Part 3

"Dear me, what an imperious little person this is!" said Miss Cleeve very brightly indeed. "Gently, gently, Lily, if you please. If you do your lessons very nicely and are a good little girl, perhaps you'll go and see Vonnie later on. We shall see."

Miss Cleeve looked very wise and very decided, and Lily distrusted her violently.

"Why haven't I seen Mother this morning?"

"She's busy, dear."

"But Nurse is with Vonnie too. Is Vonnie so very, very ill?"

"Ha, ha!" said Miss Cleeve with a laugh that rang singularly untrue. "What a silly little girl to talk like that, now! Come and sit down, and you shall choose which lesson you'd like to begin with, for a treat."

Miss Cleeve's brightness and Miss Cleeve's treats inspired Lily with a sickening sense of fear.

She was kept in the schoolroom all the morning, and when she and Miss Cleeve went downstairs to luncheon, Miss Cleeve held her hand with unnecessary tightness all the way. But Lily was alert, and she saw the doctor's little carriage going away down the drive from the window of the hall, and she also saw her mother standing, with head uncovered at the front door, and her mother did not look at all as usual.

Lily wrenched her hand away from Miss Cleeve's and ran to her.

"Can't I see Vonnie?" she cried urgently.

Her mother kissed her silently.

"I hope----?" said Miss Cleeve hesitatingly.

There was an interchange of glances between the two grown women that the child's strained, anxious gaze sought desperately to interpret.

"_Is_ Vonnie very ill, Mother?"

"There's nothing for you to worry your little self about, my darling," said Eleanor in a soothing voice, kissing her again.

A choking sense of her own impotence, resentment at their futile evasions, and above all a growing horror of all this mystery, made Lily burst into loud, unrestrained crying.

"Hush!" cried Miss Cleeve sharply, pulling her into the dining-room.

"Lily, Lily," said her mother. "Oh don't, my little pet."

She sank into a chair, looking overwhelmed.

"My dear child," said her father, suddenly emerging from the embrasure of the dining-room window, "you mustn't add to your mother's troubles just now. You must be a good little girl, and not think of yourself at all. Do your little lessons, and play about in the sunshine, and don't give any trouble, but be a good, happy little child."

It all sounded very kind and easy. The flood of misery that overwhelmed one must be some form of obscure, but extreme, naughtiness.

Luncheon was eaten almost in silence, and Eleanor went away before it was finished, stroking Lily's long brown hair as she passed behind her chair.

"Play in the garden this afternoon," she whispered, "and Mother will try and come to you in the drawing-room after tea."

Then a telegram was brought in and Philip, after reading it, said to the parlour-maid:

"The carriage will be wanted to meet the 3.30 train this afternoon. Tell Fowler."

Miss Cleeve looked up and said: "Is it----?" and raised her eyebrows.

"Yes. A second opinion will be a relief to us, though I'm afraid----" He checked himself.

Lily, not daring to glance at them, knew very well that it was because of her that they left all their sentences unfinished.

"----Probably a trained nurse, if he recommends it----" said her father, very low and rapidly.

What was a Train-Nurse?

Miss Cleeve went away, as usual on Saturdays, as soon as lunch was finished, saying warningly to Lily: "Now mind you go and play in the terrace garden as your mother told you. I think I should stay on the nice front terrace all the afternoon, if I were you. It'll be nice and sunny there."

"Yes, Miss Cleeve," said Lily forlornly.

There was probably something to be seen or heard from the other part of the garden, overlooking the drive, that they did not want her to know about.

In spite of this conviction, however, Lily went to the terrace, and looked up at the windows of the room where Vonnie was.

The blinds of both windows were drawn down so as to admit the least possible light into the bedroom and there was nothing to be learnt. Lily went into the potting-shed and sat there in the obscurity and cried.

She heard two of the servants walking down the path outside, as though on their way to the stables, and caught fragmentary words and phrases.... "It's awful--so quick, too."

"That's the way with tumours ... don't you remember me telling you about my poor Aunt Gertie ... just the same way it was----"

"Why, they may have to operate...."

"They say the pain's cruel ... and for a poor little child, too!"

Lily put her fingers in her ears and cast herself upon the ground.

It was Vonnie they were talking about, and they said the pain was _cruel_--and no one would tell her anything, or let her go to Vonnie.

"I wish I was dead, oh, I wish I was dead!" sobbed Lily.

A child with an intense capacity for feeling can suffer to a degree that is beyond any degree of adult suffering, because imagination, ignorance, and the conviction of utter helplessness are untempered either by reason or by experience. Nothing in all Lily's life ever again held for her the bitterness of that afternoon in the potting-shed, when she had been sent out to be a good, happy little child, and play about in the sunshine.

After a long while, the housemaid Clara came and called her, and exclaimed with compassion at the sight of her when she appeared.

"Are you missing poor Miss Vonnie? There, never mind, dear, come along in now and have your tea."

Clara had tea with her instead of Nurse, and was very kind, and Lily, unable to cry any more, felt dumbly grateful to her and did not ask any of those questions which she felt sure that Clara would somehow contrive not to answer.

"Come and wash your face before you go downstairs," said Clara encouragingly, "so that your Mamma won't think you've been crying."

But Lily's mother was not in the drawing-room, when she went there with the traces of her tears carefully removed.

Her father was reading and he greeted Lily in a grave, depressed way, and told her to look at a picture-book.

They sat in silence for what seemed a very long time.

Lily only spoke once, and then she said quite suddenly:

"Father, please, what is a tumour?"

Philip cast a startled look at her, that added to the effect of rebuke in his shocked reply:

"Hush, hush, my child. That will do. You must not ask questions like that, you know."

Lily was conscious that he looked furtively and uneasily at her at intervals during the remainder of the evening.

"Shall I see Mother?" she asked wistfully when she went to bed.

"I will ask her to come and say good-night to you."

Waiting in bed for the redemption of this promise, Lily grew frightened again, and pictured Vonnie victimized by some terrible and magnified form of earache, wondering miserably why Lily had not come to play with her again, or at least to kiss her good-night.

She cried again, and dozed, and at intervals murmured some angry, urgently worded formula addressed to God, because her father had said to her very gravely that she must say her prayers, and ask God to bless everybody--Father and Mother and Vonnie. Lily had understood that he would not seem to attach special importance to Vonnie's need, by naming her only.

It was the middle of the night when she woke with a sudden start, and a new, compelling sense of terror.

Instinctively, she sprang, trembling, out of bed and groped her way to the door. There were lights and subdued voices without, and Lily ran out on to the stairs in her night-gown and caught at her mother's person. Dazed by the light and her own violent wakening from a heavy sleep, Lily hardly knew what happened next, or how she was taken back to her bed again.

But it was her mother who knelt by the bedside, with tears streaming down her face.

"Oh! Tell me what's happened?" said Lily. "Is it Vonnie?"

She did not know what it was that she feared.

"You oughtn't to know--I never meant you to be told till morning----" Eleanor was sobbing violently. "What can I say?--God--she's very happy with God, darling--gone to heaven----"

Amongst the disjointed words, Lily suddenly caught a flash of meaning.

"Is Vonnie dead?" she asked incredulously.

"Hush!" cried Eleanor in a sort of stifled shriek. But her head bent itself in assent.

Then Vonnie wasn't unhappy, wasn't ill--would never be either again, but always happy and well! It was like a dream come true.

Lily, after the long misery of the day, felt nothing but a rush of relief and comfort at the knowledge that Vonnie was dead.

The relief which is the outcome of a violent emotional reaction, however, cannot be expected to endure.

In any case, even had Lily not awakened to a changed world, in which she hourly missed Yvonne, the inseparable companion of all her nursery days, Philip Stellenthorpe could never have rested content until the strange callousness manifested by his younger daughter had been explained away. "The want of realization of a little, sheltered child," he forbearingly called it.

But it had shocked him, all the same.

Whilst Eleanor was only blindly anxious to shield Lily from any fright or grief, where she herself considered that fright or grief might threaten, Philip was unable to refrain from exacting the due meed of conventionality that he took for a tribute to Yvonne's memory.

Yvonne's belongings disappeared mysteriously, and one day when Lily asked if she mightn't have Vonnie's paint-box now, her father, overhearing her, was gravely displeased.

"My dear child," said he, "you don't want to be a heartless little girl, do you?"

Lily did not want to be a heartless little girl at all, and still less did she want to be called one. Therefore she did not attempt to restrain showers of pitiful tears whenever she missed Vonnie most, and to cry in church whenever she saw her mother doing so.

After a time, Philip and Eleanor ceased to speak of Vonnie at all, although a great many photographs of her now pervaded the drawing-room and Eleanor's dressing-table.

It soon became impossible for Lily to connect the object of so much that was in reality a kind of exploited sacredness, with the real Vonnie whose impotent champion she had been, to whom she had always been preferred against her will, who had been of so little significance save to Lily herself, in her tiny world during her short life-time.

The Yvonne of the photographs, of Mother's occasional Sunday evening low-voiced talks, of Father's still more occasional, solemnly mournful references, gradually acquired a meaning for Lily, albeit a purely sentimental one, that had nothing to do with Vonnie, whom she really only remembered, after a little while, in occasional vivid flashes.

Nevertheless it was actually many years before, at the most casual mention of a cold east wind, Lily ceased to feel a sudden irrational rush of sheer jubilant triumph, because the east wind could never give Vonnie earache any more.

III

"There are some gypsies on the common, Father."

"Are there, my pet? You and Miss Cleeve had better keep to the road, for the present, then. Very likely they have illness about. Those people are not very careful."

"There was such a thin little boy. He looked as though he didn't get much to eat," said Lily tentatively.

"Well, well, my darling, we'll hope he does. Did you find any blackberries on your walk this morning?"

"Only a few. They're not yet ripe. But, Father----" Lily was ten years old, and nowadays when she saw that her father and mother were deliberately evading a subject upon which she desired information, something that seemed stronger than herself drove her on to urge the point, with an affectation of being unaware of their disapproval.

"Do you think that little boy was really starving, perhaps?"

"No, no, my child." Philip moved uneasily and glanced at his wife. "People don't starve in England nowadays."

"We won't talk about sad things like that, Lily dear," said Eleanor brightly. "People needn't be poor unless they want to, you know. They can always find work."

"Why hasn't everyone got a house then? Why can't that little boy live in a house like we do?" Lily demanded meditatively.

There was a silence weighty with disapproval.

Then Philip remarked simply and with finality:

"Don't ask foolish questions, my little pet."

Lily knew herself defeated and was guiltily conscious of having deserved rebuke by her deliberate pursual of one of the many topics that, for reasons never explained, should not be talked about.

During the year that had elapsed since Vonnie's death, the number of these subjects seemed to have increased enormously. Not only was Vonnie not to be talked about, but anything connected with death, funerals, and mortality generally must be avoided, and it was a general axiom that what Philip occasionally referred to as "sad, painful, distressing things" were never really fit subjects for discussion.

Curiously enough, the nervous sufferings of Lily's whole early childhood, culminating in the emotional crisis that she had undergone when Yvonne died, at this period deserted her. She was now merely sensitive in a petulant way, subconsciously antagonistic to all her surroundings, and obsessed by a resentful certainty that her father and mother did not understand her.

This ungracious conviction she once haltingly attempted to explain to Eleanor, early faced with the endeavour that has defeated so many, that of avoiding the only form of words obviously designed to express what she wished to have understood, and finding instead some other formula in which it might be conveyed with equal lucidity and yet less outspokenness.

The results were a number of self-contradictory statements from Lily, followed by tears.

"But what is it that I don't understand, my baby?" Eleanor urged her to return to the attack.

"Me," quavered Lily, suddenly explicit.

Her mother winced very visibly indeed.

Lily felt unutterably naughty.

"My dearest," said Eleanor at last, "how can a grown-up person not understand a little child? You're talking nonsense, you know. There can be nothing in a little girl of ten years old that's beyond the understanding of a grown-up, experienced person. And to say that a _mother_ doesn't understand her own child, is to suggest something that can't possibly be. Some day you'll know what I mean."

"When?" said Lily.

Eleanor's absolute belief in the creed that she had enunciated perforce carried a certain conviction to Lily's bewildered and undeveloped mind.

"When?" she repeated.

"When you have a little child of your own," her mother replied simply.

There was nothing more to be said.

Until that far-away, unbelievable time when one would be sufficiently old to have a little child of one's own, it must be taken on trust that all grown-up people, especially one's father and mother, understood one perfectly, although they made one feel all the time as though they did not.

Lily's thoughts and her feelings became speedily more and more muddled and confused.

Her discontent, which originated in sheer perplexity, took the form of argumentative and tiresome contradiction of the rules imposed upon her.

"She used to be such a dear, little sunny thing," cried Eleanor piteously. "Of course, I know there's an awkward age for all children to go through but I never thought of Lily's beginning it so young."

She cried and looked pale over Lily's naughtiness very often, and Lily was tortured by remorse and self-accusations that were without any effect upon her behaviour.

One day her father, who was tacitly supposed to know of her naughtiness, but to find it too grievous to be mentioned openly, spoke to her.

"You will regret it bitterly later on, my child, if you grieve your mother just now. There are reasons which you can't understand why she should be spared in every possible way, at present."

Were these specific reasons, or only the usual mysterious ones held over one's head by the authorities, and generally supposed to have obscure reference to God?

Lily presently came to the conclusion that some definite event was impending, and that she was supposed to know nothing whatever about it. Things were said to her of which it was obvious that she was intended to make general application only, and to which, with intuitive certainty, she instantly attached a special meaning.

"You must always be a very good little girl to your mother, and pray to God that He may take good care of her."

Why should Father suddenly say that, when it was an old-established certainty that Lily knew she ought to be a good little girl, and had prayed for her mother every night ever since she could remember, as a matter of course?

Sometimes it almost seemed as though they wanted to see how far it was possible for them to go, before Lily would make any sign of having noticed that there was a mystery.

"Nurse, I want you to bring those things that I spoke to you about into my room this morning."

"Yes, madam."

And then five minutes later:

"My little Lily must stay in the schoolroom and do her lessons very nicely this morning, and not go running about the house too much. Trot along to Miss Cleeve, my pet."

As though Miss Cleeve had ever dreamed of allowing Lily to run about the house during lesson time! Such a thing was quite unheard of, and Eleanor's casual tone did not for an instant deceive Lily into supposing that the prohibition had been a casual one.

On another occasion, a still more careless enquiry:

"You know you must never come into upstairs rooms without knocking at the door first, don't you, darling?"

A rule that Lily had known and had been made to observe, since she was three years old.

It appeared, therefore, that there was some urgent necessity for enforcing the rule now. Lily discovered that the door of the Blue Room was locked, all of a sudden.

She felt a strange inability to question her father or mother, but she tried to entrap Miss Cleeve into an admission, unconsciously imitating the air of carelessness with which Eleanor had tried, as Lily dimly felt, to entrap her into asking some question, to which a reply might be given that would direct curiosity into an innocuous channel leading nowhere.

"Oh, Miss Cleeve! Did you know the door of the Blue Room had been locked?"

Lily gave a high-pitched, nervous giggle. "Perhaps the key's been lost!"

Miss Cleeve threw her a very sharp glance of which Lily pretended to be quite unaware.

"Really, dear," she said in a very even voice. "Keys sometimes are lost, you know. But there's nothing to take you to the Blue Room, that I know of."

"Nurse goes in there sometimes. I've seen her coming out."

"I daresay she likes to see that it's kept dusted and tidy," said Miss Cleeve, in a preternaturally calm voice. "Now run and wash your hands for lunch, dear."

Lily felt thoroughly baffled by Miss Cleeve, and could not decide whether or not the governess had penetrated the motive of her artless enquiries.

Because she felt ashamed of her own attempts at solving the mystery that was in the air, she was sure that she was being naughty again.

When she went downstairs to the dining-room, her mother and Miss Cleeve were already there, talking in furtive tones to one another. Eleanor broke off the instant that Lily appeared and looked at her in rather a startled way, but Miss Cleeve, with the same determined naturalness with which she had spoken upstairs, uttered her final remark quite loud:

"So I thought perhaps a word to the wise, Mrs. Stellenthorpe----"

"Quite right, Miss Cleeve, thank you. I shall take care. Anyway it won't be very long now before----"

They both looked at Lily, who suddenly felt so uncomfortable that, to cover her own confusion, she almost involuntarily cried out: "Before what, Mother?"

Her mother and Miss Cleeve exchanged glances in a way that made Lily feel unutterably small and foolish and ignorant.

To her deep mortification, she felt her face burning with angry scarlet, although without knowing why.

"Poor little thing!" said Eleanor, and actually laughed, causing all Lily's inchoate disconcertment to culminate in a silent, furious resolution, that never again would she ask any of them about anything, so long as she lived.

The impassioned, childishly formed determination was not of a nature to endure. The inexplicable resentment that had caused it, Lily never forgot.

She could not have told what sudden intuition first made her suspect the truth, but when Eleanor, with certain circumlocutions and euphemistic phrases, told her that she might pray to God to send her a baby brother, Lily felt that she had known all the time that this was what all the mystery had been about.

"It's a great secret and you mustn't talk about it to anyone," Eleanor whispered.

Lily had no wish to talk about it to anyone. She was by that time thoroughly convinced that the arrival of a baby was something necessitating endless concealments and misrepresentations, and therefore of a highly shameful nature.

She was sent away to the seaside with Miss Cleeve for nearly six weeks, and when they came back again, the little brother was established in a blue and white cradle, and the Blue Room had been unlocked and transformed into a night nursery.

Lily gathered from various things that the servants said, that her mother had been ill, and that the illness was in some manner connected with the baby's coming. The subject puzzled her, and troubled her thoughts very often, but she felt sure that it was wrong to desire enlightenment, and she knew that if she asked questions she would receive either jocular or untrue replies, or the shocked "Hush!" of enforced reticence.

Eleanor having a horror of pet animals, from which she feared the contraction of mysterious and unspecified diseases of the skin, Lily was safeguarded from any direct encounter with the crudities of Nature. Her imagination therefore continued to evolve theories and explanations that her common-sense rejected, but that frightened and distressed her none the less, and that sent her furtively in quest of the information which she believed to be illicit, to such forbidden books of reference as the "Encyclopædia Britannica."

After Kenneth was born, Lily, to her unconscious relief, ceased to be the sole object in life of her parents, her governess, and her nurse. She spent less time in the drawing-room, and after Miss Cleeve had left for the day, remained in the schoolroom and read endlessly.

"Not too many story-books, my little darling," Eleanor occasionally said with a hint of disapproval in her tones, but as the books in the schoolroom were all story-books, and she was not allowed to touch the ones in the drawing-room, Lily continued to indulge her taste for fiction, although with the usual underlying feeling of guilt that seemed automatically to attach itself to whatever was pleasant.

There were curious _nuances_, never put into words, as that to read a new story-book was more reprehensible than to re-read an old one, and even when a recent birthday had occasioned the arrival of some delightful blue or red volume, the very giver of it might be apt to exclaim, with a sound of vexation, on seeing Lily immersed in it:

"_Another_ new story-book!"

Lily grew to be so apprehensive of these expressions of disapproval that sometimes she slipped the new book, with its incriminating, shining binding, into one of the brown paper covers that concealed the wear and tear of the old books.

This manœuvre was one day penetrated by Miss Cleeve, who did not seek any explanation of it, but merely told Lily on general grounds that she was a most sly child, and didn't seem to know the meaning of the word "honour."

Lily wept and felt that it was true.

Gradually she came to consider her passion for reading as another sign of her own depravity, much confirmed in this view by the grave pronouncements of her father, who said to her from time to time: