
her father said hastily, "but sometimes a little hint.... You
see, my little pet, very young people can be rather thoughtless
sometimes, and then it may lead to things that are perhaps a little
bit undesirable--you'll understand better when you're older. But
clandestine expeditions to post letters, or to call for them, are
quite out of the question, and might lead to a great deal of talk and
unpleasantness."
Philip stopped to shudder at the distasteful vista of possibilities
thus opened up, and the perception suddenly flashed upon Lily of his
ingenious misinterpretation of the object of her morning expedition.
It afforded her the most unaffected relief.
There was no humiliation, and but little inconvenience, in being
suspected of misdemeanours on a scale to which she had never aspired.
It was even, mysteriously, rather gratifying.
"You understand what I mean, my darling?"
"Yes," said Lily, trying to keep extreme thankfulness out of her voice.
"Then we needn't say anything more about it." But Philip still
fidgetted uneasily with his newspaper and it was evident that he had
more to say, and that he much disliked the prospect of saying it.
"Of course, one likes you to have plenty of innocent and ladylike
amusement," he said at last, in reluctant and distrustful tones.
"Certainly one does. And Cousin Charlie's daughters and--and their
friends--are everything that is nice and proper, no doubt. But
I shouldn't like to think that you ever get at all--excited, or
unguarded, so that people might find you a little bit--undignified."
Lily's relief was now merged in acute discomfort.
Her father must be thinking of Colin Eastwood. Had she really been
undignified?
To Lily's thinking it was an unendurable word, denoting indefinable
forms of unrestraint, of an underbred lack of self-respect.
"One of these days," said Philip, carefully looking away from his
daughter's discomfited face and perhaps scarcely less embarrassed
than was she, "one of these days I hope to see my little girl happily
engaged and married to some good, suitable man. But not for a long,
long while yet, and in the meantime my little Lily mustn't cheapen
herself by foolish boy-and-girl nonsense."
"I haven't----" stammered Lily, scarlet.
"Hush, hush, now. You know you mustn't contradict Father like that."
The form of Philip's serious and unvehement rebukes had not varied
since the days of Lily's babyhood.
"You'll be a good child, my pet, I know. If only your mother had been
spared to us, there would never have been any little difficulties.
You must talk to Cousin Ethel, if there's anything she can help you
about----"
"But there isn't anything----" Lily was frenziedly repudiating she knew
not what.
"Well, well, we needn't talk of sad, uncomfortable things, my child.
Only no little hole-and-corner affairs with letter-writing, remember."
But Lily had ceased to derive relief from the evident immunity from
detection of the toffee scandal that was thus implied.
Her idle dreaming about that impalpable summer romance was over, and
she strove with shame to forget the very name of Colin Eastwood.