Part 19

"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!"

He flushed angrily. "What is the matter? Why may I not touch your hand?"

"I don't like it," said Lily simply.

He stared at her for a moment, amazement and mortified vanity struggling together in his face. Suddenly, a true Latin, he burst into a rueful laugh at his own discomfiture.

"I believe you mean it! But then you really are as cold--as white--as your own name-flower! You don't know what it is--to care?"

"But," said Lily, herself confused, "you always said that I didn't--that I never----"

"One says these things! But I did not know it was so literally true----"

"Forgive me," he added very gently. "You are still only a child, after all."

Lily justified his words better than she realized, by flushing deeply with vexation. She had thought that he understood her, but his understanding had been only the first move in the game, and she realized, with something nearly allied to disappointment, that the Italian was not the man to rouse her to any appreciation of subsequent moves.

"It's just--not," she thought, and involuntarily the words added themselves--"like Nicholas. He's--just not."

She was slightly relieved, upon the whole, when della Torre bade her a whimsical farewell.

"I still think that I could have taught you something, had you been willing to learn--but you are afraid. You will learn not to be afraid of life, some day, and then----"

He made an expressive gesture.

"Am I afraid of life?" she said, rather surprised. "Yes, I think perhaps I am. I think I have always been taught to be afraid of it."

"And I, I wanted to teach you to forget everything that you have been taught! But it is never the teaching that matters--only the teacher. You know what they say?"

He paused a moment dramatically, looking at her and smiling.

"_C'est le ton qui fait la musique._"

Lily remembered the words very often, after Giulio della Torre had gone.

"Did you give our friend Spaghetti his marching orders?" Nicholas made enquiry of her, his eyebrows raised in a significantly humorous expression.

"I don't know that I did, exactly. He gave them to himself, I think."

"I thought he seemed a bit infatuated," said Nicholas complacently.

"Would you be angry if I told you that I--I did encourage him a little bit?"

Nicholas roared with laughter.

His mirth was so spontaneous and so ludicrously inapposite to Lily's own half-formed intention of making as sensational a confession as the mildness of the facts allowed, that she could not help laughing with him.

"But, Nicholas, I really am ashamed."

"Why, darling?"

He put his arm round her waist.

"Because one evening he--he told me I wasn't happy and I said it was true."

It was that which had weighed upon her, with its implication of her husband's inadequacy. The fact that she had allowed the Marchese to tell her that he loved her, appeared to her to be relatively of no importance.

"You shouldn't tell fibs," said Nicholas serenely.

Lily was silent from sheer disconcertment.

"What are you downcast about?" he asked affectionately. "I've been so disgustingly busy lately, I haven't had any talks with my little wife. That fellow didn't worry you, did he?"

"Not in himself," Lily said confusedly, making an effort to give her real thoughts to her husband.

She was not surprised when he failed to follow her bungling attempt.

"Not in himself, eh? Well, he's a splendid fellow, della Torre, full of brains, and I don't blame him if he got a little bit above his boots, eh?"

She had scarcely ever heard Nicholas say a word in condemnation of anyone, and although the thought touched her, she was also impatient of his lack of discrimination.

"Nicholas, it was partly my own fault, that the Marchese thought that I should like him to make love to me a little bit."

"Was it, by Jove!" Nicholas refused to take the matter at all seriously.

"You know, you're a very fascinating little person, my dear. You mustn't be surprised if inflammable young foreigners lose their heads from time to time. And you mustn't let it distress you, either. I can't have you looking worried."

It was so evident that his whole solicitude was for herself alone, that Lily felt a sudden rush of passionate gratitude and affection towards him.

"Oh, Nicholas, how good you are to me!"

She raised her lips to his.

The disappointment that marriage had brought to her receded at such moments.

She ceased to try to wrench from her relation with Nicholas a supreme meaning which it could never hold.

She was content to feel his love for her, momentarily forgetting to rebel at the poverty of the response that it awakened in herself, content to know that he was content, and curiously relieved because she could sincerely assure herself that she loved her husband.

XX

No dramatic crisis came to break down the endless monotony of Lily's dissatisfaction as time went on. But she envisaged the possibility of one.

"Supposing I meet the man I could have loved--supposing I _do_ love him?"

The specious echo of words that might have been spoken by her father, by Miss Melody, by any of those who had stood for wisdom to her childhood, followed on the thought.

"_Why meet trouble halfway?... How weak to torture oneself about something which may never happen ... crossing bridges before one comes to them...._"

Something in the last phrase awoke a long-dormant memory.

They had said that to her, long ago--the new metaphor leaving a little picture on her plastic, childish mind--in the old days when she had been afraid, because the east wind would give Vonnie earache.

They had said that it was naughty and ungrateful to run and meet trouble halfway. Of course Vonnie wouldn't get earache. And Vonnie had gone out into the east wind, and had got earache. The agony of those nights of silent strain was upon Lily once more as she remembered.

Illumination came to her.

They had bluffed her into accepting those old catchwords then, but was she of her own free-will to be bound by them now?

"_Don't put things into words--don't let imagination run away with you. Beware of imagination. It's morbid to dwell upon what may never happen._"

Shove it all out of sight! Bury it without looking at it! Embark upon adventure by the line of least resistance!

And then, when that which was buried rises to confront you, in stark, unescapable reality, then, realize that your defences are not ready, that an emergency is upon you with which you have deliberately unfitted yourself to cope, that Truth, your only weapon, you have long ago cast from you at the bidding of those who read its name Morbidity.

But she was dimly aware that, as submission had blinded her once, so bitterness obscured her vision now.

The old, inculcated instinct for seeking advice beset her often, but she decided it in the realization that no glib outside verdict could now carry weight with her.

Half enviously, half mockingly, she thought of the old literary convention that, in a time of mental crisis, some chance encounter, some wisdom met almost at random, should provide the unforgettable word holding the key of solution.

"_She never saw the lame cobbler again, but his words had made all life look different henceforward...._"

There were no such fortuitous sign-posts in real life, Lily decided.

More than one adviser, nevertheless, sought her unasked.

"All is not well with you, my Lily."

Aunt Clo's penetrating gaze had underlined her words.

"Shall I tell you, little one, that I foresaw this some time ago? _Moi aussi, j'ai passé par là._ There comes a day, is it not so?"

"What?" asked Lily, mildly bewildered.

"_Jeunesse, jeunesse!_" said Aunt Clo, quite in her old way. "Youth calls to youth, my Lily, as well I know. And watching you, I have re-lived my own past. You know something of the story of my past. Do not, I beseech you, little one--do not let me live to see tragedy repeat itself."

"Tell me what you mean, Aunt Clo."

"Lily, Lily! Fencing is unworthy of you--utterly unworthy of us both."

"I want to know what you think," said Lily wearily.

"Think!" repeated Aunt Clo solemnly. "What _can_ I think?"

Her niece was utterly unable to find a reply to the portentous conundrum.

Miss Stellenthorpe put one hand upon Lily's shoulder and plunged a long, deep look into her eyes.

Then she sank into a seat and allowed the saddest of smiles to dawn upon her lips. She shook her head slowly from side to side. "Who am I, that you should turn to me, my dear? I, who made such a shipwreck of my youth? But O, little one! How lightly I should count the cost, if it is to save you from the same folly, from the same life-time of regret!"

Had Aunt Clotilde really some message to interpret?

Lily looked at her with a faint stirring of hope. Miss Stellenthorpe's fine eyes were glowing.