"I'm very sorry you're going, very sorry indeed," said Nicholas.
He was purposely speaking with restraint of manner.
"I couldn't stay after a row like that," said Doris candidly. "I
couldn't possibly."
The word vexed him.
"I hope there are no such things as 'rows' in my house," he said,
deliberately repressive.
"Of course, I wasn't going to say anything upstairs with Mrs. Aubray
still weak as she is, but if I don't say anything, it isn't because I
don't feel. Miss Stellenthorpe was most insulting."
They stared at one another.
"I'm very sorry," said Nicholas uncomfortably.
"Please don't think that I think it's anything to do with you," said
Doris, with some formality. "You and--and Mrs. Aubray, of course--have
always been very kind, and of course, I have done my best, and I can't
help knowing I'm a good nurse." She paused.
"Of course you are. It's made all the difference having you here."
Nicholas spoke eagerly, both from sincere conviction and from the
desire to gratify her.
"Miss Stellenthorpe didn't seem to think so. I don't know what she
knows about nursing, I'm sure, but from the way she spoke you'd thing
she was matron-in-chief and all."
Nicholas wished that Miss Dickenson had contrived to pass through her
hospital training without incorporating into her being quite so many
slightly common turns of speech. The matter of Aunt Clo's accusations,
whatever the manner of them, might not have been altogether without
justification.
"She's very artistic and highly strung, you know," he urged in
extenuation of Aunt Clotilde. "She--she really is a very splendid
person, you know. I'm sorry you and she haven't hit it off."
"I'd better go upstairs and pack, I suppose," said Doris.
"Don't be in a hurry, please don't. Anyhow, one of the maids will see
to all that for you, if it's really necessary. Won't you have a talk
with Lily first?"
"I don't want to worry her. Besides, she could have stopped Miss
Stellenthorpe saying all she did, if she'd wanted to. I don't know what
I shall do now, I'm sure."
Nicholas began to walk up and down, very much perturbed, and Doris
dropped into a chair.
"I oughtn't to be bothering you, I suppose," she said presently. "My
rotten affairs don't really matter to anybody but myself."
"Please don't say that--please don't. I simply hate to hear you say a
thing like that. I thought it was agreed that you were to look on us as
real pals."
His kind-heartedness seriously perturbed, he stopped in front of her.
"Don't you remember the agreement?"
"Did you really mean it? I'd be awfully glad to have you for a pal.
You always strike me as being so awfully dependable and--and strong."
Nicholas, unconsciously accepting her transition from the first person
plural to the third person singular, threw out his chest with the old,
satisfied gesture.
"It's very nice of you to feel that. I think I am to be depended on,
Miss Dickenson, where my friends are concerned, and I'm very glad you
feel that. Very glad. As for strength--well, I'm certainly not a weak
man."
He laughed a little, very much pleased, as is a man who meets with
reassurance upon a point about which he is sometimes secretly dubious.
"My shoulders are quite broad enough to bear your troubles as well as
my own, I think, don't you?"
"Yes, I do. _Rather._ But it seems a shame----"
"Why? You know I'm interested in anything that concerns you. Of course
I am."
His candid, solicitous eyes were fixed upon her opaque, unrevealing
gaze.
"Thank you, awfully," said Miss Dickenson slowly. "I get a sort of
devastating feeling, sometimes, you know."
"Tell me what you mean," Nicholas sympathetically invited her.
"Oh well, things are a bit difficult all round, you know. I can't live
at home, I simply can't. It's too devastating. That's what really made
me take up nursing--to get away from home."
"But your father is so proud of you--you should have heard him speaking
of you, as I did the other day. I can assure you he quite appreciates
your pluck and--and spirit."
"Oh, I daresay. It really isn't so much Father as my aunts and people,
and my married sister, and even the two girls. They're always sort of
talking _at_ me."
Her voice grew angry.
"I can't have a friend, or go anywhere, or do anything, without them
interfering. My aunts are always hinting that I don't know how to take
care of myself."
"But I'm sure you do," Nicholas said gently.
"Of course! It's all old-fashioned, devastating nonsense, that's what
it is. Because men like talking to me. There isn't anything _in_
it--I'm not even pretty."
She scarcely made a pause, but it was not in Nicholas to refrain from a
meditative interpolation: "I don't know so much about that!"
"It's quite true I've got a lot of men friends, or at least I _had_.
I've given up men now, since the one I was engaged to treated me so
badly. You know, I told you about him.... When that happened I said,
Thank you, that's enough for me, I said. I know what men are now, and I
shan't have anything more to do with them."
"But it's not like you to be bitter," Nicholas said, in a gentle,
puzzled way.
His ear and his trained mind alike noted the futility of her speech,
but his masculinity was all the while increasingly aware of that in
her which, for want of a better word, he could only describe as animal
magnetism.
In her, it was extraordinarily powerful.
"Sometimes," declared Doris inconsistently, "I just think I'll marry
the next man that asks me."
The suggestion, for reasons that he did not attempt to analyze, somehow
affected Nicholas disagreeably.
"Oh, I don't think I should do that if I were you," he gravely
objected.
"Why not? Men are all rotten, anyway--it doesn't make much odds which
of them one takes in the end."
Her cheap cynicism made Nicholas vaguely uncomfortable. He looked at
her without speaking.
As though Doris, by means of some odd intuition of her own, had guessed
his disapproval, she changed her tone suddenly.
"Of course I don't really mean half I say--you mustn't think I mean
it all, really you mustn't. I've known some awfully nice men--men who
really were nice, I mean. Most of my pals have been men--not flirting,
I don't mean, or anything like that. Just friends."
"I hope you're going to add another to their number," said Nicholas,
smiling suddenly.
"Really?"
Her blue-green eyes, neither large nor lustrous, fixed themselves upon
his face with a sudden intensity that was somehow alluring.
"Of course, really," Nicholas declared readily.
She sketched a movement that yet was not actually one, and Nicholas
found himself ratifying his avowal of friendship with a handclasp.
"I don't want you to feel that all this makes a bit of difference," he
said earnestly. "If you ever want a friend--well, here I am, very much
at your service. And don't you go and do anything impetuous with your
life. I should be very, very sorry to see you make a mistake."
"Thank you," said Doris.
She added after a moment, in the low, half-sullen tone that she
sometimes adopted:
"I must say, it's nice to know that somebody cares."
"Of course I care," Nicholas vigorously replied.
He released her hand with a final hearty pressure. "Now supposing I
have a little chat with Miss Stellenthorpe, don't you think we could
put this right? I can't bear you to go away from our house like this."
"Oh, it's all right. Mrs. Aubray really is awfully much better now. I
don't think she needs me any longer. Her maid can quite well give her
all the help she needs now and--I expect I've been here long enough,
anyway."
From this attitude Nicholas could not move her, and indeed he had no
very urgent desire to do so. It did not need Aunt Clotilde's eloquence
to inform him that Lily shared Miss Dickenson's own estimate of her
visit, and thought that she had been there long enough.
"You ought to have told me, my dear child, if you found that she was
getting on your nerves," said Nicholas frowningly to Lily.
He was vexed that Lily had not told him, vexed that he had not
perceived it for himself, vexed, indefinably, that Miss Dickenson
should have been found wanting, and vexed that she should leave the
house under the weight of a grievance.
"I'm sorry you and Miss Dickenson didn't quite hit it off together," he
said to Miss Stellenthorpe, with a hint of rebuke in his voice.
Aunt Clo was quite impenitent.
"The day will come," she remarked with an air of detached omniscience,
"the day will come, when the little Dickenson will remember my words
with gratitude. But at present she has a skin like a rhinoceros hide. I
assure you, _cher ami_, that it was necessary for me to put dots upon
my i's with her."
"That you certainly did," said Nicholas, with a certain grimness.
"_Et alors?_" said Miss Stellenthorpe coldly.
Nicholas had a perfectly genuine admiration for her, and would not
pursue the point.
He bade Doris Dickenson farewell with renewed assurances of friendship,
and on the day she left, his lantern-jawed face unconsciously grew
lengthier than ever, and his voice very grave. If, subconsciously,
Nicholas waited to receive comment upon these phenomena, he was
destined to disappointment.
Miss Stellenthorpe's concern was wholly for her niece.
"The little one requires distraction," she authoritatively informed
Nicholas. "She is regaining strength just now, and we do not want
her to brood. Encourage her to go out, to see her friends, _de se
distraire, enfin_!"
Nicholas begged Lily to follow Aunt Clo's advice, and was delighted
when Aunt Clo herself, with her usual ceremoniousness, enquired whether
he would permit the Marchese della Torre to call upon them.
"But of course! Splendid fellow, della Torre! He'll remind us of our
courting days, eh, Lily? What on earth does he want to ask permission
for? Why doesn't the fellow drop in one day? I didn't even know he was
in England."
"Nor I," admitted Aunt Clotilde. "We met by chance, entirely."
"'We met 'twas in a crowd,' eh?" said Nicholas. "Well, Lily, will you
write and ask him to dinner? I should like to do something for him."
In the weeks that followed, it might have been said with truth
that Nicholas did a good deal for the Marchese della Torre. Always
hospitable, he was whole-heartedly grateful to the young man who had
rendered his long-ago stay in Rome agreeable, and he had conceived one
of those innocent admirations for the Italian's range of erudition that
made up part of his child-like singleness of vision.
The Marchese, more exquisitely dressed than ever, was as full of
urbanity, as well informed and as imperturbable as of old, and only
one change was to be remarked in him. A true Italian, the merely
perfunctory admiration accorded by him to Lily Stellenthorpe as a young
and pretty English girl, and a Protestant, became lively and acute
directly he met her as the wife of another man.
He kept his dark eyes reverently fixed upon her face, and did not
venture upon personalities until he had many times seen both Lily and
her husband. Then one evening at the theatre he said to her, "You
have changed a great deal, in these few years. Although your face is
as young as ever, the soul that looks out of your eyes is that of a
woman--no longer that of a child."
Lily was startled, but she was too young and too disconsolate to reject
the subtle flattery.
"I feel very old, sometimes."
She felt afraid for a moment that he might laugh at her, kindly, as
Nicholas would have done, from the height of the years that separated
them. But della Torre said quickly:
"I know. People laugh a little, sometimes, when one says that, but it
is only because they themselves have either never grown up at all, or
have done so insensibly. They do not know anything about the short cut
to knowledge that is traversed by some of us."
"What is that short cut?" said Lily.
He shrugged his shoulders.
"I am afraid, generally--suffering. But why do you ask? You know it as
well as I do--perhaps better. You are a woman, and highly strung."
"Sometimes I've wondered whether I mind things more than other people
do," said Lily, divided between the yearning for self-expression
and the old, inculcated idea that only impersonal channels can be
altogether safe ones in conversation between a man and a woman.
The Italian raised his eyebrows.
"Of course! How can you wonder? Your capacity for emotion of every kind
is written on your face. Not for all to read, certainly: but for those
who know, to recognize. You are not happy."
"Yes, I am," said Lily quickly.
"Forgive me. You say that because you think I have no right to speak
so--and perhaps I deserve it. I am sorry."
The humility in his voice caused her a moment of compunction.
"Don't be sorry," she said, smiling. "I suppose no one is exactly
happy, once the happiness of childhood has been left behind."
"Childhood!" exclaimed the Italian scornfully. "The happiness of
childhood! What does childhood know beyond the happiness of eating too
many sweets, the happiness of a little animal? It is only men and women
who experience real happiness, and real suffering. You--you have never
yet been happy, and you are beginning to realize it. Is that true?"
"Yes," said Lily very low.
He betrayed no least quiver of triumph at having won the admission from
her.
"You are eternally seeking something--perhaps you hardly know
what ... desires and vague wishes within yourself frighten and disturb
you sometimes--then you think that you are ungrateful and discontented,
and you blame yourself. _Non é vero?_"
"Yes, it's true," said Lily. She felt a thrill of wonder that anyone
should understand so well. The lights in the theatre were lowered
again and the orchestra playing the opening bars of the Intermezzo of
Cavalleria Rusticana, with its eternal appeal.
All the emotionalism in Lily responded to the age-old lure of the music.
She turned her head and looked at the Italian. His dark eyes were bent
upon her, with a look so tender, so concerned for her sadness, that her
own eyes suddenly filled with tears.
"_Poverina!_" he said with great simplicity. "And you English women
have no religion! In Italy the sad ones go to the church, they burn
little candles and think that their wishes will come true, or they find
comfort in their own virtues and resignation to the will of God. But
you? What have you?"
He answered his own question with an eloquent gesture of negation, and
Lily said nothing.
But later in the evening she turned to him again, and although she was
still silent, she knew that it needed only that slight movement to tell
his acute perceptions of her mute, half-ashamed desire for sympathy.
"You are like me. Music--poetry--but especially music," he said,
watching her face; "they speak too much of the unattainable, beautiful,
intimate things--the Blue Rose one dreams about."
"Is it always unattainable?" she asked wistfully.
"There is only one Blue Rose," said della Torre, and shrugged his
shoulders, smiling. Then he added: "There are other roses, though.
Beautiful, dark-red ones, and flame-coloured ones. I have found many
roses, even if never the Blue one."
The next day he sent her roses, and wrote upon the card which
accompanied them: "They are only make-believe, but I cannot find the
One that I want you to have."
Thus was established between them the language of allusion.
The Marchese made no secret to Lily of the fact that women interested
him supremely. She thought that he was not making love to her when he
told her frankly that he had loved often.
"Love is the only thing that matters," della Torre remarked. "It has
often been said before, it remains none the less true. A man is young
just as long as he retains his capacity for falling in love. What does
it matter if he loves successfully or unsuccessfully? It is the hope,
the fears, the despairs, that count--the meetings and partings, the
misunderstandings, the beautiful pretence that the most ephemeral of
emotions will endure for ever."
"You don't think that love is lasting?"
Lily was smiling a little, but there was disappointment in her heart.
"The Blue Rose is the only one that never fades," said Giulio della
Torre.
Lily found herself wondering very often just how much she liked him.
His intuition seemed to her to be very wonderful, and his tact
unfailing. He never jarred upon her varying moods, and she knew, with
inward compunction, that they varied often. She could hardly herself
tell when it first become a thing of accepted implication between them,
that he loved her. Divided between the conventionality that told her
she should be shocked, the common-sense conviction that his passion
would be as brief as it was likely to be fruitless, and the unavowed
gratification that she derived from it, Lily, as usual, refused to
envisage the direct question.
She continued passive.
Nicholas liked the Marchese, and meaning merely a mild facetiousness,
referred to him when he was not present as "our friend Spaghetti."
Miss Clotilde Stellenthorpe returned to Italy, and mysteriously
expressed her parting counsel to Lily.
"_Aha, bambina!_ You will have courage, will you not? There is much to
be done, much to be suffered, by those who steer slender craft down the
rapids."
Lily did not seek to interpret her aunt's metaphor. It seemed to her,
indeed, that she sought nothing, did nothing, said nothing. Everything
within herself was negative, torpid and unresisting.
"You are asleep," said Giulio della Torre half wistfully, half
reproachfully.
"Perhaps."
"Do you never mean to wake up, Princess?"
"I can't," said Lily.
She was unable to resist the temptation of interpreting herself to
so sympathetic an observer. "When I was a little girl, I cared about
things so dreadfully. I had a younger sister whom I loved ... in those
days everything seemed to matter so much. Now, I hardly feel anything
at all. I seem to have grown indifferent."
"Because there is nothing for you to care about." He looked at her
boldly.
"I think one might break through the thorn-hedge, Princess, and waken
you."
"No," said Lily sharply.
She thought of Nicholas.
"You forget I'm married," she said, with a childish mixture of dignity
and simplicity.
The Marchese shrugged his shoulders.
"Not at all. He is very good, very kind, the husband--but so much
older! And you were never in love with him--of that I am very certain."
"I thought I was--everyone told me I was----" she began, and added
belatedly, "I can't discuss it with you. You must see that. Please
don't say any more."
But he said a great deal more, and Lily, with a certain sense of
fascination, felt quite unable to help listening to him.
"It was never an Englishman that you needed at all--you do not belong
to the Northern races, whatever your birth may be. In temperament you
are of the South. You need infinitely more than anyone here will ever
give you. To the English, sentiment is ridiculous--poetry is for the
inside of the poetry books only--passion is improper--and love means
merely the domestic affections. But you--what you need, what you must
have, if you are ever to express yourself, fulfil yourself--it is
romance."
He spoke with so much simplicity that Lily, answering nothing, merely
looked up at him with amazed recognition of the truth in his words. He
understood, as Nicholas would never understand, but she knew that she
did not want him to make love to her. When the things that he said to
her made her heart beat faster she wondered why she was all the time so
certain that she did not love him.
He made love openly to her, with a suddenness and a fervour that
totally disconcerted her.
"But may I not tell you that I adore you?" he asked piteously. "You
have never been loved as you should be loved, most Beautiful. Let me
show you."
Lily's sense of her own invulnerability was strong, even if it was
also unconsciously wistful. She let Giulio della Torre "show her" in
the words that came to him so readily and so eloquently, but when he
took her hand, or rather, snatched at it with his own slender, olive
fingers, she had a sudden and purely instinctive movement of recoil.
"Oh, don't!"