Part 16

Janet and Sylvia sat forlornly in the schoolroom, in old black serge skirts and new black blouses hastily made up by the village dressmaker. They had nothing to do.

An uncle and aunt had arrived and the aunt was upstairs with Ethel. The uncle had gone down to the church "to see about things," they said.

"Oh, Lily, if only it hadn't been so awfully, awfully sudden! We'd all had dinner together, you know, just as usual, and he only stayed in the drawing-room a few minutes, and then said he thought he'd go to bed early."

"He did say he'd a pain in his side; he told Mother so--but we never thought it was anything----" said Sylvia.

"No. And then he went upstairs, and we were all sewing, just as usual, and we never heard anything. It was Emily who heard, from the dining-room, clearing away dinner. And she went upstairs and his door was open, and she saw--oh, Lily!"

Tears choked Janet's utterance.

Both girls had cried until their eyelids were swollen and discoloured and their faces white from exhaustion.

"Has there been time to hear from Dorothy?" Lily asked, for the sake of saying something.

"Not yet. The cable might come any time, now. We cabled to Frank, of course. And _he_ was so pleased about Dorothy's baby and everything, and now--now he'll never see her."

They sobbed and cried.

"The baby will be a comfort to Dorothy."

"Yes, oh yes. And to Mother too, later on."

A bell rang, and Janet said:

"That might be the cable."

Waiting for the Indian cable seemed to be the nearest approach to an occupation that was possible.

"Uncle has sent up the announcement to the papers, so to-morrow I suppose there'll be telegrams and things," said Sylvia, shuddering. "But the Indian cable ought to be here to-day."

The cable came at last and Janet took it upstairs unopened to her mother's room, and Sylvia and Lily remained in the schoolroom, where the clock hands moved so slowly that they often seemed to have stopped altogether. Lily held Sylvia's hand, and spoke from time to time, trying not to think that her platitudes were utterly meaningless.

"He couldn't have felt anything at all--it would have been so much more dreadful if he'd had to suffer ... and now he--he's so much happier ... he'd want you to be brave...."

She wondered desperately, as she spoke, whether she really believed what she said. Was Cousin Charlie happy now, with some incommunicable bliss? Was he really capable any more, of wishes and hopes concerning those left behind?

Sylvia cried on, softly and drearily, and the hands of the clock crawled slowly round.

Presently Janet came back again and said that the aunt and uncle were downstairs.

"It's so dreadful to have to think of meals and things, just the same," she said.

"Mother is staying upstairs, Lily, but she'd like you to come and see her this afternoon. I think it's a comfort to her to talk."

Cousin Ethel was very brave, and it seemed, as Janet and Sylvia had said, to comfort her to talk.

"He was so _good_, Lily--that's such a comfort to me. Twenty-five years married, and I never had a cross word from him! I like to think that the children will all be able to remember that. He was such a kind father, too, so devoted to his girls. Do you remember how he used to call them 'kiddie-widdies'?

"After all, Lily dear, one of us had to go first--it's only a very, very few that are allowed to slip away together--and I couldn't have borne to think of him left without me. He's happy now, for ever and ever, and I don't suppose it'll seem more than a flash of time to him, where he is now, before we meet again."

Cousin Ethel cried, too, but it was evident that she found consolation in the thought of an Eternal Life holding the certain promise of ultimate reunion.

Lily went away and promised Janet and Sylvia that she would come again the following day.

"The Hannigan aunts are arriving to-night, and Uncle Bob and Aunt Mary. I think perhaps it's easier, when there are people there," Sylvia whispered.

Lily was glad to think that they would have the occupation of preparing for, and receiving, the visitors. Anything would surely be better than sitting, sick with crying, repeating over and over again all that they had said already.

She felt very tired, and full of remorse for her own inadequacy. She knew that there had been no conviction behind any of the commonplace utterances with which she had striven to convey consolation. Only her sympathy with their sorrow had been real. Even sympathy, however, seemed to fail her when Philip Stellenthorpe spoke of personal loss to himself.

"Our very nearest friend, poor Charlie," he observed sorrowfully. "There are very few left now, my little Lily, whom I know as I did your poor Cousin Charlie. We'd been friends for many years and I thought very highly of him--very highly indeed."

Lily, against her own will, knew that during Cousin Charlie's life-time Philip had not thought highly of him at all. They had not been intimate friends--Philip had no intimate friends--and it was Charlie Hardinge, not Philip, who had taken for granted that a good-fellowship, at all events, existed between them. Philip had very often resented Charlie's officious interest in his affairs, and his reiterations of unwanted advice.

"Well," said Philip with a heavy sigh, "our loss is his gain, poor fellow, no doubt."

Then he, too, believed, or affected to believe, that Cousin Charlie was now in a region of undimmed happiness, a disincarnate spirit in the presence of his Creator.

Lily deliberately tried to imagine the operation of such a transformation.

Cousin Charlie, interested in his garden, in the arrival in India of a little granddaughter, in the successful solution of a chess problem, utterly without premonition, so far as one knew, of any kind. Walking upstairs, perhaps thinking quite casually of the little pain in his side that they all knew was nothing at all, perhaps occupied with some trivial reflection about the lamp in the passage. He was always particular about the trimming of the wicks....

And then in one instant, unconsciousness. They had found him on the very threshold of the dressing-room, where he must have fallen just as he entered it.

There had been no flicker of consciousness. He had been dead within one hour from the time of his seizure.

And what after that?

Cousin Charlie, awakening in a new world, a world where presumably all his old interests held little or no meaning, confronted with a Supreme Being to whom he had paid a more or less perfunctory homage on Sundays, and told that he had earned, in his comfortable, easy-going, perfectly honourable fifty-eight years upon earth, an eternity of perfect happiness.

It was only less unthinkable than was the alternative of kindly, active Cousin Charlie consigned to an eternity of misery and punishment.

Perhaps there was no afterwards at all, and Cousin Charlie's spirit had flickered out when the machinery of his physical body failed. Then there would never be any reunion, such as his wife, who loved him, looked for so confidently.

Lily could not believe it.

Love, at least, must be a thing that went on. Love was part of God.

She remembered, with a great sense of relief, the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory. A place where the souls of the dead awaited. The suggestion of a place of existence upon which the spirit might learn, and be prepared gradually for transformation, seemed to Lily to carry a sense of possibility with it. The other alternatives, quite simply, appeared to her to be incredible.

Her mind was very much occupied with such thoughts, and she found it difficult to speak of other things, as Nicholas was obviously desirous of doing.

Nevertheless, she seconded the efforts of her husband when her father persisted in discussing the funeral arrangements of the following day.

"What a ghoulish sort of pleasure your father seems to take in this business," Nicholas remarked pensively when they were alone together. "I quite agree that it's sad enough, but it needn't pervade the whole conversation, surely."

"I suppose after to-morrow he'll be all right," said Lily.

She was faintly shocked at the criticism of Philip, although her reason admitted its justice.

"You do like Father, Nicholas dear, don't you?"

"My dear child, because one likes a person it needn't make one blind and deaf and dumb to their short-comings," said her husband cheerfully.

Lily assimilated in silence the obvious common-sense of the dictum, that all the same came to her as something almost new, and entirely revolutionary.

The next day, they attended Charlie Hardinge's funeral. Lily retained confused impressions of the smell of new crape, of the sound of decorous murmuring in the church, and then of stifled sobbing as Janet and Sylvia took their places. Ethel Hardinge's thick veil fell over her face, but Lily did not think that she shed tears.

The organist struggled with unusual music, obviously beyond the capabilities of the player, and presently to familiar strains the choir sang:

"Light's abode, celestial Salem, Visions whence true peace doth spring, Brighter than the heart can fancy....

There for ever and for ever Alleluia is out-pour'd....

All is pure and all is holy That within thy walls is stored."

Lily knew the choice to be Ethel's.

The insistence upon abrupt translation from life on earth into a world of perfect joy and peace, where "all is pure and all is holy," again bewildered and almost distressed Lily.

Could such violent dislocation as was implied really take place?

A child did not, in the space of a night, become a man. Learning, even on the lowest plane, was not acquired in an hour. Did God, then, reverse all His laws as manifested upon earth, whenever a soul left its body?

If so, the spirit now in heaven was not Cousin Charlie at all. It was somebody quite else, with understanding and aspirations that had never been his; one to whom new revelations had been made, that must of necessity transform the soul that received them.

The Charlie Hardinge loved and mourned by his wife and by their children would have been saddened and frightened by such a cleavage of himself from them. One could imagine him, clinging still to old formulæ, asking piteously for explanations, calling upon old, familiar trivialities.

But radiant in the presence of his God, every value he had known upon earth transmuted, without pause or preparation?

Lily knew that she could accept no such assurance. She remembered, as a little child, asking whether she might pray for her dead mother, and Philip's gentle teaching that those at rest with God needed no intercession. They were at peace. The child had been comforted, receiving the words with full confidence, because spoken by her father. Now, Lily found that her whole being rejected them, although she desired to believe, and was frightened of her independent judgment as of a sin. The thought of Charlie Hardinge's soul, as she imagined it to be, deprived of the familiar body and of all the homely accessories to existence, obsessed her. With a sense of furtive guilt, Lily prayed. She prayed that he might not be afraid, or lonely, that someone might be there to help him, and that he might, in some mysterious way, keep in touch with the people that he loved and that loved him, without feeling the added pang of their tears and their sorrow.

Surely the twenty-five years with Ethel counted for something, even in eternity?

She fell again into a maze of speculation, that lasted until all was over.

As the groups of people moved away from the newly-filled grave, Lily saw Janet Hardinge beckoning to her. She went to her, and Janet said wistfully and miserably, as Sylvia had said the day before: "I think it makes it easier if there are people there, Lily. Please come up to the house with us, won't you?"

The Hardinges' house was filled with strange uncles and aunts, most of them entirely unknown to Lily. Tea was laid in the dining-room, and the house, with blinds up-drawn again, and the hall door open, had to Lily's eyes an odd look as of having been newly relieved from strain.

She sat between a Hardinge aunt and an uncle whose name she did not know.

He was a kindly, red-faced man, who shook his head, saying, "Well, well, well," very much as Charlie Hardinge himself might have said it, and then appeared to dismiss the more serious aspect of the gathering from his conversation, if not altogether from his thoughts.

"This is a very good room," he said approvingly, looking round him. "Nice aspect, nice sunny room. They ought to use this room a great deal."

On Lily's other side the Hannigan aunt murmured lugubriously:

"They must just try and begin life again, and make the best kind of a home they can. That's what I tell them. They've got to begin again, now."

And at the other end of the table Lily could hear yet another aunt telling Sylvia that she must be brave and eat some sponge-cake and drink up her tea.

Mrs. Hardinge did not appear at all.

Tea was prolonged as though nobody knew what was to be done, once it was over.

"They ought to go away, and make a thorough break," said Miss Hannigan to Lily. "Then they could come back here again, you know, and start fresh."

"Let me cut you a piece of cake, now," said her other neighbour.

She was relieved when a diversion was caused by the maid's announcement that her husband had come to fetch her.

Janet had gone upstairs to her mother, but Sylvia embraced Lily convulsively in the hall, and said:

"Oh, Lily! It's all so awful, and it goes on and on. I keep feeling that I shall wake up and find it's all a dream."

A few tears of exhaustion rolled down her little white face as she spoke, but Lily saw that she had literally cried until she could cry no more.

"Are you all going away for a little while?" she said hesitatingly. "Your aunt said something about it."

"They want us to go back to Ireland with them, but Mother thinks they couldn't really afford three visitors, and such a long journey wouldn't be worth while for less than a month."

"Cousin Ethel wouldn't go alone, or perhaps with just Janet, and let you come to me--or somewhere else, of course, if you'd rather?"

"Oh!" cried Sylvia, "we must all keep together now that there are only the three of us left."

Lily, as she left the house, violently disputed this sentiment within herself. The longer the three desolate women remained together, just so much the longer would they react upon one another emotionally. Lily wondered whether she was herself heartless in so thinking. It made her seriously uneasy to know that Philip Stellenthorpe would most certainly consider her to be so.

She felt strangely rebellious, and at the same time ashamed of it.

"Well," said Nicholas, "I'm extremely thankful it's over. I was very much afraid there was going to be an accident, weren't you?"

"What--when?"

"Didn't you notice? I suppose your little head was somewhere in the clouds again. One of the bearers wasn't fit for the job--quite unmistakably intoxicated. That's the worst of having country labourers--one can't ever be quite sure. I was on thorns, I can tell you."

He laughed a little, quite gently, but the sound jarred vaguely upon Lily.

"Has the whole thing upset you, poor child? It's the first time, I suppose, you've been to a funeral, isn't it? Well, I must say I hope nothing of that sort will ever be done over _me_. I should like to be buried at sea."

He flung back his shoulders, tapping his broad chest with the tips of his fingers.

"When this 'poor clay' is laid by, I must say that I should like to think that its only grave was to be rolling waters, eh, Lily?"

She was conscious of feeling more utterly out of tune with his mood than ever before.

"What can it matter, if it isn't oneself at all? Lots of people say that, about being buried at sea, but it's no more and no less than being buried anywhere else. What's the difference?"

He looked surprised.

"What's happened to my holy little saint? I should have thought that the prayers and the consecrated ground and all the rest of it meant a great deal to you, Lily."

His kind, good-humoured air of interested curiosity made her regret her own exasperation, of which, however, she knew herself to be far more conscious than he was.

"Nicholas, tell me really. What do you think has happened to Cousin Charlie's soul, now?"

"My dear little girl! We know that he was very kind and good, and--and Almighty God's mercy...." He stopped, looking disconcerted.

"What's come over you, Lily?"

"I don't know. Only it all seemed so unreal, somehow, to think of Cousin Charlie perfectly happy in heaven and either not knowing anything at all about the people he loved best, or else, in some miraculous way, able to understand why God should let them suffer, and what good is going to come out of it all, so that he doesn't mind. It all seems so--so unlike the ordinary sort of person that he was."

"Yes," said Nicholas. "Yes."

"How could he suddenly turn into a pure spirit who would find eternal joy in the presence of God?" cried Lily recklessly. "They sang that hymn about heaven, but how _can_ one imagine an ordinary, average, good person suddenly in heaven for ever and ever more, unless they've become absolutely different? Surely it's the same essential spirit that was on earth, that goes on into the next world?"

"Heaven, eh? Harps and crowns and white robes and wings and all the rest of it, eh, Lily? No, my dear, I can't say that any of that appeals to me very much."

"Do you believe in it, Nicholas?"

"The old idea of heaven or hell, world without end, Amen? No--yes. I don't know. No, I can't say I do."

"What do you think happens after death, then?"

"One goes on, somewhere or other, of course."

"Yes."

"But I know no more than you do, my dear," said Nicholas. "I don't suppose we were ever meant to know."

Lily was intensely aware that such a conclusion shirked the question entirely, but she said nothing more.

It was from that time that she began to acknowledge to herself her own inner conflict between loyalty, that she had been taught was the supreme virtue, and the insistent demand of something within herself that claimed a right to independent judgment.

Reacting to the sense of having been deluded, Lily gradually forsook the habit of going to church, and was relieved when Nicholas made no comment.

They did not talk about religion. The subject was one which quite evidently held not the slightest interest for Nicholas.

Lily went once or twice by herself to the Brompton Oratory, but always with a sense of doing something wrong. She also purchased, almost furtively, from a green baize board erected at the bottom of the church, a penny pamphlet purporting to explain the chief difficulties that might be supposed to confront a potential "convert" to the Catholic religion.

The little book was ungrammatical, written in slipshod English, and was far from even being explicit. But Lily understood that in the Catholic Church was to be found even less liberty of thought than in her own. The Church told her children what to believe, and beyond that they might not look.

Lily wondered whether such restriction of outlook might not be conducive to great inward peace.

She thought of it wistfully and sentimentally, but knew very well that she could never now, of her own free-will, seek to suppress, unsatisfied, the new spirit of doubt that encompassed her.

With her faith in the arbitrary presentment of the religion that had been imposed upon her, Lily also lost much of her childish faith in the essential infallibility of her father.

His religious beliefs were his own, and she did not seek to question them, but she resented more and more having been brought up to suppose that such beliefs could be transmitted wholesale, to be received without question and without analysis. No such acceptance, she thought, could be of enduring value. Discontent possessed her.

She continued to take pleasure in the many enjoyments that awaited her, but she knew that she was missing happiness.

Alternately, Lily blamed and pitied herself.

XVII

Nicholas Aubray had no idea that he made certain remarks at certain hours of every day, with almost clock-work regularity.

It was left to his wife to make this discovery and others; her critical faculty developing with every year, the years themselves still too few to prevent her from putting her discoveries into words.

"You mustn't be too sharp in your judgment of other people, my dear," Nicholas said to her from time to time, without any more direct reference to an increasing uneasiness in the atmosphere, that he would not, indeed, admit even to himself.

Lily, too, had her reticences.

The shibboleth declared any criticism of another to be uncharitable at best, disloyal at worst. Unthinkable, to criticize one's husband.

Lily sought valiantly to ignore that which certain perceptions in her registered almost automatically.

She loved Nicholas, therefore she must see Nicholas as perfect.

The effort, in the course of time, became considerable, and very wearying.

She lived in a constant searching of spirit, fond of Nicholas and grateful to him when he petted her, touched by his many thoughtfulnesses and frequent gifts, intensely desirous of believing that she loved him, and irritated almost--although never quite--to the point of protesting aloud when he sang out of tune.

Nicholas sang very often, from exuberance of spirits, and it was almost always out of tune.

He had a singular faculty for remembering the words of popular musical-comedy songs, and no ability at all to retain the simplest of airs correctly.

"I say, Lily, that was a catchy sort of thing we heard last night."

"Oh yes, I know."

Lily spoke hurriedly, trying to escape from the conviction that she was in dread lest Nicholas should attempt to reproduce the tune that he had liked.

"The one that girl sang in the second act--very fine girl, too!"

His tone was jocosely significant, and although such humorous allusions did not really amuse her in the least, Lily eagerly caught at this one.

"I saw you look at her, Nicholas! She's rather your type, isn't she?"

"What do you mean by my type, madam, I should like to know? How do you know I've got a type, eh?"

He began to laugh spasmodically, and Lily's lips mechanically took on the curves of the amusement that she did not share.

"My type, indeed! Ha, ha!"

Lily's meaningless laughter echoed his genuine mirth. Then he began to hum:

"In Lou-is-ville--I've left my little home, The folk I used to know In Lou-is-_ville_--where--something--something--roam. Tra-la-la-la-_lah_ In Lou-is-_ville_."

"Catchy sort of tune, that."

"Oh yes. Would you like me to get the score?"

"Not unless you want it yourself. I thought that was pretty nearly the only good thing in it, didn't you? Besides, what do you want with a score when you've got a husband who can reproduce it note for note to you next morning? Ah--hum----!"

Nicholas cleared his throat and expanded his chest in facetious burlesquing of an operatic performance.

"In Louisville! I've left my little home."

He sang it through again, with mock dramatic emphasis and gesticulation, and Lily dug her nails into the palms of her hands and stretched her mouth into a fixed smile.

She was unspeakably disgusted at herself.

Why should she mind these things? And why, minding them, should not love for Nicholas make her minding of no account?

For she still maintained to herself that she loved Nicholas.

That which perplexed her perhaps most was her own increasing tendency to dwell upon a recollection that for several years now had been almost altogether obscured----Vonnie.

The memory of her childish championship of Vonnie, the sick despair of knowing herself to be better loved and cared for than was Vonnie, the pain that she had suffered through Vonnie's pain--all recurred to her with an odd sense of contrast.