CHAPTER TWO.

LILAC

I

On the prospectus it was called _The Mordaunt Club_, but in practice no one ever thought of saying anything but “The Hen House” when speaking of the block of unselfcontained flats near the river in which Gillian and Lilac Armstrong had lived ever since their mother’s death.

Sir John Mordaunt, its founder, had built it out of the remnants of Buckingham Palace. This material he had acquired at what a later age has called bargain prices, from one of the contractors when the Royal dwelling was finished and there were bricks and mortar and fine-faced stone to be had for the carting away. Being of the period, the Mordaunt Club building was rock-like in stolidity and forbidding of aspect. Framed to shelter poor spinsters of the governing-classes in their declining years, it consisted of two gaunt five-storied houses, one on each side of a courtyard graced by one plane-tree and a laburnum. Kindness without consideration had directed the scheme. The buildings faced due north and south. There were four flats, or sets of rooms on each floor into two of which the sun never shone; the other two from March to October being intolerable unless their occupants were able to obtain for themselves the sunblinds philanthropy had not provided. The flats consisted of two small intercommunicating rooms, the outer one opening on to a common hall out of which, on each floor, two bleak corridors with coal-bin, oil-tank, sink, cold-water tap and lavatory (also of the period) served the tenants of the four flats as joint domestic offices. Two members living together were allowed one extra and separate room, if they could get it. And the rent, which was small, included a certain amount of service.

There was a communal kitchen in the basement of one of the buildings, from which, twice a day, at one o’clock and at half-past seven, the roast beef of old England or the boiled mutton of her Antipodean island, was sent up accompanied by potatoes, boiled, with turnips, carrots or cabbage according to their season, and followed by milk-pudding, and on Sundays by apple-pie. These viands, served between two hot plates, were placed on the table in each sitting-room, whether it were laid for a meal or spread, as the Armstrongs’ often was, with Gillian’s school-books or Lilac’s millinery, by small hard-working maids. They came from Battersea, these servers, and were ruled over by the janitor Mr. Gordon, and by his wife Mrs. Gordon, who roasted beef and boiled mutton for the “Ladies” (this was how the basement referred to the landings) and fried and grilled and souffléed choicer viands for her husband and the maids to consume at less conventional hours.

Mr. Gordon was only parts of a man: he had a wooden leg, a glass eye and one other contrivance of the surgical-instrument maker, the precise nature and location of which was most decently unrevealed, though its existence was well known and always spoken of as “Mr. Gordon’s trouble.” For some time after they came to the Mordaunt Club the Armstrongs had supposed Mr. Gordon’s trouble to be the one which was always very troublesome on Saturday evenings and had caused him one night to make an earnest attempt at locking the courtyard gate with a tablespoon. This delusion, fostered by the constant references to it in Mrs. Gordon’s conversation, and by the frequency with which it was cited by the maids as a complete explanation for their lateness on any occasion, was dispelled, or rather was thrust further into mystery by Mrs. Gordon herself.

“I wonder if you’d mind paying by cheque, miss,” said Mrs. Gordon on her weekly visit to collect the dinner-money. “If I take it all downstairs in cash, nothing’ll hold Mr. Gordon. They’ve told him at the Orspittle that he can have a new spring fitted to his trouble, and he’s that set on it—you know what men are, miss—that he can’t wait to find out whether it reely will do any good work or whether it’s just one of them try-ons. Larst year he had six little buttons put on, instead of the strap. And believe me, miss, there ’asn’t been a week since when one or other of them buttons ’asn’t popped off. And he won’t have boot-buttons sewed on at home instead. Not he. You know what men are, miss. Back to the shop it must go—and a shillin’ a time unless I can find the button in his close. So I’ve took to keepin’ the buttons till four’s off at a time. And wot it’ll be like if he gets a spring put on as well you can guess for yourself, miss. It’s cost us a pretty penny has Mr. Gordon’s trouble, miss; not but wot her ladyship didn’t come down very handsome at first, but Mr. Gordon never was one to let well alone. And he _will_ read the papers. You know what men are, miss. All them nasty advertisements putting ideas into his head. So, if you don’t mind, miss, I’ll take a cheque, and give you all the cash I’ve collected from Number Six and Number Nine—Eight’s out—and that’ll leave me just enough to do the shoppin’ meself this morning, and Mr. Gordon won’t be tempted even if he does get hold of my clean apron.”

Mrs. Gordon’s clean apron, a highly starched affair, was remarkable for two pockets, in one of which she kept change, in the other a photograph of Miss Gordon, Mr. Gordon’s daughter by an earlier and evidently ill-judged union. Gillian was, from the first, at a loss to account for the frequency with which Mrs. Gordon, diving for change, would put her hand in the wrong pocket and withdraw the picture exclaiming:

“There now! if I haven’t gone and got out Miss Gordon’s photograph instead of arf a crown. P’r’aps, as I have got it out, you’d like to look at it, miss. It’s a new one. She brought it in the other day when she come to see me and Mr. Gordon.”

And it very often was a new one. Miss Gordon seemed to be able to afford a great many very new photographs, many of them taken in deep evening dress, though the first one that had emerged from the housekeeper’s pocket was a tinted affair on a thick bevelled card and represented Miss Gordon in tennis clothes, “pure white to her feet” as Mrs. Gordon pointed out, with racket in hand and balls on the ground, and a tennis-net faintly sketched in on the blank background.

“It’s more than her own mother ever saw,” had been Mrs. Gordon’s cryptic reply to Gillian’s congratulations on the handsome effect produced by this effigy, “nor deserved to,” she had added as one who could, if encouraged, expatiate on a rich theme.

Gillian would have liked to know more, but Lilac had discouraged this curiosity in her sister as being not only vulgar but idle.

“For goodness’ sake, Gillian,” she said, “don’t let the woman talk more than she must. She’ll stay here all day if you listen to her with both eyes like that.”

“But I think she’s wonderful,” said Gillian, “and such a rest from Mrs. Lysaght. She talks about real things and makes them deep and funny.”

Lilac snorted, “Rather a good description of her apple-pies. The crust had sunk in deep enough last Sunday and there was a bit of carrot in the apple when I got to it. Besides, she isn’t here to amuse you—and she doesn’t amuse me. Go and talk to Mrs. Barraclough if you must be amused in the Club. She’ll tell you things that are some use and she might get old Lady Mordaunt to let me sell roses on Alexandra Day.”

Mrs. Barraclough was the Club treasurer. She lived in the flat at the top of the kitchen stairs, and every Monday from 4 to 6, she sat at the receipt of custom. The members—it was understood that they should not be known as “tenants,” lest the Club lose caste—called on her to gossip, or left their rent on the first Friday of the month in notes in her letter-box according to their dispositions, some ladies being far more delicate over finance than others. So delicate indeed was Miss Parsons who lived in the flat immediately opposite Lilac and Gillian, that she always paid her rent anonymously and late at night, stealing down to slip a sealed envelope into Mrs. Barraclough’s letter-box, after Mr. Gordon had gone his rounds at ten o’clock, when he put out the landing-lights and locked the Club up till morning.

Mrs. Barraclough was the widow of a Yorkshire squire—but Mr. Barraclough’s passage through her life had been so short and so sudden that if it had ever mitigated her essential qualities, the change had long been rectified. She was one of seven Irish daughters, all reckless, as only the children of a Resident Magistrate in the eighteen-eighties could be; and, after a youth of hard riding to and after hounds, had eloped from the hunting-field with Tom Barraclough, and had seen him drown before her eyes six months later, when their wild, protracted honeymoon ended in the Aran Islands.

The child, which was born the following year, was a girl, and her mother had never forgiven her for it. In consequence of the child’s failure to be a man she had seen the small estate pass to a cousin, from whom her tiny jointure had to be wrung year by year by a solicitor whose charges for obtaining it halved, and in very bad years, quartered the total which eventually reached the widow’s pocket.

Mrs. Barraclough’s life had been one long scrimmage and the training served her well. For none but a woman inured to battle could hope to keep the semblance of peace and order in such a hornet’s nest as the Club was framed to become in any of those emergencies to which communal life is liable. She had obtained the post by nepotism of the frankest kind. Lilias her daughter had escaped early from the chronic friction of home, by way of marriage with a naval lieutenant, a grandson of the Club’s founder; and the present Sir John Mordaunt, a man of affairs and used to cutting knots, had solved the problem of his daughter-in-law’s relations with her mother by pulling such strings as were necessary to get his son appointed to a ship in the China Seas. Having done this he set Lilias up in a flat in Yokohama and, by himself, appointed Mrs. Barraclough to the post of Treasurer of the Club. Mrs. Barraclough’s book-keeping was entirely her own affair, but it was sufficient, and she was in Debrett. To be in Debrett had originally been the first qualification for membership of the Mordaunt. Lilac and Gillian were not there. They had figured in _Who’s Who_ as “_2 daughters_” until Gerald Armstrong’s death and that was all. But, as Mrs. Barraclough explained when interviewing them, things had slackened terribly since the War. She was referring to the Boer War which had filled the two years immediately following her appointment to the Club.

“It is now enough to be the widow, or the orphan of any officer,” said Mrs. Barraclough, “or of a missionary, and I understand that your aunt was a missionary.”

Gillian was indignant.

“Aunt Elizabeth was nothing of the kind,” she protested. “She was engaged for many years to a celibate clergyman in Rhodesia—who died two years after their marriage—and neither Lilac nor I is her, or his, orphan.”

“That’s what I was just saying,” said Mrs. Barraclough who, being Irish, always knew what she meant, and knew it most especially clearly when her hearers were most confused by what she actually said.

“Wasn’t it because Miss Armstrong was so well known to Mrs. Middleton that you ever came to hear of the Club yourselves? And she’s a missionary born and bred, though how she came by such a daughter as Jessie is one of those things I’d like to ask someone who knows.”

“Well, anyway,” Gillian insisted, “we’re not missionaries.”

“No,” said Mrs. Barraclough, “you’re not, neither of you. Though if one of you was it wouldn’t be that fluffy little sister of yours. I saw her going out in a frill of muslin yesterday, which had no missionary in its pedigree.”

“Lilac won’t ever be a missionary, even though she wants to go to India more than anything in this world.”

“Then to India she’ll go,” said Mrs. Barraclough. “Lilac is the kind of girl that gets what she wants, and sooner than late. But I’ll tell you,” she went on with one of those sudden changes of theme which made her conversation so stimulating, “I’ll tell you who is. The new tenant at 44. Miss Victoria Vanderleyden—she’s a missionary.”

“She sounds much more like an American,” said Gillian.

“She’s that too,” said Mrs. Barraclough. “American on one side and missionary on the other—I forget which is which—and a manicurist by profession.”

“I thought you said she was a missionary.”

“By birth, yes. But now that she’s got in on the strength of having been born in Java or some such outlandish place, I find that she works in one of those sinks of iniquity in Bond Street where you get your face ironed out and your finger-nails made to look as though you’d been eating hot muffins and got melted butter all over ’em. You ring the bell before you can get in, and you pay a guinea before you can get out, and it mostly goes in curtains and cushions.”

“Not a shop?” asked Gillian.

“No,” Mrs. Barraclough snorted, “a parlour. The Spider and the Fly it should be called. I went there once to see.”

“Did you pay a guinea?” asked Gillian.

“I did not. I rang the bell and asked for a price-list. I might have dropped an ‘h’ with a crash by the horrors they had. They don’t have a price-list. It’s called a ‘brochure,’ and it says very little about prices. It isn’t exactly a shop, but it’s so nearly one that I’d never have let that young woman in if I’d known about it before she was in. I must wink at it now.”

Mrs. Barraclough spent a good deal of time in winking at things which were not strictly within the order of the Club, but which did not disturb its peace. It was this capacity to wink with discretion that, more than anything else in her methods, had established her power over the members and also over the Committee which loomed behind her administration.

“She’s a nice creature to look at and very quiet.”

“She’s young then?” Gillian was interested.

“She seems young to me, but she’s not a baby. You two are all I want in the infant line at present.”

At one time the Club took no one under forty; but that meant separating mother from daughters. At first they had excluded widows. That was in old Sir John’s time. The idea of a man who didn’t provide for his wife made the philanthropist so angry that he refused to do anything for the consequences.

“The Club’s full of widows now,” said Gillian. “There’s the Countess.”

“There is,” said Mrs. Barraclough, “and it’s about the Countess I’ve got to talk to you, Miss Armstrong. I’ve had a letter of complaint from her.”

“She’s a terrible complainer,” said Gillian. “I suppose it’s her nationality. Poles do have a greater sensibility to grievances than other people.”

“Oh, well, so do the Irish,” said Mrs. Barraclough. “But the Countess has complained of you.”

“Of me? But I never do anything but say good-morning, and take in her parcels if I’m in and she’s out. I don’t share her scullery. She’s on Miss Parsons’ side.”

“That is the trouble. She says she’s timed the maids and that it took Beatrice twice as long to empty your slops last week when your sister was away as it did Gladys to deal with hers and Miss Parsons’.”

“Well, so long as it didn’t interfere with Gladys I don’t see that it matters. Beatrice is on our side and she never complains.”

“You don’t understand. It’s the principle of the thing. You are getting twice as much service as she is whoever serves you. She says, in the postscript, that she cannot avoid the suspicion that you have a hot bath every morning.”

“But of course.”

“That’s what she supposes, she says, ‘as a matter of course.’”

“What have you said to her?”

“I’ve written to say that I am speaking to you on the subject, Miss Armstrong, and I’ve pointed out that the remedy lies in her own hands. But being a Papist I doubt if she is allowed to bathe at all during Lent.”

“Did you put that last bit in your letter?”

“I did not. I’m warning you that whatever you do, whether it’s washing yourself as a Christian should, or having tea-parties on Sunday will be used against you and reported to me—and now you may go, I’ve got to see Mrs. Middleton about the new fireplace she’s putting into No. 6.”

“I shall complain about the Countess and her piano,” said Gillian from the threshold, “and that’ll be cutting off my nose to spite her face, because she plays gorgeously. It will be a terrible pity, but perhaps it will all be for the best, because if she thinks I don’t like her playing she’ll play much more than she does now. I think I shall complain chiefly about the Debussy and the Folk-Songs and then she’ll be put off Rachmaninoff and Liszt.”

“Go away, you chatterbox,” said Mrs. Barraclough, throwing a stone out of her own glass house with vigour and conviction.

This conversation had taken place soon after Gillian had made her entry into the Club, having walked to Chelsea from Wimbledon beside the greengrocer’s van in which the Armstrong furniture was piled, because the greengrocer and his boy, who were officiating, had refused to start unless William’s voice were stilled and their own safety insured. William was a sulphur-crested cockatoo who could, and did, sing “God save the King” as far as the syllable “Gra——” and no further, whenever in his opinion things had gone far enough. He sang very loud and harsh, and danced as he sang, accompanying himself with crest outspread and great beating of wings. Having his cage tied on to the top of a greengrocer’s wagon full of furniture on a cold-hearted day in December, was one of the things no cockatoo could be expected to encourage, and William had burst into the National Anthem before he had been actually roped on as the finishing touch to the already overloaded cart. Several repetitions of this fragment having collected a crowd, William had grown emphatic and reaching a loud “Gray” for the sixth time, stayed there shrieking “Gray—Gray—Gray” and shaking his cage with a furious dance of protest. So Gillian, who had intended to make the journey by omnibus, was obliged to go with William who would listen to her and to nobody else. And William, once he had been persuaded that she was not going to desert him, folded wings and crest, and cocking his head on one side kept one bright, round eye fixed on his mistress as she walked on the pavement beside him and occasionally calling “Puss, Puss” to a passing horse, arrived at the Club at nightfall and was carried into the little flat before anyone quite realized his nature. William had fallen into the category of the things Mrs. Barraclough winked at, partly because she liked Gillian and also because William had remarked, “Good day—what weather!” and had offered her his claw to shake when, quite by chance, she had met him, for the first time, alone on the staircase below the landing where he lived. William lived out of his cage as much as he could, and had a passion for visiting those he liked. William was no respecter of persons. If he liked you he liked you, if he did not there was no persuading him. He liked Mrs. Barraclough and he adored the postman, and for the time that was enough.

It was Mrs. Barraclough who came to the rescue in the matter of what Lilac called “carving Gillian’s career.” Lilac had £100 a year of her own, as well as the £50 a year with which she and Gillian were each left when Mrs. Armstrong’s annuity perished with her. So Lilac stayed at home and devoted the considerable leisure left her when the domestic arrangements of life in the Mordaunt Club had been disposed of for the day, to the management of her toilet and wardrobe, while Gillian went forth to carve her career with what had so far proved the worst possible incompetence. Carving a career, as Lilac pointed out, demanded common sense, and of common sense Gillian had no grasp.

“You might have known that stuff about Venus was no use in a school,” said Lilac. “I suppose you think that any word beginning with a ‘v’ is beautiful because of violet. The _violet_, the _viol_ and the _vine_ and all that nonsense.”

“But it wasn’t Venus. I didn’t give them that line. It was the one about Minos et Pasiphaë,” Gillian protested.

“It’s the same thing, only worse. I shall ask Mrs. Barraclough if she knows of any safe job for a mild lunatic who knows three languages and a lot of poetry.”

Mrs. Barraclough did not endorse Lilac’s estimate of her sister.

“Gillian’s all right,” she said, “only a little unprejudiced. I’ll go and see if old Winona wants another secretary.”

Old Winona, or Winona Lady Bottomley as she was described on her large glazed and gilt-edged visiting-cards, was out of a secretary when Mrs. Barraclough called. Old Winona seldom kept a secretary for more than a few weeks at a time. They either left of their own accord or were sent away in a great hurry laden with compensatory gold. Some of them took prolonged sick-leave, and to these Old Winona was very kind.

“She’s the second wife and first widow of Bottomley’s Bicycles,” said Mrs. Barraclough, “and she doesn’t know how rich she is. The lawyers don’t tell her—they think her reason might give way. But she keeps three secretaries, one in Belfast and one in London and one to travel up and down with her, and they’re never the same secretary except the one in Belfast, who’s a man. The others are girls. Poor things. You’re to go to see her at twenty minutes past eleven to-morrow morning, and to take a signed photograph of your father with you.”

“But I haven’t got one,” said Gillian, “my father never signed a photograph in his life.”

“Then take any photograph you’ve got and say it’s your father’s,” said Mrs. Barraclough, who had no use for purely academic scruples in business.

“The only signed photograph she’s got,” said Lilac, “is one of William Gillette as Sherlock Holmes, and that’s a picture post-card. And it’s so worn out with being hidden by me when I had good reason for worrying Gillian that it’s no use for carving and careering. But I’ll lend Gillian a black hat and my good umbrella and see her to the top of Sloane Street by 11:15 myself. I’ll watch her across the road and we must leave the rest to God.”

“Do I call her ‘Winona Lady,’ as they do Adeline Duchess?” asked Gillian.

“No; you don’t know her well enough to make game of her title,” said Mrs. Barraclough, “and you must be very careful about it. There _is_ a Lady Bottomley, Toby’s wife, but she’s never mentioned, she’s one of the Oh No’s.”

“What are they?” asked Lilac, who knew the importance of social distinctions and the wisdom of not being too proud to ask questions.

“It’s poetry,” said Mrs. Barraclough, as one who had very little use for the article. “‘Oh no, we never mention him, his name is never heard,’ a famous poem, ‘my lips are now forbid to speak that once familiar word.’”

“I know,” said Gillian.

“‘From sport to sport they hurry me To banish my regret And when they only worry me——’”

“I don’t think it ends like that,” said Mrs. Barraclough.

“That was Andrew Lang,” said Gillian, “he didn’t like Haynes Bayley—he was quite right. He wrote ‘O think not Heleena of leaving us yet,’ when it might just as well have been ‘O, Helena, think not——’”

“For William’s sake, my poor idiot, if not for your own and mine, try to forget about how things sound for the next twenty-four hours. It’s far more important to find out how things are. I’ve met Toby Bottomley,” Lilac went on, turning to Mrs. Barraclough, “but I didn’t know he’d a wife.”

“She’s not noticeable, I grant you that. Not where Toby is. She’s on the stage, in America. There was a rumour that Toby was divorcing her, but Old Winona don’t believe in divorce. Her own two husbands died. And Toby only gets an allowance while she lives, so I dare say it’s all hanging fire.”

Lilac was silent and Gillian noticed that her pretty face sharpened, the blue eyes narrowing and the soft mouth tightening to a hard, red line for a moment, as they did when Lilac was planning a move in the very successful game she was already playing with life.

Gillian never understood the moves or the game, but she knew that Lilac played and won, and she was often a little uncomfortable about it. For Lilac had a way of letting her sister in at some advanced stage in an affair of the kind and expecting her to co-operate in the dark. A pang of suspicion thrust itself through her mind. It was Lilac who had gone to Mrs. Barraclough. Had Lilac a reason for wishing Gillian to work for Lady Bottomley? But, on the contrary, Lilac was rather annoyed about the prospect.

“If I’d known,” said Lilac as soon as the door had closed behind Mrs. Barraclough. “If I’d had the slightest suspicion that Mrs. Barraclough knew the Bottomleys, I’d—I’d—well, Gillian, will you _promise_ me not to tell the old lady that I know Toby?”

“Well,” said Gillian, “I won’t start off by saying, ‘Oh, dear Lady Bottomley, my sister knows your son,’ but if she asks me if I’m the Miss Armstrong her son knows....”

“She won’t. She doesn’t know.”

“Lilac,” said Gillian, “what is it?”

“Oh, it’s quite all right. I met him at Glynde, at Sophie’s birthday revels, and he’s generally at Eaton Square on Sundays. Sophie knows all about it. It was Toby who gave that dinner at the Savoy last week.”

“I thought it was Stephen and Sophie’s party. That was why I wondered why they didn’t ask me.”

“Well, it wasn’t. It was Toby’s. Stephen and Sophie were asked—and me—and we went to _Kismet_ after dinner. In a box. There wouldn’t have been room for you.”

“Oh, well, I’m glad it was Toby’s party. There isn’t nearly so much iron in my soul now that I know,” said Gillian, “and if Lady Bottomley doesn’t know about you she can’t suspect me of being your sister. Besides, it may not come to anything.”

“No, p’r’aps it mayn’t,” said Lilac, “and, I forgot to tell you, I had a letter from Sophie this morning. They’re going to Glynde after Ascot, and they’ve asked me to go, and you. They’ll have a Goodwood Party, but you needn’t go to the races.”

“If I become that old lady’s third secretary,” said Gillian, “I shan’t be able to go to Glynde at all, except perhaps for a week-end. I’ll write to Sophie myself.”

“Oh, all right,” said Lilac; but she was not pleased.

Sophie Glynde had originally been Gillian’s friend. She was German on her father’s side and had been at a school in Lausanne where Gillian had spent six months of her sixteenth year. Her English mother was a Glynde, and Sophie, who was startlingly pretty, had married her second cousin Stephen almost at sight the summer she came to England. She would, if Stephen’s elder brother went on being a bachelor until he died of riotous living, be the Mistress of Glynde Regis one day.

Sophie had been very kind to the Armstrongs. But gradually her butterfly affections had settled on the younger sister who, not being under the pressing necessity of carving a career, was able to put herself more unreservedly at Mrs. Glynde’s disposition on those frequent occasions when that lovely being, who had a horror of solitude, was deprived of the solace of her husband’s company. Sophie was now Lilac’s friend. And Lilac, who took the same size in shoes, gloves and garments as Sophie did, inherited all the clothes of which Sophie grew tired before they were reduced to the condition in which they automatically passed into her maid’s possession. Lilac, who had a genius for dress, spent laborious days in achieving the raiment for triumphant nights from this spoil, and no one but Gillian, who pinned her into the never quite securely finished results, knew how precariously the lace from one gown, the satin from another, were held together to form a third more wonderful than either in its outward and dazzling effect.

Lilac, naturally, met a great many people at the Glyndes’ of whom Gillian had no knowledge, or whose names she knew without importance; but Lilac’s reserve about this one person, this Toby Bottomley, was unusual and significant. Lilac, clearly, would prefer that Gillian should not become Toby’s mother’s secretary.

But Lilac was to be disappointed.

She fulfilled her promise, lent Gillian the black hat, completed the loan with a pair of grey suède gloves and took her to the top of Sloane Street the following morning. Her last words as she pushed her sister off the island were:

“For Heaven’s sake, remember you’ve never heard of me.”

II

Number 99 Knightsbridge was a conspicuous house. It rose a full story higher than its neighbours and spread a whole window wider than any other private dwelling from the Hyde Park Hotel to the Guards’ Barracks. You could see it half-way down Sloane Street, thrusting its crammed and costly window-boxes into the dimness of the London colour scheme. Each of the fifteen front window-frames had had the Georgian sashed panes removed and was now filled with a sheet of plate glass, bevelled into an ebony frame and veiled inside with curtains of the richest lace; each of the rust-brown bricks of which it was built was now surrounded with the best mortar, so white that Gillian felt it must be enamelled. The wrought-iron balconies which hung across the first and second floors were painted black and enhanced by a gilded boss wherever the pattern made it possible to apply one, and the tall black railings which fenced the ground floor from the street had their tips gilded to match the balconies. In the midst of them the decoration of an ornate gardendoor twisted and whirled around what was evidently a bicycle-wheel with a golden tyre, the hub of which was formed of the letters W. M. in monogram. Gillian had often rejoiced in the opulent charm of this exterior without supposing that the dwelling behind it would ever admit so plain a worm as herself to tremble at its more intimate magnificences. Now, as she pressed the amethystine button of the bell-push at the gate she felt like a goose-girl in a fairy-tale at the moment when she comes to the magician’s cave. It was rather a shock to find the door opened by a perfectly plain butler; a tall, grave, clean-shaven man who received her with a melancholy kindness which belonged to more anciently established, less insistently plutocratic surroundings. The pathway from the street to the house-door was flagged with porphyry and malachite under a glass roof supported on pillars up which crimson-ramblers, their roots in huge porcelain vases, were twined. Baskets of scented geraniums hung at intervals from the arches of this processional way, and tubs of blue and pink hydrangeas stood in the garden spaces on either side of the path. The hall into which she followed the butler up a flight of three marble steps, occupied the whole floor and was lit by two tall windows on the street side, and by glass doors opening on to the long garden which led down to the Park. It was full of very brightly burnished suits of armour each embowered in a separate grove of palm and fern. In the midst of these, enormous pink begonias trained round sticks in a barrel-shaped design, occupied the four corners of a sunken fountain which was playing above the rather agitated home-life of several corpulent goldfish. At each corner of the staircase there were life-size figures representing Nubian slaves (boy and girl alternating) in coloured raiment bearing trays in either hand. On one tray stood a vase of flowers, on the other a lamp. The cumulative effect of passing three of these chromatic statues after a glimpse of the suits of armour below, had stunned Gillian a little and, by the time the drawing-room door closed upon the butler, leaving her alone with its amazing splendours, she had ceased to be keenly receptive.

But the drawing-room was worthy of the keenest appreciation. Like the hall it covered the whole floor. It had three windows looking on to Knightsbridge, and three on to the Park. Its walls were panelled in hand-cut velvet brocade, electric-blue on a mauve background: each of the two fireplaces was enriched by an overmantel, all-white balustrades and mirrors, supporting or reflecting innumerable shelves and brackets, no shelf without its flower-vase, no bracket without its statuette. Between the windows were more mirrors, framed in Dresden china frames from which candle-holders curved out like pink and gilded horns and bore not candles but china imitations carrying electric lights and silken shades which mirrored themselves again in the glass. The room was full of electric-light bulbs. From the heavily moulded ceiling mauve and blue ribbons hung in slings and from each sling a gilded Cupid stretched down a torch-filled hand, and in each torch a bulb. This amorous army of illumination circled round a very beautiful Venetian glass chandelier which, with the Aubusson carpet that spread its blue medallion and faint roses over the parquet-floor, seemed to indicate another mind feebly at work under the overmastering influence which had clearly directed the main ornamentation of the house.

There was one book in the room: _The Golden Treasury_, bound in blue leather, with a wreath of purple violets encircling the name “Winona” tooled on the cover. On the top of the grand piano, a Broadwood in a painted case, there stood an army of photographs each in a silver frame. Most of these photographs were of the same person. These were all signed “Winona” in a flowing hand and showed the signer in various forms of evening dress from full panoply of Court train, veil and feathers, to a relatively simple gown of what was probably black velvet enhanced by ropes of pearls. Here and there the series was broken by portraits signed “Reginald”; but Gillian could not discern a “Toby” among them.

As she waited and wondered if the personality of their owner were veiled or revealed by all these effigies, the door opened and the butler reappeared carrying a silver tray covered with an embroidered tray-cloth.

“Her ladyship wishes you to take a glass of milk, miss,” he said, depositing his burden on an inlaid table, “and will be with you presently.”

There certainly was a glass of milk, an engraved glass in a silver holder, on the tray before her, but it took Gillian some time to locate it among the dishes of fruit, sandwiches and cake with which it was surrounded. Winona, Lady Bottomley, was evidently kind to others as well as lavish to herself, though Gillian, who had not been brought up to eat between meals and was also a little nervous that morning, could not obey the command to drink. She was counting the layers of marzipan that separated the rich substance of an iced cake out of which one wedge had been hewn in evident consideration of her need when the door opened once more and Lady Bottomley stood revealed.

“Good morning, Miss Macfarlane, pray be seated,” she said in a measured and stately voice as she seated herself in the exact centre of a slippery and magnificent settee.

Gillian, a little surprised at the form of address, managed to control herself from correcting it by the thought that it would be time enough to do so if and when it turned out that she was to take up any duties for the lady.

There was a pause. Gillian tried not to stare too hard at the marvellous auburn wig, the Roman nose, the small dim eyes, the imposing figure, the ringed hands folded over the plush of a lace-flounced gown which presented themselves to her consideration for some time before the spirit which informed them spoke again. When the silence was broken it was with another surprise.

“My daughter-in-law, the future Marchioness of Fulham, has spoken to me of you,” said Lady Bottomley. “She assures me that, happily, most happily, you do not possess any shorthand.”

Gillian, to whom the very existence of any such person as the future Marchioness of Fulham had, until that moment, been unknown, and who was, moreover, bewildered by the receding phantom of that “Toby” on whose account she was to conceal her own relationship to Lilac, murmured that unfortunately she did not practice shorthand.

“Fortunately, Miss Macfarlane,” said Lady Bottomley, growing more imposing with each syllable, “I consider that a knowledge of shorthand renders its possessor unfit for the post of secretary to a lady of title. I shall require you to take all my letters down in your own handwriting, and to copy them out in an imitation of mine.”

“Won’t that be like forgery?” asked Gillian, forgetting her nervousness in the novelty of the demand.

“No,” said Lady Bottomley with slow decision, “it will not. It must be a poor imitation of my handwriting, and I shall sign the letter myself. The quotations from _The Times_ and _The Guardian_ with which I enliven my letters to those Abroad, you will add in your own handwriting; but I like my own remarks to appear in a style which will not clash with my signature.”

Gillian remembered Mrs. Barraclough’s admission that old Winona seldom had the same secretary for many weeks at a time, and wondered whether a tendency in handwriting to clash with the august signature were responsible for the failure of the relationship, or if other and even more probable reasons were to be revealed.

“You will also,” went on the lady, “you will also prepare lists of suitable concerts which on those afternoons when I am not accompanied by my daughter-in-law or my son Sir Reginald, the third baronet, you will attend with me. Concerts of classical music.”

“And matinées?” said Gillian hopefully. This part of her duties sounded easier than imitation scripture.

“No matinées,” said Lady Bottomley, “only bazaars. I disapprove of the stage.”

“Not even charity matinées?” said Gillian.

“Only those acted by amateurs in Halls. I do not ever go inside a theatre. When the cause is good I buy tickets and give them to others.”

“Oh,” said Gillian, and wondered if she and Lilac would ever be counted as others.

“How old are you?” Lady Bottomley was forsaking instruction for inquiry.

“Twenty-three—that is I shall be twenty-four next birthday.”

“And when is that?”

“In April,” said Gillian, conscious that this was only July.

“That’s very young. Still it may mean that you will prove more docile than those of riper years.”

Gillian hoped she was docile.

“We shall see. But if you come to me I must stipulate that you do not marry.”

“Never?”

“Not for three years. My last two secretaries—no, my last three,” Lady Bottomley checked them off on her fingers, “all married within a few months of joining my circle. I am now engaging only such as will take a vow not to marry for three years.”

“But suppose I left you—or you sent me away for some other reason?” Gillian ventured.

“In that case you would be free to marry. Not otherwise. Have you any intention of marrying?”

“Well,” said Gillian with complete candour, “I’ve no intention of _not_ marrying, but I don’t suppose I shall marry for a long time. I don’t feel old enough yet.”

“You are quite old enough to marry,” said old Winona visibly annoyed, “twenty-four is amply old enough. I was married at twenty for the first time. Have you anybody in particular in view?”

“To marry? Oh, no. They all want to marry Lilac, not me?”

“And who is Lilac?”

Gillian felt the hot blood creep up her neck, over her chin, into her face and fill her eyes with tears. This was exactly what Lilac had forbidden her to do.

“Oh, just a sister of mine,” said she, trying to make as light of the matter as possible.

To Gillian’s relief Miss Macfarlane’s sister was a person to whose identity Lady Bottomley attached no significance whatever, and, after a few more questions, they passed on to a mutual exhibition of handwriting, and an attempt on Gillian’s part at that not too faithful reproduction of the Bottomley script on which so much depended. Greatly to her own surprise she was able, by the simple device of using a broad J nib, to write a hand with which the signature “Winona Caroline Bottomley” did not clash, and before long she was walking down Sloane Street, a little unsteady in the knees, but with an odd new steadiness in her mind. Lady Bottomley had engaged her at what seemed to Gillian a fabulous salary, and unusual though the conditions of her new employment appeared to be, she had a premonitory feeling of security in them quite unlike the apprehensions which had filled her after her first interview with Mrs. Lysaght. Eccentricity was to Gerald Armstrong’s daughter far less terrifying than regulated convention.

Not until she was opposite Cadogan Gardens did it occur to her that she had been engaged as Miss Macfarlane, a friend of the future Marchioness of Fulham: whereas, now that the gate of No. 99 Knightsbridge was closed behind her, she realized how completely she was nothing of more consequence than Gillian Armstrong, a tenant of the Mordaunt Club, on whom its secretary, plain Mrs. Barraclough, had taken pity.

It was possible that even now Miss Macfarlane, bearing a coroneted introduction, was pressing the amethyst button of the electric bell, and that she, Gillian, would in a few moments be convicted of fraud and disgraced in a way which would annoy Lilac quite dreadfully. Should she go back and confess to old Winona, or forward and confess to Mrs. Barraclough. Both confessions would have to be made with as little delay as possible. But, seeing that by this time she was nearer home and Mrs. Barraclough than she was to Knightsbridge, Gillian, who usually took the more difficult alternative from a sense of self-discipline, hurried on and walked straight across the courtyard and knocked at Mrs. Barraclough’s door before going up to face Lilac in their own flat.

“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” said Mrs. Barraclough. She was eating her luncheon with the _Morning Post_ propped up against a large Sheffield-plate cruet-stand which gave to the whole of her small and rather austerely furnished room that sense of having a storied past behind it which was so lacking in the Armstrongs’ flat.

“It was Winnie Roehampton who told me that her late mother-in-law was out of secretaries again. She married Roehampton after she’d killed Jim Bottomley. He was her first husband and she made him hunt before he could ride. She’d always wanted Roehampton, but she couldn’t afford him, so she took Jim Bottomley first and married the other, six weeks after the accident, on her jointure.”

“Well,” said Gillian, “if she’s that kind of person I shouldn’t think Lady Bottomley would engage a secretary who came through her.”

“No, you wouldn’t, but Winnie’s a sensible girl. Her heart’s always in the rich place,” said Mrs. Barraclough. “She’s always kept friends with old Winona who’d never really cared for Jim. He was only her stepson, and she was delighted that her Toby could have it all. And when Winnie married into the peerage, well—wait and see. You’ll understand soon enough.”

“Well, but what about Miss Macfarlane?”

“That’s you, Miss Armstrong. All her secretaries are Macfarlanes. She’s very obstinate about names. Winnie Roehampton says she always calls Hyde Park Corner the Marble Arch.”

“Goodness,” said Gillian. “Doesn’t it make it very difficult to know what she means?”

“I dare say it does,” said Mrs. Barraclough. “But you may get used to it.”

“And is ‘Toby’ the third baronet Sir Reginald?”

“He is,” said Mrs. Barraclough. “Old Bottomley was the first, poor Jim was the second and Toby is the third—all in ten years. Old Bottomley was one of the Coronation honours. He did something very handsome for Belfast Harbour. You’ll hear all about that, too.”

“Then you really think I am quite honestly engaged?”

“Quite honestly,” said Mrs. Barraclough, “and I shouldn’t be at all surprised if you kept the job. Anyhow you have my blessing and I’ll tell Winnie Roehampton to tell her late mother-in-law you’re a treasure.”

Gillian left Mrs. Barraclough comforted and relieved. Odd though it all sounded, it was not a terrifying oddness. Winona, Lady Bottomley, was more like the first chapter in a new book than a problem of existence. You felt there were answers to all her sums. You were astonished at, not dismayed by her; and Gillian enjoyed astonishment.

“Lilac,” she called, bursting into the outer of the two rooms they used as living-rooms.

But the little room was empty. The black Cromwellian table that stood under the window was not laid for luncheon, and William had unfastened the latch of his cage and, perched on the back of one of the three chairs they had bought at Heal’s to match the table, was thoughtfully manicuring his claw with his beak.

“Hillo!” said William. “Kiss cocky! Kiss cocky!”

“Lilac! Lilac!” called Gillian and went through the door into the inner room which was lined with bookcases and furnished with an enormous red-leather chesterfield, Sophie’s gift to the young flat-holders, and so huge that there was hardly space for another seat in the room.

But Lilac was not in the book-room, nor in the larger single room on the north side of the building looking into Gwynne Street which they used as a bedroom. Lilac had evidently gone on to some occasion of her own when she left Gillian at the top of Sloane Street, which was like Lilac, who had many private affairs to attend to though she usually kept Saturday morning free for flat-keeping and was in to lunch. And this was Saturday morning or Gillian would not have been free to go looking for work as she had done. Gillian, in solitary disgrace, was still correcting the July examination papers in the mistresses’ room at Pelham House all the other days of the week.

So Gillian took off her hat and washed her hands and went and ate bread and cheese and lettuce with William and read _The Song of Honour_ in a little yellow-paper book with a rather smudgy woodcut on its cover which she had bought at the Poetry Bookshop the Saturday before. William, who adored crusts with butter, sat on one claw on the back of her chair and held the crusts she gave him in the other, occasionally dropping one while he stood on both feet in order to stretch a long neck to turn over a page for Gillian. He didn’t tear the page, but he often turned it before Gillian was quite ready, and she had to turn back while William was climbing down to pick up his crust from the floor. She did it as quietly as possible in order not to hurt his feelings. William was really tiresome when his feelings were hurt. He would chatter and scream and flap his wings and require whole-hearted, undivided attention for quite five minutes if he felt neglected or snubbed, and Gillian had to be very careful because the Countess had already complained of the noise he made.

It was three o’clock when Lilac came in. She was flushed, but it was with excitement quite as much as with heat.

“Have you got the job?” she asked from the doorway. Gillian felt she dared not have answered “No.”

“Yes. I think so, though she wants someone at once,” she replied, wondering why Lilac’s eyes were so blue and her hair so curly at the sleepiest hour of the whole week.

“That’s all right. You can go to her on Monday,” said Lilac, taking off her hat and pushing the damp curls from her forehead with the third finger of her left hand. “I’ve fixed it all up with Mrs. Lysaght.”

“Lilac!”

“Yes. I have. I took the Putney bus and I called on her.”

“Goodness!” said Gillian.

“And gracious!” said Lilac, “I do wish, dear Gillian, you would not swear so blasphemously.”

“All right then. Damn!” said Gillian, “but hurry up.”

“Yes, I did. I called at _Mon Repos_. What a woman! Does she always screw that little gold pencil in and out?”

“Always!” said Gillian, “particularly when she’s angry. Was she angry with you?”

“Oh, very.” Lilac sat on the table and swung her buckled shoes up and down in the sunlight that came through under the green rush sunblinds. “At first. But it’s all right. You’re to correct those abominable children’s papers at home till the end of the term, and she’ll pay you your full salary. A person, you really couldn’t call her a girl, called Jane Bird, who lives on the other side of the Albert Bridge, will collect and deliver them day by day.”

“Bird,” said Gillian. “How on earth——”

“She came here, while you were at school on Tuesday,” said Lilac, her eyes hard and her mouth narrow. “After what she said I arranged what I’d say.”

“What did she say?”

“She said—she stood in the doorway—she’s a great creature, Gillian—she said, ‘Your sister is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. She’s no good to Madame Bowdler.’ I asked her who Madame Bowdler was and she said that was Mrs. Lysaght’s spiritual title, and then she told me that the whole school was boiling over about your being in disgrace. You never told me that they sent up your lunch and tea.”

“And it’s been Irish stew with the chill off all this week,” said Gillian. “I didn’t tell you because it is all so horrid I’d rather not talk about it.”

“_I_ talked about it,” said Lilac. “I felt I must play a father’s part.”

“But, Lilac, suppose Lady Bottomley hadn’t wanted me?”

“You’d have had to find someone who did,” said Lilac. “You’d have had to do that in any case. I was determined you shouldn’t go back there any more. I told her you weren’t safe to associate with ordinary people because of the unfortunate purity of your mind. I admitted,” Lilac paused ruefully, “I admitted that it was a disadvantage, especially in school-work. I very nearly said that I supposed no head mistress could hope to see God.”

“Oh, Lilac, you didn’t!”

“No—only nearly. It was a thing I thought of saying. Jane Bird said it to me.”

“How did she find you?”

“She asked Miss Fairfax if you had any family, and Miss Fairfax told her there was a sister. She said she hadn’t supposed that anyone so wide-eyed as you could possibly be anything but the youngest of a family. I told her that to all intents and purposes you were.”

“Well,” said Gillian, “nobody who saw you would suppose I was younger than you.”

“Not until they knew us,” said Lilac darkly.

* * * * *

So Gillian wrote to Lady Bottomley to say that she could begin work for her on Monday, and the sisters went out to post the letter in time to be delivered at 99 Knightsbridge that evening, and then walked along the Embankment to Chelsea Bridge and back by Battersea Park, and Gillian confessed to Lilac that she had told about her after all.

“Did she take any notice?” asked Lilac.

“Not the slightest.”

“It’s all right then, for the present,” said Lilac. “It’s really Toby I mind. And he mayn’t find out just yet. Did you see him?”

“No,” said Gillian, “only his photograph and that was called Reginald.”

“Yes,” said Lilac. “I know. Isn’t it a pity?”

III

“Will you,” said Lady Bottomley with majesty, “take down the following letter:

“Winona, Lady Bottomley presents her compliments to Mrs. Archibald Anstruther, and regrets that she cannot become a subscriber to the Society for the Prevention of Photographing Private Persons in the Park as she is already so fully occupied in signing cheques for the Societies to which she belongs ... no, take out ‘already’ and put in ‘lately’ ... to which she already belongs, that she cannot take the exercise prescribed for her by her physician. They all tell me I ought to walk for at least one hour a day before luncheon and for half an hour after tea.”

“Does that last bit go in the letter?” asked Gillian.

“Surely, Miss Macfarlane,” said Lady Bottomley with a bitter smile, “you must have noticed that the letter ended with the closure of the third person.”

“Shall I write that one in my own writing or in yours?” asked Gillian.

“Third-person letters go in your own hand. It marks the distinction more clearly,” pronounced the lady.

They were seated in the boudoir, an upholstered chamber overlooking the Park. In spite of the heat of a mid-July forenoon the French windows were closed and curtained as precaution against draughts, which, as Lady Bottomley explained, “not only give me a cold in the head, but blow down my precious photographs.”

The precious photographs stood in ranks on slippery tables in front of the window and, in every variety of frame, clambered over the walls and up every tier of the ornate overmantel. Some of them were of people and were signed. Others were of places and were dated: none was without an inscription. One or two had little memorial wreaths affixed to their frames, and on a table placed before a life-size portrait in oils of the first baronet dressed for his first levee, stood an array of silver vases in which it was one of Gillian’s duties to arrange fresh flowers every morning. On her second day she had suggested filling a pair of very fine branched candlesticks which were doing nothing in the library where she sat when imitating her employer’s handwriting after lunch, and lighting candles to burn among the flowers.

“It would be lovely to have them of different colours. I know where you can get green and red candles,” she urged.

“A very Popish notion,” said old Winona. “I beg, Miss Macfarlane, that you will not speak of it again.”

But she was not angry with Gillian, and she was pleased that the girl had noticed how fine the candlesticks were.

“Museum-pieces,” Gillian had called them, and Lady Bottomley adopted the phrase and applied it indiscriminately to many of her treasures which Gillian herself would have catalogued as pure Waring and Gillow, or early _train-de-luxe_.

Gillian had grown accustomed to the daily shock of leaving the colour-washed little flat in the Club with its open windows, plain curtains and rush-seated wooden chairs for the fringed and patterned seclusion of Knightsbridge, and had lost the inclination to giggle at each fresh revelation of what unbridled wealth could do in the way of making a house uninhabitable, before there was any sign that the third baronet lived there himself.

One morning, however, she had nearly lost her self-control on discovering that Lady Bottomley’s dressing-room was enriched by a bath which was silver-plated and covered in by a padded lid of bright rose-coloured velvet, buttoned with porcelain upholstery buttons, each bearing the Bottomley crest in the proper heraldic colours with the baronet’s hand very bloody and the Saracen’s eye looking, with its spoked lashes quite like a bicycle-wheel, very blue, painted in the centre.

“By hand, miss,” as Dashwood, Lady Bottomley’s obsequious and alarmingly golden-haired maid had insisted when asking Gillian to wait in the presence of this luxury while she ascertained whether her ladyship, who was keeping out of draughts in bed that morning, were quite ready to deal with her letters.

One of these letters was a post-card dated “Newmarket, Tuesday,” and signed “Toby.” “Can you put up me and Stephen for Sandown?” it asked.

“Now,” said Gillian, as she read this missive and realized that Stephen Glynde might come upon her any day, “I can’t possibly pretend to Stephen that he doesn’t know his own bridesmaid. I do hope Lilac will be equal to the crisis.”

Lady Bottomley, who thought she might have caught cold while driving round Regent’s Park at Gillian’s instigation at six o’clock the previous evening, took an extra dose of ammoniated quinine and decided that at any risk she must entertain her son’s friend.

“We must send telegrams,” she pronounced as soon as she had realized the import of her son’s request, “one to Sir Reginald Bottomley, Bart., Newmarket. That is sufficient address; the other to the Honourable Stephen Glynde, who is, I presume, at Newmarket with my son.”

Gillian, who remembered that Sophie was at Glynde and had been there since Ascot because the Eaton Square house was closed, bit the information off the tip of her tongue and took down in her own writing two long, delighted telegrams, one signed “Mother” and the other signed “Winona Bottomley” and copied them out in her imitation of their author’s writing without question, feeling that this attention was due to the family and its friends.

Lilac was down at Glynde, so there was no need to disturb her with news which Sophie, who was extraordinarily uninformed of her husband’s movements for a quite reasonably happy wife, might very well not be able to pass on to her.

Gillian was bidden to stay on and dine at Knightsbridge in order to help Lady Bottomley through the unwonted labour of choosing which of the two elaborate spare rooms should be filled with flowers and writing-paper and sticks of scented sealing-wax, and have bath-salts and shaving-soap disposed in its polished bathroom by the train of rubber-tyred housemaids who, shepherded by kind and melancholy Atkinson, trooped into the boudoir to receive her detailed instructions.

It was extraordinary, thought Gillian, as she walked down Sloane Street and past the Guards’ Barracks to the Embankment in the moonlight, extraordinary and rather pathetic that this very kind and cumbered lady should not have troops of friends on whom to lavish the overflow of her incredible riches. She was, as her name suggested, Canadian by birth, and her family had long since faded out of communication with their relative who had married the first baronet in the days of his experimental and impecunious youth. Some of the wonderful letters Gillian was employed to transcribe, often from pencilled notes made in her absence, were to cousins in Montreal. These were only sent when some reference to the house of Bottomley appeared in the Press. Gillian had to go through the post for Press-cuttings very carefully every morning. On the days when any came in, Atkinson took a cab and went forth to buy twenty copies of every paper in which they occurred. After the orgies of the Bottomley Orphanage Bazaar at which Lady Bottomley had been photographed in the very act of receiving the Royal Princess who had opened it, the cab bearing the papers in which the picture appeared was so crammed that Atkinson had been obliged to come back sitting with the driver all the way from Fleet Street to Knightsbridge.

Gillian had enjoyed that day. Two cuttings of each notice, two cuttings of every photograph (several versions had escaped into print) had to be made and pasted into the two great leather-bound Press-cutting albums in which the records of twenty years were garnered. The first baronet had kept one for his own reading and another for his wife’s, and the practice was continued in piety by his widow.

“I shall of course,” she had told Gillian with an even more than usually majestic intonation, “I shall of course make over the late Sir John’s volume to his grandchildren when they come of age.”

“I didn’t know he had any,” Gillian had spoken in the haste of surprise.

“Not yet, Miss Armstrong.” Lady Bottomley had begun to make use of the right name from time to time, though still reverting to Macfarlane, especially in the early morning.

And, then, when the cuttings had been pasted down, the crested address-book was opened, and its scantily filled pages were gone through until everybody named in it had been honoured with a copy of all the papers duly marked in red with “See Page 7.” Gillian addressed the wrappers in her own or her imitation writing according to old Winona’s direction, and Atkinson bore them away and applied and gummed them down to their contents in his pantry. It was all very ritualistic and unreal, but Gillian enjoyed it.

“I suppose,” she went on, as she leaned over the parapet and watched the river flowing at low tide towards Lambeth with a silver, moonlit edge on the curve of each black ripple, “I suppose that’s why she’s so lonely. Real people couldn’t bear to be near her and she couldn’t bear it either. I can, because it keeps you far enough away from anyone to be paid by them. It doesn’t matter if I do laugh at her a little so long as I earn my wages. But you’d burst if you tried to be her friend.”

She let her mind float away along the river till it took her to another summer night, six years ago, when she had watched another tide swim by under the same moon. Then she had been with her father at Altona on that sudden, miraculous journey he had taken, retracing some adventure of his youth, just before he set out for Burma and his death.

The broad waters of the Elbe, brackish with the sea that moved within them, and spangled with the lights of travelling ships, had carried his memory back to a time in which she, who had been his friend ever since she could remember, had no slightest share. He had spoken to her as to a new-made friend, of a climax in his life to which no memory of hers could even dimly reach.

“It was all over, the man to whom it happened was dead in me long before you were born, before even I so much as knew of your mother’s existence. The house behind the chestnut-tree in that lithograph we bought this morning might be the house I left twenty years back, Gillian. Sun on the yellow walls; closed white shutters, a flight of stone steps going up to a glass door, and inside—Illusion. And I sat under the shadow of that tree and looked up through the thick leaves and saw the tall spikes of chestnut-blossom flaming like white wax candles in the heat, and it was all no good. All that stillness and beauty were empty. I had come to the end of my own deception. All the time I had known. All the time I had heard the voice within saying, ‘This is not real. You are playing false with yourself. Take it if you must, but do not try to pay for it because you have not the coin in which such things are trafficked.’ And I had tried to coin their coinage, because I had to pay; and I couldn’t go on. I can’t tell you what it was. You need never know. I mean, child, it is not necessary to salvation for a girl to know all things. ‘Its shadow upon life enough for thee’—you remember Andromeda. But you’ll be safe so long as you remember to wait until the inner voice agrees _after_ you’ve tried. It’s no use hesitating before the Unknown. You must try for yourself, but you must not go along a road you know is not your road just because you’ve tried it. You must be able to turn back. You must be able to say, ‘This road is closed.’ Don’t pay tolls at the wrong bar twice. One day you’ll need all you’ve got. You’re the kind that pays for everything, overpays always, but I’ve taught you to look for the lasting values, and you’ll not pay for fakes without knowing what you’re about. It’s the people who bank on fakes who leave their souls in Hell. Lilac will pay for fakes in her time. But she’ll pay because she wants them, and she won’t pay a penny more than they’re worth. It’s you, Gillian, who may make bad bargains. Remember that, and wait till you’ve said,

“Das unbeschreibliche. Hier ist’s gethan,”

before you go bankrupt.”

And then they had gone to supper with Hans Adler the painter, and had laughed and eaten and sung the Mörike-lieder till they cried, and had eaten again, and drunk extremely sweet and extremely luscious things, some iced and some buttered, and had had an utterly ridiculous, truly Germanic time.

IV

Lilac had come back from Glynde.

She stood in the open doorway of the bedroom as Gillian came up the stairs. Mr. Gordon had put out the landing-lights and Gillian had only just managed to get in before he locked the courtyard gates for the night.

“How late you are,” said Lilac.

She was in her nightgown, and her pretty hair was sticking out all round her head in a honey-coloured halo, as it did before she had brushed it and tied it into lilac ribbons at night.

“Goodness,” said Gillian. “Have you had dinner?”

“Bother dinner,” said Lilac. “I’ve had two eggs and all the milk. Where have you been till this hour?”

“At 99,” said Gillian, “getting ready for Stephen. He’s going to be there for the night.”

“I know,” said Lilac, “with Toby.”

Gillian put her arm round Lilac and drew her inside the room. “Lilac,” she said, “are you in love with Toby?”

“Yes,” said Lilac, “isn’t it damnable?”

* * * * *

They lay awake talking until dawn. Lilac didn’t know how Toby really felt. She had known there was some hitch in his life but it was Mrs. Barraclough who had been the first to tell her about the wife in America.

“Sophie and Stephen don’t know, at least if Stephen knows he never told Sophie, and I’ve not told her either,” said Lilac, “and Toby so helpless. He’s rather like you, Gillian. He misses the point. The first thing he ever said to me, I mean, the first thing to show he’d noticed, was, ‘What rippin’ teeth you’ve got,’ and you know, Jill, it isn’t my teeth at all, it’s my hair that most people like because of its colour, and the curls. But if he loves me at all it’s for my teeth, and,” said Lilac with wisdom and despair, “it isn’t enough. There are mountains to remove, and you don’t remove anything much because you like another person’s teeth.”

“What made you come back, then?” said Gillian. “I thought it was always absence that made a man find out——”

“Oh, Jilly darling, I know, and if it had been anyone else I’d have stayed away till he did. But that’s the worst of being in love one’s self—you simply _can’t_ be clever about it. It’s easy enough to be _l’autre qui se laisse aimer_. I can do that. Look at that horrid little Rollo, and Mr. Percival Grantham. Donkeys”—and Lilac sat up in bed, and waved her arms in the moonlight and shooed donkeys out of her life.

“Well,” said Gillian, “he’ll have to know about me now. Do you think he’ll stop loving you for your teeth when he sees me pasting cuttings into the grandchild’s album?”

“I just can’t think,” said Lilac, clasping her arms so tightly round her knees that she laid a hand over each elbow. “He might suddenly love you terribly, just because he’d loved me a little. He’s rather like you. He doesn’t see any harm in the most dreadful things.”

“Goodness,” said Gillian, “what sort of things?”

“Poetry,” said Lilac, “and pictures. He’s got that print of Father’s—the one Mother burnt, the Dürer. He took me to an exhibition of the most awful things, and bought it. It cost fifty pounds—no, guineas.”

“Do you mean _Die grosse Fortuna_?”

“Yes, the fat woman on a skipping-rope. And there were the most dearest little grey and blue pastels, ships that pass in the mist, in the next room for half the money.”

“He sounds rather nice,” said Gillian. “I thought it was only horses.”

“Oh, it’s horses as well. And Sophie’s been an angel. I’ve been riding every morning at Glynde. She’s given me a perfectly new habit of my own for my birthday. It’s much harder than riding-lessons in that dreadful _manège_ at Lausanne, with the tame horses and the smell of tan.”

“And Monsieur Avranches—’_dans la main gauche, mademoiselle Arumstrongüe, dans la main_ GAUCHE’—oh, Lilac!”

“Yes—and only half an hour at a time. But at Glynde it’s a groom who doesn’t say a word and humps you along—I’m so stiff and sore, Jilly.”

“Lover’s pains,” said Gillian, “and learning to ride properly. I think you have a very good time.”

“Gillian”—Lilac was very solemn—“will you promise me that you’ll never tell Toby that you cried when Mother burnt that dreadful engraving? I used to think you shammed liking it to curry favour with Father, and when I saw Toby buy it I told him my father had had it too, but I didn’t tell him what became of it, and he doesn’t know there’s you. Sophie didn’t tell him. Sophie doesn’t know that I meet him in town—at least, she didn’t till yesterday.”

“You’re bang in the middle of the tangled web,” said Gillian, “and you know how bad I am at tangled webs. But I’ll try to say nothing but ‘Yes, Sir Reginald. No, Sir Reginald,’ like a parlourmaid. Perhaps if I did it with a lisp it would put him off so frightfully that there’d never be any chance of getting to pictures in our intercourse.”

“Oh, Gillian, don’t do anything stupid. It would be no good for him to think I’d got a lisping idiot for my only family.”

“I expect,” said Gillian, “that whatever I do’ll be wrong while you are in this state. But you know you can trust me not to compete.”

“I know I can trust you not to _try_ to compete,” said Lilac; “but you’re so innocent you’ll probably think you’re doing putting-off things when really you’re doing the other kind.”

“What kind?”

“Oh, well, what had you done to set your Jane Bird blazing with adoration? I’ve never seen anyone in such a state. She couldn’t eat or sleep because you’d been wronged, and I met her in King’s Road every day last week; probably she hasn’t come round the other way home on the off-chance of meeting you that way.”

“I met her on Friday,” said Gillian, “but I didn’t think it had anything to do with me. Besides, even if it had, Jane Bird’s quite a different matter.”

“You wouldn’t, and it isn’t. And, you see, you don’t know a thing about it.”

“I certainly don’t know much about Jane Bird,” said Gillian; “but she’s a strange person—exciting too. Almost the most exciting person I’ve ever known.”

V

Lilac had forbidden Gillian to share her admiration of _Die grosse Fortuna_ with Sir Reginald Bottomley, but she did not know, she could not have known, that his august mother had gone through the complete works of Swinburne in the eight volumes which he had brought home from Oxford and had cut out, with a pair of nail-scissors, all the passages she considered unsuitable for a gentleman’s library. Nor could her worst nightmare have suggested to her that Toby would discover the mutilation of his property at the same moment as Gillian did. But this is what actually happened.

Gerald Armstrong’s Swinburnes, the little red _Atalanta in Calydon_ and the little fat Moxon _Poems and Ballads_, had gone to Sotheby’s with his other first editions when his books were valued, and Gillian, who had nothing but the Tauchnitz _Selections_, had been bothered all morning because she could not remember how

“Some angel’s steady mouth and weight of wings Shut to the side...”

went on. So, just before tea, while Lady Bottomley was resting, she took the library-steps into the far corner where she had seen the tall, dark Chatto & Windus books standing on a high shelf, and was sitting on the top of them, one hand clasping the pole, and her mouth wide open in dismay at the ruin she had found, when a mild voice below her feet said:

“How do you do?”

Gillian put the book on her knee and looked over.

“I’m terribly shocked,” she said. “Did you know that lots of _The Triumph of Time_ and most of _Before a Crucifix_ had been cut out of these?”

“No—have they?—how annoying. May I look?”

“But, of course. They’re yours. It’s a dreadful pity. And they’ve not been done at all neatly.” She handed the books to their short, pleasant, rather nervous owner, who took them from her and helped her down from the ladder, saying he supposed she was the latest Miss Macfarlane.

“Well,” said Gillian, “I answer to the name. I’ve got another for holidays.”

They took the remaining six volumes down and had made a list of dilapidation before the chimes rang for tea.

“I wonder why some of them have been left in,” said Toby.

“Well, if they’d all come out there’d have been no book left,” said Gillian.

“Yes; but I don’t think that would have stopped whoever began to cut them up.”

“Lots of people don’t understand the least little things,” said Gillian.

Toby looked at her sharply.

“No,” he said. “Perhaps it’s as well.”

Gillian wondered if he suspected his mother, and was sure he did when he said nothing about the excisions when they joined her for tea.

As they sat in an uneasy silence while Lady Bottomley poured out the scented Ceylon tea she always drank, Gillian let herself fall into the abyss of guilt that so often yawned for her after any completely self-forgetting hour. This quiet man with his large grey eyes and small brown moustache was so unlike the Toby she had imagined, and the discovery of what had been done to his books had so inflamed her mind that for the moment Lilac’s complicated affairs had faded from existence, and here she now was, his accomplice, almost his friend, before he even knew her name. Was this what Lilac called “doing the other things”? Gillian wondered. She had done things. She was certainly now, without knowing how she came to be doing it, standing between Sir Reginald and old Winona.

And how dreadful it was to be so afraid of anyone you belonged to as the third baronet was of his mother. Was he afraid or ashamed? Weren’t they both the same thing? Why _would_ she use that large gold sugar-tongs? Why would she put two lumps of sugar and all those blobs of cream in Gillian’s tea? Why did neither of them say a word except in answer to her own remarks? Gillian felt herself growing more and more dreadfully bright as she babbled on. If the monosyllables continued much longer, she knew she would say something awful. She felt herself turning to poor Toby and saying:

“Lady Bottomley tells me you were at Eton and Magdalen Colleges,” which was exactly what Lady Bottomley had told her in the expansions of yesterday. That would be a really putting-off thing. Wasn’t she the very worm of vulgarity for wanting, for not really wanting but for thinking of saying it? How dreadful to have crumpets for tea in July!

And then Stephen came in. And Stephen, who was so dull, so solemn, so correct, Stephen whom she really hardly knew at all, changed everything back into the amusing, preposterous fun it had all been until these last ten minutes.

“Hullo, Gillian!” Stephen said when he saw her, “why aren’t you down at Glynde with Sophie and Lilac? Is that confounded High School mewing you up in London through the dog-days?”

And there were explanations and introductions, and Lady Bottomley, instead of being upset, was elated that Gillian had a sister whom her son had met at Glynde, and Stephen and Toby, who weren’t doing anything particular that evening, said they’d both come and see Lilac and hear news of Sophie after dinner, and Lady Bottomley said Miss Lilac must come to lunch with _her_ Miss Armstrong the next day, and they’d find some nice concert to go to in the afternoon. Gillian was so out of breath with it all that it took Lilac ten minutes to piece together a coherent story out of all the scraps and laughter she carried home with her, particularly as William caught the infection of excitement and sang “God Save our Gray” at the top of his voice until they covered his cage with Lilac’s Burberry. And that only made things worse, because, after a moment’s silence, William observed in a dulcet voice, “Toby—Toby—prritty Toby.” “Just as if,” said Lilac, pale and husky with rage, “just as if we’d said nothing else for months. I wish you’d kill that bird, Gillian.”

And she meant it. Gillian was afraid of Lilac when she went white with passion like that. She carried William’s cage over to the Middletons’ flat and asked the Mrs. Middleton who really was a missionary’s widow to take him in for the evening. Mrs. Middleton had “a way” with parrots, and, though it didn’t seem to work quite so well with cockatoos, she was always very kind about trying to soothe William’s song, when Gillian had other things to do. Lilac had once declared that she’d overheard Mrs. Middleton reading the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer to William just as she used to do to the heathen: but all William was ever heard to add to his vocabulary from the Middleton flat was Jessie Middleton’s drawl, “Oh, Mother, _must_ I?” followed by a prolonged imitation of Jessie Middleton’s yawn.

Love, thought Gillian, as she knocked at Mrs. Middleton’s door, was doing rather horrid things to Lilac; it was making her cruel—Lilac who couldn’t bear even to kill clothes-moths—and suspicious and extravagant. And dishonourable. After all, there was Toby’s American wife—at least there might be, though, now she had seen him herself, Gillian was bound to admit Toby didn’t look in the least married to anybody.

“Isn’t it damnable!” was what Lilac had said last night. And to-night she wanted to have William killed.

VI

It was hot in the little book-lined room up under the roof of the Mordaunt Club. Gillian sat on the window-sill and leaned out over the dark well of the courtyard across which beams of light from the other open windows made slanting, transparent, misty bridges. She sat out of the circle of lamplight made by the painted shade over the oil-lamp which stood on a table in front of the largest bookcase.

Stephen was in the light. It shone on his red, fine skin, on his smooth, shiny hair, on the patent leather of his shoes, on the shining curve of his dress-shirt that bulged, ever so little, over the dull repp of his white waistcoat. Gillian was liking Stephen more every minute. He was so comfortingly at his ease in life. Here, in their little book-room; that afternoon, before the appalling splendours of old Winona’s tea-table, he was just the same Stephen as he was at Glynde. He wasn’t like Toby, who had been nervous even though he chattered in his own library and sulky in his mother’s drawing-room, and who now sat in the corner of the red-leather chesterfield making jerks of speech and ruffling up the pink-and-blue Samarkand rug with his feet. Lilac sat in the other corner, quite in shadow, very slim in her thin white frock with its wide angel sleeves that hung down over her hands as they lay folded in her lap. Her eyes, dark with excitement, looked black in the shade, and the fluff of her fair hair seemed grey with no light to bring out its golden shimmer.

“Been to the Russian Ballet?” jerked Toby.

“Not again,” said Lilac.

Money was sometimes a disadvantageous possession—sometimes. Stephen hadn’t half as much as Toby, but he had been born into his place in life, and it never occurred to him to doubt his perfect right to be wherever his life took him. You could see he never thought about paying for anything; he took it for granted that things were paid for! Stephen was free. Toby, who could buy real Dürers in St. James’s Street and have horses at Newmarket, was afraid. Money had robbed him of the place he was born into and he didn’t fit in the place it had bought for him. He was too nice to be apologetic, but he was always ready to be a little angry. He said “How annoying!” over everything that went at all wrong. He’d said it about his Swinburnes; and when Lady Bottomley had said that she’d promised he should open a bazaar in September; and when he’d dropped the spoon out of his coffee-cup saucer as he took it from Lilac just now.

It was odd that Lilac, whose every movement was so finished and effectual, and who knew exactly not only what she wanted but how she was going to get it—it was perhaps not really odd that Lilac should want this gentle, undecided Toby. It was clear that he wanted her. Of that Gillian had been sure from the moment he had come into the flat. You could see that Toby saw, that he _could_ see nothing but Lilac. It was dreadful, Gillian felt, to have that feeling about another person, particularly if you had a wife in America and couldn’t have the person you wanted like that. It was rather dreadful of Lilac to let him want her when he couldn’t have her. Dreadfully cruel. Perhaps Lilac didn’t know. Perhaps Toby had never looked at her in this way before. Lilac couldn’t let him go on like that. She was keeping very still, almost as if she were half asleep. She must be making up her mind to put a stop to it; not to see Toby again. Nobody could bear to be wanted so badly, to be looked at with such unhappy eyes.

Then, very quietly, and without looking at Toby, or at Gillian, or at Stephen, softly and slowly, but deliberately and not at all as if she were dreaming, Lilac raised one hand and smoothed back the long loose sleeve from the arm that still lay in her lap. Stephen was lighting a cigarette and didn’t notice. But Gillian saw. And she saw how Toby leaned forward a little and stopped in the middle of asking something quite dull to let his eyes drop from Lilac’s face to her hand. And Lilac raised her hand and pushed it along the top of the chesterfield, playing a little, light, slow five-finger exercise on the red leather until her bare arm up to the elbow, lay out beyond the shadow, cream-pale and soft, the skin taut and smooth over the wrist-joints, with tiny sparkles of gold hair catching the yellow lamplight as the round finger-tips tapped out their noiseless tune.

“Guess what I’m playing,” said Lilac softly, in the voice of a young witch casting a spell. “It’s something you know,” and her two long front teeth gleamed in the shadow, breaking the rose of her mouth as she spoke and smiled.

“I can’t guess,” said Toby hoarsely. “Tell me,” said Toby, as though his life depended on being told.

“No—you must guess,” said Lilac, her voice shaking a little in her throat with laughter. “You know it quite well,” and she emphasized the “quite” delicately so that it rang in the air like a chiming bell.

Toby bent on his elbows; his crimson hands clutched each other between his spread knees. His head, thrust into the circle of lamplight, showed his damp hair sticking to his brow.

“Lilac, I _can’t_ guess. Not while you do that.”

Gillian slipped down from the window-seat.

“It’s _Ach du lieber Augustin_, the tune the pipkin sang when it boiled, in the story of the prince who went back into his kingdom and slammed the door,” she said.

Lilac jumped up from her corner and the sleeve fell back again over her arm.

“Oh, Gillian, how mean of you!” she cried. But her voice was happy and satisfied as it had not been before that day. And presently Stephen took Toby away. They were driving down to Esher that night, as Toby had horses arriving from Ireland with a new groom whom he didn’t quite trust, and he wanted to be on the spot himself first thing the next morning.

* * * * *

Lilac went to lunch next day, and on to the nice concert with Lady Bottomley. She arrived, very pretty and rather pathetic in the large crinoline hat trimmed with the pink rose she’d bought in Sloane Street, and the mauve ribbon she’d salved from part of Sophie’s largesse, while Gillian was pumice-stoning the copying-ink from her fingers after her morning’s work. All old Winona’s letters were preserved in duplicate, even the third-person refusals to add to her cheque-signing toil. Gillian had already traced the original hands and the varying imitations of six of her predecessors through the flimsy pages of the copy-files which, also bound into crested volumes, filled a shelf below the newspaper-cutting tomes in the library at 99. Gillian had been taught by her father to burn all letters, even his own lively, brilliant letters written when she stayed behind at school and he sent her his diaries with their little pen and pencil drawings on every page. So she added her daily sheaf to this unvaluable collection, consoling herself with the quotation from La Rochefoucauld, which she could never quite get by heart, about considering the kind of people to whom He gave the most of it when you wanted to know what God really thought of money.

“And, of course,” said Gillian, being honest with herself as she scrubbed her inky hands, “it wasn’t God who gave old Winona money to spend on having a quite young crest put on everything she possesses, but John Bottomley who did make the best bicycles that ever spun and deserved to be ‘a perfect Crocus’; and Toby will do beautiful things with it when old Winona dies. I wonder if she’ll have a tomb all made of precious stones. I do hope she will. I do wish she would. And order it now, while I’m with her like the Bishop, at St. Praxed’s.”

But there wouldn’t be any ordering of jewelled monuments for a day or two at any rate, for by the time Gillian came into the drawing-room Lilac had made such headway with Toby’s mother that that lady was insisting that Gillian must take the week-end until Tuesday and go with her sister to Glynde.

“And, of course,” said Lilac, “if Gillian is not quite rested by Tuesday, I can come back and do your letters myself for a day or two. I don’t pretend to be as clever as Gillian, but I’m _very_ industrious, and I’d try not to let you miss her too dreadfully, Lady Bottomley, indeed I would.”

Lady Bottomley was archly playful.

“I am sure, Miss Lilac, that you would be a delightful secretary, but I always spend August in Ireland, where my male secretary attends to all my requirements, and _my_ Miss Armstrong will only have to look in for an hour or two in the mornings when she gets back from Glynde. I should be sorry,” and she tapped Lilac’s cheek with the whole bunch of her fingers, “for such a pretty little person as yourself to leave her friends on my account. Mr. and Mrs. Glynde would never forgive me for robbing them of such bright eyes.”

So Gillian went to Glynde with Lilac by the five-o’clock train out of Victoria on Friday afternoon. And when they got there, there was no Toby.

Stephen met them with the car at Lewes.

“Toby’s gone to America,” he told them. “He was very bored at Sandown and didn’t seem to care whether the Buster won or not. I think he’s gone after that wife of his.”

“Oh,” said Lilac. “You don’t think he’ll bring her back, do you?”

“Alive or dead,” said Stephen. “Dead, possibly. I dare say he’s gone out to murder her. There’s sure to be one of the properly free states where a decent fellow like Toby can kill a wife from time to time! How long have you known about her?”

“Only since I went to Lady Bottomley,” said Gillian. “I thought you and Sophie didn’t.”

“Sophie don’t,” said Stephen; “but Toby told me the whole story, and he says he told Lilac.”

“Yes,” said Lilac, “he wrote to me about it, yesterday. But I’d known for some time. And I told Sophie.”

“You did, did you?” said Stephen. “That’s all to the good,” and he changed the subject.

VII

Lilac did not marry Toby till the spring. And Toby did not murder his wife, though old Winona went into deep mourning on the receipt of a cable from San Francisco one day in the following October. The cable was duly filed. It ran:

“Millicent is no more. Do not announce it in _The Times_.—REGINALD.”

“I quite feel with my son,” said old Winona. “The death of so unworthy a woman as the late Lady Bottomley is not a matter we, as a family, can publicly countenance. But my own change of title must be announced. Will you look up in Kelly, my dear, for the form in which a dowager announces the resumption of her original title?”

But Gillian could find nothing helpful in Kelly or even in Whitaker, and, after an afternoon’s research, was told to telegraph for the lady whom Mrs. Barraclough called Winnie Roehampton.

“My daughter-in-law knows by experience how to deal with knotty points in the social code,” said the ex-dowager.

Lady Roehampton discouraged the attempt at a public resumption of her ex-mother-in-law’s rights. She was an elegant and vivacious creature with very flaxen hair and a complexion so brilliant that, though actually the work of nature, it laid her under the constant suspicion of resorting to art. Her manner, which at first seemed friendly, was on closer acquaintance seen to be the outward expression of an undiscriminating candour. She had no reticences, and also no rancours. To her things and people just were. She neither classified nor blamed. But she lacked the philosophic detachment which enables others who share her outlook to stand aside and watch their fellow creatures commit the follies they themselves are too balanced to stigmatize, too interested to prevent. Life was not pure spectacle to Winnie Roehampton. She knew what drama meant to the actors and she was a shade too unintelligent to remain passively unkind in circumstances over which she could have any possible control.

“My child,” she said, drawing Gillian into the shelter of one of the palm-groves in the hall after telling Atkinson to call off that powdered menial as she would let herself out, “take her to Jay’s. Let her buy up the whole shop. They’ll tell her to an inch how much crêpe indicates the resumption of whatever a baronet’s widow resumes when her son has been divorced by his wife. Oh, yes! That’s what’s happened. Didn’t you know? Let her get new visiting-cards—she might have a little black arrow put through ‘Winona.’ I wish I’d thought of that before. Never mind. You can tell her I thought of it on the way down. But keep her out of _The Times_. You needn’t tell her Millicent isn’t dead—after all, I _may_ be doing Toby an injustice—unless you can’t restrain her any other way. But you might suggest that she’d better wait till Toby gets back, as it’s quite on the cards that he’s bringing a perfectly good new wife of his own with him.”

“I think,” said Gillian, “the little black arrow is quite enough for me to suggest. I’ve seen the cable, you know.”

“So have I. That’s what convinces me. Millicent isn’t the kind of woman who dies of anything but extreme antiquity or violence. And she’s now about thirty, and you don’t suppose Toby has done anything violent.”

“No, of course not,” said Gillian faintly, seeing again Toby’s bent head and strangling hands thrust forward into the lamplight as Lilac’s arm slid along the top of the couch behind him.

Her hesitation was misunderstood.

“Oh,” said the Countess of Roehampton, without a trace of self-consciousness or embarrassment, “Dora Barraclough has told you about Jim Bottomley’s accident? She’d exaggerate, of course; I’ve always said it was my fault. But I didn’t plan it. I was quite sorry when it happened. And you can see how I’ve been forgiven. Call me in again if she gets difficult. One of Roehampton’s aunts is a lady-in-waiting, and I’ll get her trained intellect to bear on the situation.”

“Thank you so much, Lady Roehampton,” said Gillian from the doorstep, ignoring the more sensational aspects of the lady’s Parthian speech. “I’ll get Dashwood to take her to Jay’s this very afternoon.”

VIII

The only person who made any difficulty about Lilac’s marriage was Aunt Elizabeth Armstrong, whose real name was Mrs. Mortimer. She was what Toby called a reinforced relation. Toby could be quite amusing if you gave him time. Mrs. Mortimer had been a Miss Armstrong, Gerald Armstrong’s only aunt, and had taken him after his mother’s death when he was quite a child with her at such times as he was not at school. When he grew up and went to Oxford, and not till then, Aunt Elizabeth had bestowed her hand on the West African clergyman to whom she had plighted her troth in early life. Mr. Mortimer did not long survive his marriage, and little Ellen Mortimer, a young half-sister who was semi-dependent on him, came to live in England with his widow, and, much to her indignation, married Gerald Armstrong quite quietly one afternoon when he was home on leave, going out to do so at a registrar’s office in an old hat, and coming back with him to tea as though nothing had happened.

There was something of the born supplanter in little Ellen Mortimer, so it seemed to Aunt Elizabeth, who did not greatly care for women. And it was like little Ellen to have two daughters and no son. Aunt Elizabeth, who filled the office of grandmother on both sides to Gerald’s and Ellen’s children, made the best of Gillian, whose second name was Elizabeth. But Lilac was a thorn in her flesh. Little Ellen had been sly, but demure and quiet in her dress, as became a Christian lady. But Lilac only resorted to slyness when overt methods failed and her taste in dress was what Aunt Elizabeth called “shouting,” which wasn’t in the least what other people mean by “loud,” but indicated a general effect calculated to make the casual observer look twice and look approvingly.

Aunt Elizabeth lived at Highgate in a little bow-windowed house at the top of the hill which you entered from the road, thinking it quite an ordinary house, only to discover that the parlour-window at the back hung over a precipice dizzying down through tree-tops, and smoke-wreaths and chimney-stacks to the great lake of the city out of which the dome of St. Paul’s rose, a small round island in the east, and the four chimneys of the Chelsea power-house stood against the far horizon in the west like the masts of a sailing-ship with all its canvas furled.

Aunt Elizabeth set no store by the view from her parlour-window. She did not obscure it, as she obscured that of the road in the front of the house, by strong, white Nottingham lace curtains; but her motives were not æsthetic motives.

“No need to curtain these windows,” she said. “Only the birds of the air can see into them from the outside, and the fewer the curtains the better the dusting.” Aunt Elizabeth’s house was very well dusted. It was also quite reasonably comfortable. Its furniture belonged to the mahogany age, but there was no horse-hair left, though you could feel that Aunt Elizabeth had lived with horse-hair in her time. Also, it was quite surprisingly free from any traces of Mr. Mortimer’s vocation. None of the African mats, beads and other devices which filled Mrs. Middleton’s flat in the Club, had its counterpart in Aunt Elizabeth’s parlour. “Heathen rubbish,” she called them all, “and some of it worse. How Agneta Middleton can bring herself to set up that shameless idol she has on the mantelpiece in a Christian land I cannot conceive, and if,” said Aunt Elizabeth, “that Mrs. Barrymore of yours wasn’t a poor thing, she’d have had it taken away and burnt.”

“But Mrs. Barraclough thinks it is an ornament. She doesn’t feel about it as you do. It doesn’t seem to her to be a god as it does to you,” Gillian had protested.

“God, indeed,” said Aunt Elizabeth; “devil, my girl, that’s what they are, however your Mrs. Barrington makes excuses for them.”

Aunt Elizabeth always got the names of the people she called “poor things” just a little wrong. It made them seem even poorer than she said they were, and was a deliberate classification, not in the least akin to old Winona’s large confusions. She had never once stumbled, as a person liable to true confusion might well have done, over the name or names of her prospective great-nephew-in-law. “Poor Reginald” she called him from the first, and she withheld her blessing on the match for some days under the impression that, being Irish, he must necessarily be a Roman, and so worse than the heathen of whose conversion it was always possible to entertain an active hope.

Lilac made it quite clear to Gillian, without any direct reference to the subject, that Aunt Elizabeth was to be allowed to understand that Toby was the bachelor he appeared to be.

“If she can be brought to approve of my marriage,” was what Lilac had said, “she’ll forgive me for not going to live at Highgate.”

Mrs. Mortimer had been quite willing for Gillian to go to the Mordaunt Club, and be under Mrs. Middleton’s eye when Ellen died. The Club was within an hour’s journey of Pelham House. But she had quite supposed that Lilac would sojourn with her at Highgate. That neither she nor Lilac really liked one another was no reason, in Mrs. Mortimer’s self-disciplining view of life for them, as widow and orphan of the same blood, to live apart.

But Lilac had been firm. Gillian was not fit to live alone. All she’d got to furnish the flat with was a ton of books, a cast of the Winged Victory, and an old brass toasting-fork which, said Lilac, just showed. Besides, Lilac couldn’t live out so far as Highgate herself. And Aunt Elizabeth saw to it, as Lilac very well knew she would when it came to the point, that all the lacunæ made by the sale of her nephew’s really valuable things and the habit of living in semi-furnished houses which little Ellen had contracted in the course of their nomadic married life, were properly filled with good cutlery and fine linen sheets to go with the outlandish curtains and wild cups and saucers Gillian herself had bought at strange shops of post-Maple ideas.

“And how is Gillian any fitter to live alone now?” asked Aunt Elizabeth, when she had been made aware of Lilac’s engagement. “Is she going to share your home?”

“No! How could she, dearest Aunt Eliza? Toby and I aren’t going to have a home for ever such a long time. We’re going round the world for our honeymoon, and that’ll take almost a year.”

“And where will you be if the Lord should send you a child? Gadding about on the face of the waters, I dare say.”

“Oh,” said Lilac, blushing, but defiant, “He won’t send one till we get back. Toby and I have decided that.”

“Wicked, impious creatures!” said Aunt Elizabeth, shaking her head, on which, in spite of Lilac’s efforts, she wore just the same kind of cap, three rows of Brussels lace frilled on to a high-crowned ‘shape,’ as her mother had worn before her. “I shall pray without ceasing that the Lord may see fit to defeat your ungodly purpose.”

“Well, don’t say anything to Toby about it, or to Lady Bottomley,” begged Lilac.

“I shall do the Lord’s bidding,” was Aunt Elizabeth’s reply. “If He bids me to speak, it will not be for you to prevent me, my girl.”

So Lilac took good care that Toby was not left alone at any time when the Lord might be likely to move Aunt Elizabeth to declare His views; and by the exercise of that secret diplomacy which always baffled Gillian to detect in the working, managed to keep her quasi-grandmaternal relation and her prospective mother-in-law apart.

“I dare say you would enjoy seeing them meet,” she retorted when Gillian pointed out how fine a conflict might arise between two such autocrats, “but it’s my wedding and I’m not going to have it spoilt.”

“I’m sure they’d not spoil it,” said Gillian. “Aunt Elizabeth is so relieved that you’re going to be married in a Protestant church that she doesn’t mind its being a fashionable one, and she won’t know how like a pantomime it’s going to be till she’s there. And you know she won’t brawl in church.”

“No. Not _in_ church. But she might persuade Toby and his mother to have the horrid bits left in. She thinks her Prayer-Book was just as much given by inspiration of God as the Bible.”

“Are there any horrid bits?” said Gillian.

“Gillian, you idiot. You’ve read the Service, haven’t you?”

“Lots of times,” said Gillian. “I think those vows are rather terrifying. It’s such a long promise—forsaking all other, too—you can’t know who’s coming—but I like it because of the ‘so’—‘as.’ I can’t think why people will say ‘as long as.’ It’s no easier.”

“Oh, _that_,” said Lilac. “That’s all right, and I’m not going to be common and suffragetty about ‘obey.’ It’s the other bits. Even you, my poor Jill, wouldn’t want to be mixed up in a remedy against sin.”

“I don’t know,” said Gillian slowly; “if it were a remedy, it would be rather beautiful to be part of it—_against_ sin.”

“There are times,” said Lilac with bitter incisiveness, “when I think you can’t be quite right in your head.”

They were on their way to Dover Street to try on the bridesmaids’ dresses. There were to be six bridesmaids—two little Glyndes, the two small Roehampton children, a stout but very rich friend of whom Lilac had not lost sight since the Lausanne days, and Gillian herself. And they were to be all dressed as Dresden china shepherdesses in dresses copied from a complete half-dozen originals that figured among the many presents from the bridegroom’s mother. For old Winona, who was coming out of her black garments and going into maroon with feathers on the resumption of her dowagership, had insisted on giving and choosing the bridesmaids’ dresses herself. It wasn’t regular, but still, as Lilac said, this was a subscription wedding in which Glyndes and Armstrongs and Mortimers all had stakes, so why shouldn’t everybody have a share? And, having once allowed the prospective dowager to take a hand in the preparations, it was useless to attempt to stay that hand from munificence. Besides, she was already very fond of Lilac. Their ideas were seldom in conflict. In the matter of abridging the wedding-service, for example, she was entirely of Lilac’s mind. There was nothing Calvinistic or Biblical about old Winona.

“She really is very nice and refined about some things,” said Lilac. “Much better than Toby is. Did you know that she’d snipped the worst bits out of his Swinburnes when they moved from Blackheath to Knightsbridge after he’d left Oxford?”

“I knew someone had chopped up the books dreadfully,” said Gillian. “I shall give Toby a new unbarbered set for his wedding-present.”

Toby gave Gillian _Die grosse Fortuna_ and the large _Saint Eustace_ two days before the wedding. Lilac had come upon the print when they were looking through Toby’s things together one day, and had told him that Gillian liked it. She was taking her own pictures, a large coloured reproduction of Greiffenhagen’s _Idyll_ and a photogravure of Balestieri’s _Beethoven_ away with her in the small case of her own personal possessions which was being stored at Knightsbridge, and Toby, very modestly, proffered his two Dürers to fill their places on either side of the tall bookcase in the little room.

Gillian accepted them in speechless content.

“And I suppose,” said Lilac, “that you’ll hang them there, both of them, and tell me they’re both beautiful.”

“So they are,” said Gillian.

“The one with the dogs is amusing, and I like the little hill with the castle on it behind,” Lilac conceded. “But as for the other—well, all I can say is that you’d better not let Mrs. Gordon see it if you want to stay on at the Club without me. She’d think it was a caricature of herself. Which it might very well be.”

* * * * *

The wedding took place on the 25th of April at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square. Aunt Elizabeth did not attend. The date coincided with some mysterious anniversary in her own life which she always kept in prayer and fasting. Neither Lilac nor Gillian could ever be quite sure when this penitential festival would fall, for it came round, not as a day in the month, but as the third or fourth Monday in April, which might be any day between the 15th and the 27th. She had presented Lilac with travelling trunks and cases and a dressing-bag of the finest quality and a length of black satin brocade which would stand by itself. To Toby she sent two copies of what she called “The Scriptures,” one in the Authorized the other in the Revised Version, replete with Notes, Maps, References, Concordances and Subject-Indexes printed in large type on India paper and bound in the limpest, most velvety purple leather. She had also given Lilac a purse containing a five-pound note, four sovereigns, two half-sovereigns, six half-crowns and ten shillings in shillings and sixpences, all new coins of that year.

“No need for you to go to your husband for pocket-money till you’ve got used to him, my girl,” said Aunt Elizabeth as she gave her youngest great-niece a dry and single good-bye kiss.

* * * * *

Gillian was glad that the old lady did not appear on the day of the wedding. Nothing about it would have pleased her mind. The great, green, Burne-Jones window lighting the white-and-silver bride with her sheaf of Madonna lilies, followed by the six powdered and panniered bridesmaids with their gilded crooks and jaunty flowered-baskets, would have seemed to her equally sacrilegious with the operatic music sung by an exotic soprano and a dusky tenor in place of a sound Britannic anthem while the register was being signed. And the huge wedding-bell, composed of white roses and plaster Cupids, under which Lilac and Toby stood to receive congratulations in the drawing-room of the Grosvenor Hotel afterwards, a surprise planned and executed by old Winona, would have pleased Mrs. Mortimer as ill as the champagne and the confetti (silver hearts and horse-shoes these), which flowed and floated through the afternoon.

Gillian took Lilac up to the hard, unfamiliar hotel bedroom strewn with dressmakers’ boxes and tissue-paper where the bride had dressed that morning and now was to change into her travelling-clothes. The room was crowded with people. There was Lilac’s new maid, a rather awful being, who had packed everything so thoroughly that there had been nothing left for Gillian to help with the night before, and there was Sophie, of course, and the awkward other bridesmaid who had to come up too, and Mrs. Barraclough whom they couldn’t very well keep out, and odds and ends of people who tapped at the door and said, “May I come in just for one second?” and Winnie Roehampton who dashed in very slim and cool in a leaf-green sheath frock of the most miraculous cut, and said, “Well, my dear, I was Lady Bottomley once and I hope you’ll make a better job of it than I did,” and skimmed out again before Lilac had time to thank her for the benediction.

But Sophie cleared the room for the sisters for a final moment, and Lilac cried a little in Gillian’s arms before she went down to Toby and the confetti.

“Jilly,” said Lilac, “promise me one thing. When I come back, when you see me again for the first time, you won’t open your eyes and stare at me, will you?”

“No,” said Gillian; “but why should I stare?—and why should you mind if I did?”

“Oh, Jilly, Jilly,” said Lilac, “I don’t believe you know.”

IX

Gillian had a dazed, deafening headache. She couldn’t stay on and chatter to the wedding-guests. She couldn’t go on and dine at Claridge’s before the theatre-party with which the day was to end.

Old Winona had another Macfarlane to look after her now. Gillian was absolved from her duties and was going to take a proper secretarial course in order to fit her for real life, a business for which life at 99 was no sort of preparation. So Gillian was free to go home to the Club by herself; Mrs. Barraclough was making a complete orgy of it with the Roehamptons and the Glyndes.

She took off her preposterous hat, shook the powder out of her hair, put on a hooded cloak and slipped out of the busy, indifferent hotel into the April twilight and walked down to the river.

It was a soft, dim evening, heavy with spring. The plane-trees on the Embankment were shaking the fine splinters of their stamens out of the little tasselled bracts that opened with soft popping noises in the still leafless boughs. The air was as clouded and green-grey as the water; the figures hurrying to get out of the Park before the gate closed for the night moved on the other side of the river as if behind glass in an aquarium.

Gillian leaned across the parapet and let the breeze that blew down-stream cool her aching flushed face. The tide was low. A few desultory gulls, the stragglers of the main fleet which had put to sea with the onset of mild weather some weeks earlier, scavenged quietly in the mud at the water’s edge. A police-boat prowled up from Vauxhall; two barges keeping to mid-channel travelled with the ebb, their sails set to catch what airs might stir to aid them. The evening was not so much peaceful as indifferent. Gillian lingered on, and an increasing desolation preyed within her. What was it that Lilac had done?

“Lilac will always know that she is paying for a fake.” That was what her father had said. Was Toby a fake? Lilac had wanted him. She had wanted him so much that she had at last stretched out her soft arm and taken him by guile with her rosy, tapping fingers. Gillian never remembered that hand, creeping into the lamplight and shaking all poor Toby’s unhappy resistance, without a shock of wonder. What exactly was it that Lilac had done to him? How did she know she could do it? It was predatory, her gesture, yet it gave away something that could never be taken back again. Lilac had been paying, paying deliberately, for Toby. But was it Toby, the essential Toby, that dim, kind, gentle Toby who loved horses and fine engravings and had such clumsy hands and such vague, beseeching eyes that Lilac had bought with the lilt of a song from a fairy-tale? Or was it what Toby stood for? Was it only the power to buy everything, to go everywhere, to make, if she chose, such a crammed and monotonous wilderness of any house as Old Winona had made of 99, that Lilac really wanted in Toby? wanted it so much that she had confused Toby, who was not in the least magnificent with the magnificence she could reach through him? Gillian thought with a slow gust of remorse of that far-off, unconsidered Millicent who too, in her day, had wanted Toby, and who was now—neither she nor Lilac had ever stopped to ask if she were dead—at least she had never spoken of Toby’s first wife to Lilac. What Toby had said to Lilac about her was their own affair; but Gillian might have spared her a thought.

Lower and lower in her own esteem she plunged, down into the dark undergrowth where motives lie tangled in egoism and vanity. Jealousy of her sister; envy of Lilac’s freedom; feeble self-pity for her own loneliness—as if she didn’t want to be alone—assailed her as she groped in the shadows of her heart. What an aftermath of a wedding! Why couldn’t she be happy because Lilac was free, because she had both hands full of what she most wanted? Gillian wanted freedom too. But it wasn’t, after all, freedom that someone else’s money could give her. Lilac had freed herself with one hand by fettering the other. In a way she was more bound than Gillian, who could never hope to be freer than she was now.

Gillian’s headache was gone; it had faded out with the daylight. The sky was quite black above the Embankment lights now, and the tide was rising and taking fresh reflections, long swords of light from the lamps on the bridges, as the waters broadened beneath them. Gillian turned her face to go home, her self-reviling over. But there was still an ache of disappointment in her thoughts. What was it she had asked of this day, that thing for herself, that secret and peculiar enjoyment which had not been given to her? Long ago, when she was a child, she had known this unsatisfied ache. “I’m not hungry, but I know there’s something very delicious I’ve not eaten,” she had explained to her father. Now the ache was there, but she knew what she had missed. It was the climax of the wedding-service which had never come; the moment when, in her prayer for Lilac, she had hoped, had meant to reach out and touch her father’s spirit if it could be possible that that spirit remained aware of her. She had promised herself to wait with closed eyes for the words:

“... whose daughters ye are so long as ye do well and are not afraid with any amazement.”

and they had never been spoken.

Lilac and Old Winona together had had the service thoroughly pruned. The Bishop had tweetled an inaudible little sermon over the married pair, the murmurs of which were drowned to the congregation in the creaking of the bridesmaids’ gilded flower-baskets as they stood separated from the bride and fidgeting in the aisle for the end of the performance. There had been little need for consecrated phrases at the Pantomime Wedding.