THE Naylors and the Montmorencys had always known each other; it was
an affair of generations. Hugo had stayed at Danielstown as a boy
for months together, and knew the place as well as his own house, he
told Francie, and certainly liked it better. He had expressed this
preference, which had come as a shock to her, when they were first
engaged. She was pained as by an expression of irreligion. She consoled
herself, and rehabilitated him secretly, by remembering he had had a
stepfather and could never have known the meaning of family life--she
had a delicate woman’s strong feeling for “naturalness.” She intended
to make up to him for the deficiencies of his childhood, but, almost
immediately after their marriage, Hugo sold Rockriver. Now she would
always blame herself for not having dissuaded him, but he had been so
set at the time on an idea of going to Canada and she so foolishly
anxious to compensate him for what she was not by going there with him
and thriving. So when the idea of Canada failed, they had no house, and
she, after all, no vocation. As for Hugo, he had expected little of
life.
Francie had heard all her life of the Naylors of Danielstown, her
cousins and theirs had married; but Ireland is large and she had not
met them till she came to Danielstown on a bridal visit. Then, of
course, they had known each other always; there had been no beginning.
She knew she had never in all her life been so happy as on that first
visit; time, loose-textured, had had a shining undertone, happiness
glittered between the moments. She had had, too, very strongly a sense
of return, of having been awaited. Rooms, doorways had framed a kind of
expectancy of her; some trees in the distance, the stairs, a part of
the garden seemed always to have been lying secretly at the back of her
mind.
It was, also, on that first and only other visit, that she had
made friends with Myra--that in itself was memorable. Myra was
“interesting,” cultivated, sketched beautifully, knew about books and
music. She had been to Germany, Italy, everywhere that one visits
acquisitively. It had been a bond to discover that Francie and Myra
must have been in Germany at the same time, the summer of ’92, though
without meeting. Myra was the same age as Francie--they had been
presented the same year, though not at the same Drawing-room--and
thought of Hugo as quite a boy: she could not help showing it.
Sometimes, guessing what she had shown, she would laugh and say
something clever and quite irrelevant to cover the awkwardness. For
Hugo was ten years younger than both of them, Francie’s husband.
Francie and Myra had had long remarkable talks about almost everything,
confidential if not alarmingly intimate--walking, driving, on the
seat by the caroline allspice tree, and at the head of the stairs at
night--while their candle-flames stooped from their vehemence.
When at the end of that visit the Montmorencys left Danielstown this
had seemed to Francie more of a pause than a break in the continuity.
“Next spring,” they all four promised each other, shaking hands and
kissing at the foot of the steps--it was then autumn, the bronze trees
were sifted through by the wind and shivered along the outlines--“Next
summer, Hugo,” Myra exclaimed, “_at latest!_” and the last view they
had of her was as standing bright and imperative. Only as they drove
away did the trees run, watery, into the sky and Francie’s lids prick:
she slipped her hand into Hugo’s under the rug. And, pressing it, he
had alone to continue the business of turning, yearning and waving back
till a bend in the avenue.
She had felt, perhaps, a chilly breath from the future. Between their
smart turning out, with a roll of carriage wheels, through the gates
with their clipped laurels, and their swerving in with a grind of
motor brakes twelve years afterwards, nothing large was to intervene.
Their life, through which they went forward uncertainly, without the
compulsion of tragedy, was a net of small complications. There was
the drag of his indecisions, the fine snapping now and then of her
minor relinquishments. Her health, his temperament, their varying
poverty--they were delayed, deflected. She was ordered abroad for
successive winters, to places he could not expect to endure. He came
and went without her; going for consolation, of course, to Danielstown.
The Naylors sent her out wails, injunctions and declarations. They
would never, _never_ be happy till she was with them also.
So at last Hugo and Francie returned together. And to-day
something--that break in the trees on the avenue, something
unremembered about the face of the house, some intensification of the
silence surrounding it, or perhaps simply Lois’ figure standing there
on the steps--made the place different.
Lady Naylor and Mrs. Montmorency now went upstairs together.
Francie looked down at the top step to see if the marks were still
there--becoming much excited in the course of an argument about Robert
Hugh Benson she had waved her candle and scattered a rain of hot
grease. But there was a new stair-carpet. Myra looked down also, but in
surprise; she did not remember. She had argued with so many people in
twelve years--nowadays she argued about Galsworthy.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” she said, lowering her voice as they
approached the ante-room, “if we found Laurence up here--my nephew. He
is with us a good deal, between Oxford. Though I expect it is dull for
him. He is not out of doors very much; he is very intellectual. Though,
of course, he plays tennis.”
Francie was much relieved, on entering the ante-room, to find that
Laurence had gone. “It’s so nice,” she said, “the way you have the
house full of young people.” She turned to the right instinctively, to
her old door.
“No, this way, Francie, the Blue Room. The rooks on that side of the
house disturbed so many people; we’ve changed the rooms round and put
Lois in there; she prefers them.”
As they came into the Blue Room, Francie saw their two faces reflected
in the tall dressing-table glass, the door swinging behind. “Myra’s
aged!” she thought with a shock. Her own face never seemed to have
changed at all.
She said: “You look wonderful, you know. I couldn’t think when I was
ever to see you again, or Richard either.”
Myra kissed her--a compact, sudden pursing and placing of the lips. It
was as though they were meeting again only now. The door swung to with
a rush. “It’s been too bad, too bad--not even as if you had been in
Canada!”
The linen of Myra’s sleeve was cool to the touch of the dusty Francie.
Myra wore a grey linen dress with embroidered panels, a lace scarf
twice round the throat and a green hat dipping in front and trimmed
with clover. Her bright grey eyes, with very black, urgent pupils,
continued in a deep crease at each outside corner. High on the curve
of her cheeks, like petals, bright mauve-pink colour became, within
kissing distance, a net of fine delicate veins. Her eyebrows, drawn in
a pointed arch, suggested tragic surprise till one saw the arch never
flattened, the face beneath never changed from its placid eagerness,
its happy dissatisfaction. “_Has_ she aged?” Francie thought, glancing
closely and shyly again as they parted. Yes, she felt something set now
in Myra; she was happier, harder.
Myra receded now that the kiss was over. There was life to go on with,
the duty of love and pleasure fully discharged. She moved round the
Blue Room, nodded out of a window to some one distant coming out from
some trees--she could never learn how one vanishes in the dark of a
house. She glanced intently along the books in the book-trough. “Lois
has not changed the books!” she exclaimed. “You know how I like them
to be appropriate. Here’s a technical book on rubber a man left behind
last summer--it looks ridiculous. She’s a girl who never forgets the
same thing twice; always something different....”
“She looks sweet, I think. And surely the image of Laura?”
“She’s not so much like Laura in character. There’s a good deal, I
sometimes think, of poor Walter.”
“Wasn’t it terribly sad about Walter?”
“To tell you the truth, it was what we always expected,” said Lady
Naylor.
When Francie was left alone she went to the window and shook the dust
out of her motor veil. Then--she was so very tired from motoring,
everything seemed to rush past--she sat down on the sofa and put her
hands over her eyes. Her mind lay back in the silence, but there was
a kind of sentinel in her waiting for Hugo. She did not know what she
should say if he noticed the drive from Carlow really had been too much
for her. She had said beforehand she was afraid it might be too much,
and he had said: nonsense, that she was fit for anything nowadays.
Flattered by this, she gave in. She was so tired--just for these
few moments when she let herself go--she could not bear to realize
Danielstown. Her thoughts ached. When she looked out, there were some
intolerable trees and a strip of gold field hot on the skyline.
When she heard steps coming she fled to the washstand. Her skin was
dry, her hair felt laden and limp, it was so dusty. But that was the
fine, the phenomenal weather for which, in this country, one could not
be thankful enough. When Hugo came through from his dressing-room she
was washing her hands--they turned in the water like gentle porpoises
in a slaver of violet soap.
“Well,” he said, looking round the room.
“Well, Hugo ... isn’t it lovely?”
“Richard’s in great form--I thought I’d never get up at all to you....
Not tired?”
“Indeed, no.... Doesn’t it all seem the same as ever?”
“I tell you one thing: Myra’s ageing. Didn’t you notice?”
“Oh,” said Francie vaguely. She stooped her face to the basin, the
rain-water comforted, creeping into the pores. “_Oh!_” She dried her
face in damask, among stiff roses. “But then, we all are.”
“She’s got into a terrible habit of shutting doors.”
“Times have been worse down here. Yes, I thought, you know, she had
rather a strained look. What does Richard think of the situation?...
Oh, and had you any idea that Lois was so grown up? I had imagined her
quite a schoolgirl. She’s so pretty, such a ... a frank little face.”
“She’s self-conscious,” said Hugo, “but I dare say most girls of that
age are.... I should lie down now for a bit, it will freshen you
up--though you don’t need it. Then would you like me to brush your
hair?”
Francie got her dressing-gown out of a trunk and lay down on the sofa.
She had just relaxed there when Hugo said that the sofa did not look
comfortable and she had better lie on the bed. He made a valley for
her head between the two pillows--he did not believe it rested anybody
to lie with their head high--and she lay down on the bed with her head
in the valley. “Oh, but I don’t think I ought to lie on this lovely
quilt,” she soon protested.
“They’re not fussy here,” returned Hugo; “do lie and be still.”
So she lay and watched him begin to unpack her two boxes, carry
dresses over his arms and lay them along the shelves of the
“gentleman’s wardrobe.” She wondered: whatever would Richard and Myra
think?--“Uxorious” they would be bound to declare; Richard who could
hardly handle a jug without dropping it, and Myra who would not have
him otherwise.
“What a disgusting noise,” said Hugo, pausing and listening.
“Somebody playing a gramophone--”
They might well say she had taken the brilliant young man he’d once
been and taught him to watch her, to nurse her and shake out her
dresses. And she knew she could, now, never explain to Myra what
she had failed to explain twelve years ago--when there had been
so much less to explain and to justify--how Hugo was too much for
her altogether. How she had tried, but had not been able, to keep
him--first from marrying her, then from giving up Canada, leaving his
friends when she had to go to the south of France, or from brushing her
hair in the evenings.
“Hugo, you might leave that blue dress out; I think I’ll wear it....
_When_ was it you were in love with Laura?”
“When I was twenty-two--I was in a sort of way. She was lovely
then--though indeed she was always lovely. But she was never happy at
all, even here. She never knew what she wanted--she was very vital.”
He hesitated over two pairs of evening shoes. “Leave the bronze ones
out,” she suggested. “They go with the blue.” She lay with her eyes
shut a moment, then asked, “But why wouldn’t she marry you?”
Francie’s delicacy, her absences from him, her long queer relapses into
silence gave her the right to ask curious things, as from a death-bed.
Hugo, wandering at the end of the bed, looked at her feet thoughtfully.
“She wanted her mind made up,” he said at last, “and I couldn’t do
that--why should I? I had enough to do with my own mind. And she was
Richard’s own sister--talk and talk and you’d never know where you had
her. And if she thought you had her, she’d start a crying-fit. Then she
went up North and met Farquar, and I imagine that that was all fixed
up before she knew where she was or had time to get out of it. After
that of course she really _had_ got something to be unhappy about. Yet
I don’t believe things ever really mattered to Laura. Nothing got close
to her: she was very remote.”
“I wonder if Lois is remote?”
“What I think I felt about Laura,” pursued Hugo, interested, “was,
she was never real in the way I wanted. Nobody was before you, as you
know.... If you get up now, I can brush your hair.”
“It is very dusty,” said Mrs. Montmorency.
She had met Laura in England and been very shy of her. Laura was
a success in England, and so quite brilliant--she was too Irish
altogether for her own country. Lois had been at school as usual
and did not come home because Laura had forgotten which day the
Montmorencys were coming. Six months afterwards, without giving anyone
notice of her intention, Laura had died.
“It still seems odd,” remarked Mrs. Montmorency, “that I shouldn’t have
met Lois.” Seating herself in front of the glass she took out the pins
one by one, then shook down her hair round her face--bright bronze
threads went in and out, crisply, over the light-grey waves--she ran
it through with her finger-tips, shaking her head ruefully. But the
dust seemed to have gone, perhaps because she was happier, less tired;
or perhaps she had left a drift of it between the two pillows. Her
husband, selecting a brush, knocked over the vase of geraniums. “The
darlings!” she cried out, mopping with her kimono-sleeve.
“Confusion,” said Hugo, shaking water out of the brush, “on all who put
vases on dressing-tables!”