_If a sister knows not a brother’s heart he has none to know_.
“Dearest Sibyl,” wrote Marcus, “why didn’t you tell me you were in
London and taking Diana to her first dance? I had always meant to
give her a pearl necklace for her coming-out ball. I will take her,
of course, while you are abroad, on one condition, and that is that
she isn’t always rushing off to her aunt in the country. I dislike
that woman, as you know. I dislike all strong-minded, self-opinionated
women. You are quite right, she is no fit companion for a girl of
Diana’s age. Who has a better right to Diana than I have? I can’t have
Miss Carston interfering. Sibyl, my dear, I am longing to see you.”
Hardly had he written the words when the telephone bell rang at his
elbow.
He lifted the receiver and heard Sibyl’s voice telling him he was a
darling old owl. In answer to his gentle reproof she said, Of course
she had written to tell him she was bringing Diana to London, but she
had forgotten to post the letter! Couldn’t he have guessed that? There
was the same tenderness in the voice there had always been. She used
the same absurd endearments she had always used. He knew she must be
unchanged. Might she come and see him? Now? At once? She would!
He put back the receiver—and was astonished at his emotion. The force
of his feelings shocked him. He had imagined himself past caring for
anything very much. His life was so easy—so well ordered—so few demands
were made upon him, except for money—and those were easily met. There
was nothing to disturb him—nothing to excite him—except perhaps now and
then a rather bigger venture than usual in the city—which as a rule
meant more money (he was lucky) with which to buy china, glass, prints,
anything he liked, and to his manifold likes his room testified. His
house was beautiful and the things in it were chosen for their beauty.
For these things he had come to care because he had been left alone in
the world. He liked to think of himself as neglected. He had felt for
his sister a deep affection and she had chosen to marry and leave him.
He couldn’t compete for her love. He never competed. Even as a
collector he had suffered from this amiable inability to assert
himself. Now he deputed others less sensitive to buy for him. In his
young days, before he had gone to America, he remembered at an auction
losing a vase he had particularly wanted. He had allowed himself to
be outbidden by a girl with wide, grey eyes—who wore dogskin gloves.
He could have outbidden her, but something had moved him to pity. Her
gloves probably—they betrayed such a lack of social knowledge. It was
a blue vase he would have bought. He loved the colour of it—the feel
of it. She could have known nothing of the feel of it, for she held it
in gloved hands, for which lack of feeling and understanding he pitied
her—pitied her ignorance. She held the vase upside down to look at the
mark: even about that she was undecided—or else she was short-sighted,
which probability the clearness of her eyes questioned. Having examined
the mark, she handed the vase back to the man from whom she had taken
it and sharply bid a figure to which Marcus could have gone if he had
wished. But he had not. So the vase became hers and she looked him
straight in the eyes—and her eyes said “Beaten!”
“Goth!” thought Marcus as he recalled the scene. “She held the vase in
gloved hands. Vandal—nice grey-eyed, clean, ignorant woman—” But he had
thought of her oftener than he knew in those days, bemuse for a certain
time he had thought of her every time he had seen a woman whose eyes
were not grey.
Marcus, thinking now only of his sister, walked to a mirror that hung
on the wall between two windows and looked at himself anxiously. Would
she find him changed? At forty-six he was bound to look different, a
little grey, of course. That did not matter, so long as she was not
grey. He lit a cigarette; then put it down unsmoked, remembering that
as a girl she had hated the smell of tobacco. Then he went to the
window and ran up the blind; then pulled it down again halfway: not too
strong a light, he decided; and pulled all the blinds down halfway.
It would be kinder to Sibyl. Or should he pull them right up and face
the worst? Leave her to face the light? A taxi stopped in the street
below. It was absurd, but he was too nervous to go down and meet her
and he counted the seconds it would take Pillar to get upstairs, to
open the door. One! He must have been waiting in the hall. Supposing
she were grey-haired, old, and wrinkled—or fat—? How should he keep it
from her that he was shocked, distressed, pained? The door opened and
in a moment two arms were round his neck. He almost said, “Where is
your mother?”—was delighted he should almost have said it; wished he
had really said it. What prettier compliment could he have paid this
delightful being he held in his arms?
She was still young—still brown-haired—still impulsive. He held her at
arm’s length—Still in love with Eustace! He could see that: no woman
remains so young who is not in love.
“Marcus, Marcus, you dear funny old thing!”
“Why funny?” he asked, gently disengaging himself from her arms; “let
me look at you again.”
With a feeling of apprehension he knew to be absurd, he looked again,
gaining courage as he looked. Had he overestimated the youthfulness
of her appearance? Did not her pallor detract just a little from the
radiance that had been her greatest beauty? Had he missed wrinkles?
Yes, one or two—finely drawn, put in with a light hand, emphasizing
only the passage of smiles—nothing more. If she had lost anything
in looks she had gained much in expression. He might have left the
blinds up. Her eyes were large. There were women he knew whose eyes
got smaller as they grew older; that he could not have borne. Sibyl’s
eyes were just as they had always been. They had lost naturally
something of their look of childlike questioning. That he did not mind.
The childlike woman he had long ceased to admire. He read here true
womanliness; a depth of real understanding, and a certain knowledge of
the big things in life—things that mattered.
“Sit down,” he said, and he drew her down on to the sofa beside him.
“She looked like a rose, did she?”
“My Diana?”
Marcus nodded. “Pillar saw her.”
“Did he say she looked like a rose? Well, then it must have been very
evident.”
“Not necessarily,” said Marcus, unconsciously championing Pillar. Not
that he altogether trusted Pillar’s taste. He had shown in the Louvre,
Marcus remembered, a weakness for Rubens’s women. He might have admired
the consummate technique of a great master while deploring a certain
coarseness in his choice of subjects, but he had not done so—
“Is she pretty?” asked Marcus.
“She’s rather delicious.”
“When is she coming to see me?”
“At any moment, but she’s a will-o’-the-wisp. She comes and goes as she
wills.”
“She’s slight, then?”
“Oh, slight! You could pull her through a ring.”
Marcus was glad of that.
“Now tell me about your dear self, Marcus.”
There was so little to tell, he said.
“Not when everything interests me—Give me a cigarette.”
“But you used not to—” he began, handing her his cigarette case.
“Smoke? No—but Eustace likes me to sit with him, and we smoke—you get
to like it in hot climates.”
“I shouldn’t have let you smoke if you had been mine.”
“No?” she laughed gently. “Dear old Marcus!”
Looking at Sibyl, and finding her so perfectly satisfying to his
artistic sense, he fell to wondering what Diana was really like. And
whom she was like? He dared not ask. He had no wish to hear she was
like her father. She could not be like her mother or the papers would
be bound to have got hold of it. He was glad they hadn’t—but still
girls far less pretty _were_ advertised.
“I’m so glad,” said Sibyl; “it shows you won’t let Diana.”
“Smoke? No, certainly not.”
“You don’t know Diana—I must tell you about her—a little about her,
without saying she is like her father, is that it?” She laughed—how gay
she was! When she had told him that little, omitting that much, she
asked: “Does she sound nice?” And Marcus, smiling, said she sounded
delicious.
“She is.”
Marcus laughed; this was the old Sibyl back again, with all her
enthusiasms, the same charming companion she had been as a girl.
Because of that charm of hers, he liked to think, he had not married.
“Sibyl, is she like you?” he asked impatiently.
“Yes.”
He breathed again.
“And I so wanted her to be like her father,” she added.
“I suppose so—Is his sister—the one you call Elsie—married?”
“No.”
“You said she had no children—”
“She hasn’t.”
“But naturally. It was hardly necessary to say it, was it?”
And Sibyl laughed. Marcus needed just what she was going to give him,
a disturbing young thing to live with him. Marcus dreaded it, although
he would not have said so because of that sister he so disliked, who
wanted Diana.
“I won’t have Diana running off whenever Miss Carston chooses to send
for her. That I think you understand.”
“But there will be times when you will want to get rid of her. You
won’t want to give up travelling, will you?”
“Couldn’t she come with me?”
“You can’t conceive, dear, the trouble a woman is travelling. You would
hate to have to think of some one else—another place to find in a
crowded train—another person’s luggage to look after—another ticket to
lose—you would hate it.”
“Then I shan’t travel.”
“But surely it would be easier to send Diana to Elsie than to do that.”
“I detest that woman—”
“She has—nice eyes. You are a dear old thing, Marcus, and not a bit
changed.”
“I never change.”
Marcus waited all day. Diana did not come. He was disappointed. It
showed a want of reverence for the older on the part of the younger
generation. At last he went to bed with a volume of Rabelais to read
(in order to keep up his French). He read until he grew sleepy. He
put out the light and slept until a flash of light awoke him and he
wondered—What was this thing sitting on the end of his bed in white—a
being so slim and so exquisite!
“Darling! the same old Marcus,” the being exclaimed,—“so sleepy and I
woke him up. I couldn’t wait to see him—such years since we met!”
“Sibyl!” he murmured.
“Not this time, it’s Diana—is she like Sibyl? I am so glad—well,
darling, talk!”
The slim being sat on his bed and sticking out her feet, on which twin
shoe-buckles twinkled, urged him to amuse her. He dreaded “This little
pig went to market” played through the bedclothes. He saw Diana eyeing
the spot where she must know his toes were bound to be.
“How did you get here?” he asked.
“Pillar opened wide the portal and we walked in. He wasn’t in the least
surprised.”
“Not surprised?”
“Not in the least. He said we might turn up the carpet and dance—if we
liked. He offered us a gramaphone—his own—to dance to.”
“My dear Diana, you ought to be in bed.”
“Ought? Why?”
“It’s time.”
“What is he reading?” She put out her hand. He seized the book.
“A bedside classic, is it?”
He put it under his pillow.
“You look nice in bed,” she said softly, “but not a bit what I
expected.”
“I am not what I was, of course,” he said hastily.
“Are you a Once Was? Poor darling—does it hurt? Do you like my frock?”
He said he liked it—enormously.
“And my shoes?”
He nodded.
“Mother says I get my slim feet from you.”
“Oh, does she? Do go home, my child. How are you going home?”
“Where are your slippers?” She dived down.
“You’ve kicked them under the bed,” he moaned; “they _were_ there.”
“I never touched them; here they are!” She slipped her feet into them;
huge, red morocco slippers they were. Pillar would have remembered
where they had been bought, the day on which they had been bought, and
what kind of a woman she was who had passed at the moment of buying.
They must have been the only size left in the bazaar. Diana sat on the
edge of the bed again and put out her feet, the slippers swinging like
pendulums from the tips of her toes. “Mummy must retract her words—she
spoke in her haste—Marcus, my Once Was, I’ve been dancing—did you ever
dance?”
“Dear child, do go, who is taking you home?”
“Six people. Pillar is taking care of them downstairs—Well, if you
insist, I suppose I must. I shall love to stay with you. You don’t mind
my coming like this—do you? Look at me! D’you like me?”
She was exactly—in theory—what Marcus would have liked another man’s
niece to be, slight, graceful, with just that amount of assurance he
found right in woman; but one does not always want one’s theories to
live with one.
When he awoke a few hours later, he was firmly convinced he had dreamed
and had dreamed pleasantly enough, and he closed his eyes to dream
again; but the dream had vanished. Pillar remained. He brought him his
tea, pulled up the blinds, put his things in order, stooped and picked
up from the floor something that sparkled and laid it down on the
dressing-table.
When he had gone Marcus jumped out of bed, went to the dressing-table
and saw lying upon it a small stone of glittering paste. He had not
dreamed then. He was glad—in a way. Diana would be a disturbing element
in a quiet life—distracting, perhaps, rather than disturbing.