Part 18

"No--no, I suppose not. But she's taking, don't you think? Something very arresting about her, altogether. I must say, I can't help admiring her spirit. She's told you how they worked them at that place, I suppose?"

"The hospital? Yes."

"For a girl brought up, I suppose, very much as you were yourself," said Nicholas, "it must have taken some spirit to stick it out. She was telling me that there wasn't a soul there of her own class, practically, for her to speak to, and she used to cry from sheer loneliness, sometimes. I can't imagine her crying, somehow."

"Neither can I," said Lily drily.

Something in the quality of the silence that followed did not please her, and she went on speaking hastily:

"But she seems to have made a few friends all the same, Nicholas. At least she's always telling me of the young men who ran after her."

"I daresay," said Nicholas curtly.

The lengthening of his face indicated that his enthusiasm had been somewhat dashed, and Lily, characteristically, at once sought to efface the unsympathetic colouring that she had purposely given to her words. "I rather wonder she hasn't married. She could have done so easily, I should think."

"Oh, of course she could."

The tone in which he spoke was once more confident and enthusiastic.

"Old Dickenson told me something about that. He said she was the sort of girl men used to look at while she was still in the nursery--although both her sisters are prettier--in fact, as you say, this one isn't exactly good-looking, I suppose. I don't know what it is about her--magnetism, I suppose. Certainly she's attractive. Don't you think so?"

"She's more so to men than to women, I should imagine."

"Perhaps. You women have odd ideas about one another's merits, eh?" He laughed heartily and was still laughing when Doris came into the room.

Nicholas rose and placed a chair for her.

"We were just talking about you. I was telling my wife something about the stiff upper lip you've shown all along. I can tell you," said Nicholas significantly, "she admires pluck as much as I do. Eh, Lily?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Doris.

She was taciturn in the presence of Nicholas and his warm, friendly admiration.

"We both want you to feel that you've got real pals in us--people that you can always turn to, you know. I don't want to think of your going through any more of those lonely times that you were telling me about----"

"It's awfully sweet of you both," said Doris slowly. She looked at Nicholas as she spoke.

His small, tawny eyes expressed all the candid, unsubtle simplicity of his spirit. A hundred times he had looked at Lily herself with just such open, uncritical admiration.

"I think you've a great deal to be proud of, you know," said Nicholas. "There must have been times when you felt pretty nearly down and out, eh?" And Doris again replied:

"Oh, I don't know."

"But I do," said Nicholas, nodding triumphantly.

Lily wondered, with a certain impatience, why Doris did not indulge in one of those lengthy expositions of her own grievances against life, and the hospital, and her father, with which she had so often wearied her patient.

Was she really sufficiently intelligent to realize how very much more effective was this uneloquent refusal to dwell upon the hardships that Nicholas was so evidently ready to accept at her own valuation?

Next morning, however, when the two were again alone together, Doris was quite as voluble as ever and Lily quite as profoundly fatigued by her.

"I shall soon be strong enough to get up," said Lily. "I don't want to lie here longer than I need."

"You're like me," Miss Dickenson retorted. She possessed a wonderful power of extracting a personal application from apparently anything in the world. "That's just like me. I never can bear to give in. You know, sometimes I've really been on my last legs, as the saying is, and the Sister or someone has noticed it, and told me to slack off a bit. But I simply can't take things easily. I have to go on till I drop. That's absolutely me all over."

She leant back comfortably in an armchair as she spoke and began to polish her finger-nails with the palm of her hand--a favourite exercise.

"I was so awfully surprised at your not manicuring, Mrs. Aubray. It was one of the first things I noticed about you. You know, I'm afraid I always notice people's hands. It's the first thing I look at, almost. I suppose I sort of judge people by that. I sort of can't help it. I always look first of all at their hands."

Lily wondered, with the acrimony born of weariness, why this well-worn boast should almost invariably emanate from those least capable of any intelligent observation whatsoever.

She ignored Miss Dickenson's claim to perspicacity altogether, and replied to her earlier remark.

"I hope you don't feel that you have to go on till you drop, here. It's the last thing I should wish, and besides there's nothing but weakness the matter with me. I shall be getting up very soon--I hope before my aunt comes."

"Oh, yes, your aunt is coming. Now, when I'm ill, I never have any of my relations near me--not my sisters or anyone. It isn't that I don't think they'd come, you know, but I simply couldn't ask them. A weird sort of pride, I suppose. I really am a weird sort of person altogether, you know."

Lily closed her eyes.

"What makes you put that face on--it makes you look _so_ weird. What were you asking about--oh, yes--me when I'm ill. It's too funny, you know. I go on and on long after other people would have let themselves collapse, and then, when I do have to give in, of course I'm most frightfully bad. I'm a fearfully bad patient, too, because I'm always down on the nurse. I suppose it's because I know so well how nursing ought to be done."

"Oh," said Lily.

She remained speechless, even after Miss Dickenson had three times asked what made her say it like that.

"It sounded so weird," remarked Doris distrustfully, in conclusion.

But the sense of irony that occasionally sustained Lily was not always at her command. She regained her strength very slowly, and had no great desire to be well again.

Her relations with Nicholas were in a curiously fluid state. His presence, after enduring that of Doris Dickenson all day, always brought to her a rush of relief and pleasure, and often his companionship appeared to her as almost a perfect thing. The revulsion of feeling was proportionately painful when words of his, casually and kindly spoken, from time to time forced upon her an unwelcome realization of the gulf that mentally separated them.

They would never agree about people.

Lily, shamefacedly admitting the immense importance to herself of the personal equation in life, yet tried to blame herself for regarding the difference between them as being an important one. Sometimes, even, in her weakness and youthfulness, she tried to deny its existence.

Her husband's cult for Doris Dickenson, however, Lily unaffectedly welcomed. Incomprehensible though it seemed to her that Miss Dickenson's company should afford aught but weariness to anybody, she was glad that Nicholas should not have a solitary breakfast and dinner.

He always disliked being alone, unless when he was busy, and Lily felt vaguely that her prolonged stay upstairs would be partly compensated for if she could provide other companionship for him.

She was glad to remember that Nicholas had always liked Aunt Clo.

When Miss Stellenthorpe's visit became due, Lily said to her husband:

"Am I to say anything to Miss Dickenson about going away?"

"Why?" said Nicholas, looking astounded.

"I thought she was only staying till Aunt Clo arrived; and Aunt Clo will be here to-morrow."

"Oh well--it isn't a sort of Box and Cox arrangement, is it? There's plenty of room for them both. Just as you like, my dear, of course--but your aunt might feel freer if you still had your regular nurse at your beck and call. Besides, she's a nice girl--a nice girl, and a plucky one. You'd be sorry to lose her."

To the daughter of Philip and Eleanor Stellenthorpe it was almost an impossibility to cut across that kind, well-pleased statement with a wounding contradiction.

Lily's spirit sought the familiar refuge of the weak, a feeble and unconvinced optimism. "Perhaps Doris will go of herself, when Aunt Clo is here."

To a certain extent, the half-hearted prediction was verified, although the eventual departure of Doris Dickenson was not, perhaps, entirely a matter of free-will.

"_Bambina!_" said Miss Stellenthorpe, less than a week after her arrival, with even more than her habitual emphasis of diction. "_Bambina mia!_ How can this be?"

"What?"

"This _canaglia_!" said Miss Stellenthorpe, snapping her finger and thumb and becoming several degrees more cosmopolitan than usual.

"But who--what--_je vous le demande_--_who_ is this Dickenson ... _que vient-elle-faire dans cette galère?_ _Ecco!_ My Lily! _Mais c'est rigolo, voyons!_"

It was always a little difficult to be adequate when replying to Aunt Clo.

"She is looking after me professionally--she's been properly trained."

"_Ahimé!_" Aunt Clo sighed gustily, her eyes upturned to Heaven.

"I don't like her," Lily confessed. "She tires me very much; she talks such a lot, and really what she says is never worth hearing."

There was actual relief in putting into words the thoughts that she had so often suppressed in her own mind.

"_Basta!_ I understand, my child. Enough. You lie there, like a trampled flower, with this thing--this inferior, third-rate machine--rattling above you! But of what is Nicholas, _ce bon Nicholas_--of what is he thinking?"

"He arranged it on purpose for me--he was thinking of me," said Lily eagerly. "He thought she would be more of a companion than just an ordinary nurse. We know her family, and she was to be here more or less as a friend."

"_Et patati et patata_," said Miss Stellenthorpe scornfully. "Leave this to me, little one. I understand the Dickenson type very well."

It appeared indeed that she did.

Sitting in Lily's room, her large and shapely legs crossed beneath the astonishingly brief serge skirt that had temporarily replaced the blue knickerbockers of Genazzano, Miss Stellenthorpe elegantly smoked a number of cigarettes, and eyed the while, with critical penetration, Miss Doris Dickenson.

"You're like me, Miss Stellenthorpe. I'm afraid I smoke like a chimney--you know, my nerves sort of want it, somehow. I always inhale, too. Everyone always says I smoke too much."

"And who is 'everyone'?" negligently enquired Miss Stellenthorpe.

Doris stared at her.

"Everyone is everyone, I suppose," she said shortly.

Aunt Clo smiled with irrepressible superiority, turning to her niece.

"But how typical, is it not, of young England? The art of definition: everyone is everyone, she supposes! Ha, ha!"

"One talks carelessly, sometimes," Lily said, strongly inclined to laugh.

"But not at all," graciously exclaimed her aunt; "if by 'one' you allude to yourself, _carina_, I can assure you that it is not so. Your vocabulary, your originality, the extent of your reading, all combine to render your conversation stimulating. How I revel in the clash of wits! My niece and I between us must teach you the use of words, my little Dickenson."

Aunt Clo's little Dickenson appeared to be far from delighted at the proposition.

"How d'you mean, the use of words?" she asked curtly.

"Your vocabulary," Aunt Clo explained in a kind voice, "is that of a child, or a savage. It is, I believe, a statistical fact that certain savage tribes use a language of only two hundred words. It suffices for their need of self-expression. The vocabulary of the average English man or woman comprises little over fifteen hundred words, in daily use. People like myself, on the other hand, sooner or later have recourse to the most recondite expressions available, in the instinctive desire to avoid the _banale_. Words from other languages creep in--classical quotations--conversation becomes an art----"

Miss Stellenthorpe waved her cigarette gracefully round her head.

"How devastating!" said Doris Dickenson in the pause that followed.

Her voice was charged with the rather laboured sneer that in the English middle-classes is described as "sarcasm."

"Unhappy one!" said Aunt Clo, and groaned aloud. "What is this 'devastating' that you employ _à tort et à travers_? A senseless and meaningless _cliché_!"

She fixed a large and gleaming eye, that held undisguised horror in it, upon Doris.

Lily was conscious of a fearful joy in listening, as the many scathing criticisms that had thronged into her own mind were thus eloquently and unrestrainedly put into words by her aunt.

The sulky face of Miss Dickenson was darkly flushed.

"I speak thus for your own good, my Dickenson," said Aunt Clo, shaking a long forefinger. "You render yourself intolerable to the well-educated, and it is but a kindness to tell you so. Not only are you inexperienced, and therefore crude of outlook, but you are ignorant, self-assertive, stupidly bombastic, and talkative to a degree that----"

"Really, Miss Stellenthorpe, if you think I'm going to sit down under such rudeness----"

Doris's voice had risen instantly to the true virago's pitch of shrillness.

"Silence!" said Aunt Clo. "You disturb my niece. Perform the material duties, my Dickenson, for which I remark that you have been well trained, but cease to weary us with the trivialities of your conversation. _En voilà assez, n'est-ce-pas?_"

"I don't understand gibberish."

It was evident that Doris, after the manner of her kind, was recklessly seeking after rudeness for the sake of rudeness, regardless of wit or point. Miss Stellenthorpe raised her handsome eyebrows in an expression of patient despair.

"You perceive, my Lily? This girl--_mal' educata_ indeed, as my beloved Italians say--knows neither her own language nor any other. What can you expect of such? Deplorable, oh deplorable!"

Aunt Clo looked at Miss Dickenson and shook her head repeatedly.

"Wretched one, have you never been taught that until you have learned the art of listening, you are unfit to talk? _L'art d'ennuyer c'est de tout dire._ That art, my unhappy Dickenson, you possess to the full. It is your only one. I come to this house--straight, I may tell you, from unravelling the many tangled threads of another's destiny--I come, and what do I find? What, I ask you, do I find? I find my niece, broken in body and spirit, needing the utmost cherishing, the greatest delicacy of handling, the reticence of true sympathy--and compelled instead to submit to your ministrations. You ask me, perhaps, to tell you fully and freely of what those ministrations consist."

"I don't ask you," cried Doris passionately. "I don't want to know what you think."

"_Non far niente!_ I shall tell you just the same," declared Miss Stellenthorpe with unabated spirit. "_Pour moi il n'y a que la vérité._ The day will yet come when you will remember my frankness with gratitude and admiration. But even should that day _not_ come, my Dickenson, it matters little. The time has come for me to speak, and I shall speak. I have sat here in silence," said Aunt Clo, not altogether truthfully, "and I have been filled with amazement that my niece should not, long ago, have said what I am saying now. Instead, with a supineness for which, candidly, I blame her, she has allowed herself to be overwhelmed. Overwhelmed, you ask me, by what? By a ceaseless torrent of meaningless, ill-chosen, unmelodious _words_, my Dickenson, strung together without rhyme or reason. You have but one topic--the supremely uninteresting one of yourself. You are reminded of yourself _à tout bout de champ_--worse, you insist upon reminding us of yourself. But we do not want to know about you. You are not interesting. _A-t-on jamais vu un toupet pareil!_ You tell us of your views, your habits, your trivial little experiences, as though they were of cosmic importance. Could futility go further, I ask you? You reply at once: No, undoubtedly not. There is yet hope for you, then."

On this optimistic pronouncement Aunt Clo met at last with the interruption that her niece, fascinated by so much candour, had been unable to offer.

Nicholas Aubray entered.

"Well, well," said he cheerily, "the Female Parliament sitting?"

The trivial pleasantry was received in perfect silence, and Nicholas cast a sudden, shrewd glance round the room.

"What on earth----?"

"_Niente!_" said Aunt Clo vivaciously. "A few words, _amico mio_, of counsel to the young--the very young, I may say."

"Is that Lily?" asked her husband, with a rather puzzled smile.

"But no! Our Lily may be young in years, but in wit, in understanding, she is delightfully mature. But the little Dickenson there--_sans rancune, hein_, my Dickenson?"

Miss Dickenson's heavy face, from red, had become white.

She looked at Miss Stellenthorpe, with the concentrated hatred that only embittered vanity can engender.

"I am going to leave the house," she said thickly. "I shan't stay in a house where I've been insulted."

"Who has insulted you in this house?" demanded Nicholas, half smiling.

Doris made a dumb gesture indicating Miss Stellenthorpe.

"Nonsense!" said Nicholas brusquely. He put his hand on the girl's arm.

"What's all this about? You've misunderstood something. What is it?"

"_Rien de rien!_" declared Aunt Clo contemptuously. "For the little Dickenson's own good, _mon ami_, I take it upon myself to point out certain wearisome tricks that our Lily has borne far too long, and hence comes this talk of insult. _Enfantillage!_"

Aunt Clo's cigarette described a parabola that dismissed the subject as being one of no further importance. Nicholas turned to his wife.

"Lily--of course Miss Dickenson mustn't dream of leaving us. We should be most distressed----"

Lily looked at Doris.

She had neither the courage to persuade her to stay, nor to encourage her to go.

"I shan't stay," said Doris obstinately.

Nicholas frowned, looked at his wife appealingly and then at Miss Dickenson with evident concern.

It came to Lily, with a slight sense of shock, that Nicholas could not be depended upon in a crisis. He was uncertain.

Doris was staring at him with smouldering eyes, and both were silent.

It was Aunt Clotilde, high-handed to the last, who carried off the situation.

She uncrossed her amazing length of limb, rose to her feet with a swinging movement, and flicked the ash off her cigarette with considerable elegance of gesture.

"You have said well, my Dickenson," observed Aunt Clo. "You will remain here no longer. Go, then; and on no account forget what I have said to you. Speak less, eschew slang, learn to place your words correctly, avoid _clichés_ that mean nothing, and above all, cast from your mind for ever the delusion that the art of conversation consists in the dropping of detached pieces of information concerning yourself."

XIX

"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."