The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett Part 18

"We'll go away to-morrow," Sylvia announced, abruptly. It flashed upon her that she would like to go to Sirene with Lily, but, alas! there was not enough money for such a long journey, and Bournemouth or Brighton must be the colorless subst.i.tute.

Lily cheered up at the idea of going away, and Sylvia was half resentful that she could accept parting from Michael so easily. Lily's frocks were not ready the next day, and in the morning Michael's ring was heard.

"Oh, now I suppose we shall have more scenes," Lily complained.

Sylvia ran after Mrs. Gainsborough, who was waddling down the garden path to open the door.

"Come back, come back at once!" she cried. "You're not to open the door."

"Well, there's a nice thing. But it may be the butcher."

"We don't want any meat. It's not the butcher. It's Fane. You're not to open the door. We've all gone away."

"Well, don't snap my head off," said Mrs. Gainsborough, turning back unwillingly to the house.

All day long at intervals the bell rang.

"The neighbors 'll think the house is on fire," Mrs. Gainsborough bewailed.

"n.o.body hears it except ourselves, you silly old thing," Sylvia said.

"And what 'll the pa.s.sers-by think?" Mrs. Gainsborough asked. "It looks so funny to see any one standing outside a door, ringing all day long like a chimney-sweep who's come on Monday instead of Tuesday. Let me go out and tell him you've gone away. I'll hold the door on the jar, the same as if I was arguing with a hawker. Now be sensible, Sylvia. I'll just pop out, pop my head round the door, and pop back in again."

"You're not to go. Sit down."

"You do order any one about so. I might be a serviette, the way you crumple me up. Sylvia, don't keep prodding into me. I may be fat, but I have got some feelings left. You're a regular young spiteful. A porter wouldn't treat luggage so rough. Give over, Sylvia."

"What a fuss you make about nothing!" Sylvia said.

"Well, that ping-ping-pinging gets on my nerves. I feel as if I were coming out in black spots like a domino. Why don't the young fellow give over? It's a wonder his fingers aren't worn out."

The ringing continued until nearly midnight in bursts of half an hour at a stretch. Next morning Sylvia received a note from Fane in which he invited her to be sporting and let him see Lily.

"How I hate that kind of gentlemanly att.i.tude!" she scoffed to herself.

Sylvia wrote as unpleasant a letter as she could invent, which she left with Mrs. Gainsborough to be given to Michael when he should call in answer to an invitation she had posted for the following day at twelve o'clock. Then Lily and she left for Brighton. All the way down in the train she kept wondering why she had ended her letter to Michael by calling him "my little Vandyck." Suddenly she flew into a rage with herself, because she knew that she was making such speculation an excuse to conjure his image to her mind.

Toward the end of February Sylvia and Lily came back to Mulberry Cottage. Sylvia had awakened one morning with the conviction that it was beneath her dignity to interfere further between Lily and Michael. She determined to leave everything to fate. She would go and stay with Olive for a while, and if Lily went away with Michael, so much the better. To h.e.l.l with both of them. This resolution once taken, Sylvia, who had been rather charming to Lily all the time at Brighton, began now to treat her with a contempt that was really an expression of the contempt she felt for Michael. A week after their return to London she spent the whole of one day in ridiculing him so cruelly that even Mrs. Gainsborough protested. Then she was seized with an access of penitence, and, clasping Lily to her, she almost entreated her to vow that she loved her better than any one else in the world. Lily, however, was by this time thoroughly sulky and would have nothing to do with Sylvia's tardy sweetness. The petulant way in which she shook herself free from the embrace at last brought Sylvia up to the point of leaving Lily to herself. She should go and stay with Olive Fanshawe, and if, when she came back, Lily were still at Mulberry Cottage, she would atone for the way she had treated her lately; if she were gone, it would be only one more person ruthlessly cut out of her life. It was curious to think of everybody--Monkley, Philip, the Organs, Mabel, the twins, Miss Ashley, Dorward, all going on with their lives at this moment regardless of her.

"I might just as well be dead," she told herself. "What a fuss people make about death!"

Sylvia was shocked to find how much Olive had suffered from Dorothy's treatment of her. For the first time in her life she was unable to dispose of emotion as mere romantic or sentimental rubbish; there was indeed something deeper than the luxury of grief that could thus enn.o.ble even a Vanity girl.

"I do try, Sylvia, not to mope all the time. I keep on telling myself that, if I really loved Dorothy, I should be glad for her to be Countess of Clarehaven, with everything that she wants. She was always a good girl. I lived with her more than two years and she was frightfully strict about men. She deserved to be a countess. And I'm sure she's quite right in wanting to cut herself off altogether from the theater. I think, you know, she may have meant to be kind in telling me at once like that, instead of gradually dropping me, which would have been worse, wouldn't it? Only I do miss her so. She was such a lovely thing to look at."

"So are you," Sylvia said.

"Ah, but I'm dark, dear, and a dark girl never has that almost unearthly beauty that Dolly had."

"Dark girls have often something better than unearthly and seraphic beauty," Sylvia said. "They often have a gloriously earthly and human faithfulness."

"Ah, you need to tease me about being romantic, but I think it's you that's being romantic now. You were quite right, dear; I used to be stupidly romantic over foolish little things without any importance, and now it all seems such a waste of time. That's really what I feel most of all, now that I've lost my friend. It seems to me that every time I patted a dog I was wasting time."

Sylvia had a fleeting thought that perhaps Gladys and Enid Worsley might have felt like that about her, but in a moment she quenched the fire it kindled in her heart. She was not going to bask in the warmth of self-pity like a spoiled little girl that hopes she may die to punish her brother for teasing her.

"I think, you know," Olive went on, "that girls like us aren't prepared to stand sorrow. We've absolutely nothing to fall back upon. I've been thinking all these days what an utterly unsatisfactory thing lunch at Romano's really is. The only thing in my life that I can look back to for comfort is summer at the convent in Belgium. Of course we giggled all the time; but all the noise of talking has died away, and I can only see a most extraordinary peacefulness. I wonder if the nuns would have me as a boarder for a little while this summer. I feel I absolutely must go there. It isn't being sentimental, because I never knew Dorothy in those days."

Perhaps Olive's regret for her lost friend affected Sylvia. When she went back to Mulberry Cottage and found that Lily had gone away, notwithstanding her own deliberate provocation of the elopement, she was dismayed. There was nothing left of Lily but two old frocks in the wardrobe, two old frocks the color of dead leaves; and this poignant reminder of a physical loss drove out all the other emotions. She told herself that it was ridiculous to be moved like this and she jeered at herself for imitating Olive's grief. But it was no use; those two frocks affrighted her courage with their deadness. No kind of communion after marriage would compensate for the loss of Lily's presence; it was like the fading of a flower in the completeness of its death. Even if she had been able to achieve the selflessness of Olive and take delight in Lily's good fortune, how impossible it was to believe in the triumph of this marriage. Lily would either be bored or she would become actively miserable--Sylvia snorted at the adverb--and run away or rather slowly melt to d.a.m.nation. It would not even be necessary for her to be miserable; any unscrupulous friend of her husband's would have his way with her. For an instant Sylvia had a tremor of compa.s.sion for Michael, but it died in the thought of how such a disillusion would serve him right. He had built up this pa.s.sion out of sentimentality; he was like Don Quixote; he was stupid. No doubt he had managed by now to fall in love with Lily, but it had never been an inevitable pa.s.sion, and no pity should be shown to lovers that did not love wildly at first sight. They alone could plead fate's decrees.

Jack Airdale came to see Sylvia, and he took advantage of her despair to press his desire for her to go upon the stage. He was positive that she had in her the makings of a great actress. He did not want to talk about himself, but he must tell Sylvia that there was a wonderful joy in getting on. He would never, of course, do anything very great, but he was understudy to some one or other at some theater or other, and there was always a chance of really showing what he could do one night or at any rate one afternoon. Even Claude was getting on; he had met him the other day in a tail coat and a top-hat. Since there had been such an outcry against tubercular infection, he had been definitely cured of his tendency toward consumption; he had nothing but neurasthenia to contend with now.

But Sylvia would not let Jack "speak about her" to the managers he knew. She had no intention of continuing as she was at present, but she should wait till she was twenty-three before she took any step that would involve anything more energetic than turning over the pages of a book; she intended to dream away the three months that were left to twenty-two. Jack Airdale went away discouraged.

Sylvia met Ronald Walker, who had painted Lily. From him she learned that Fane had taken a house for her somewhere near Regent's Park. By a curious coincidence, a great friend of his who was also a friend of Fane's had helped to acquire the house. Ronald understood that there was considerable feeling against the marriage among Fane's friends. What was Fane like? He knew several men who knew him, and he seemed to be one of those people about whose affairs everybody talked.

"Thank Heaven, n.o.body bothers about me," said Ronald. "This man Fane seems to have money to throw about. I wish he'd buy my picture of Lily. You're looking rather down, Sylvia. I suppose you miss her? By Jove! what an amazing sitter! She wasn't really beautiful, you know--I mean to say with the kind of beauty that lives outside its setting. I don't quite mean that, but in my picture of her, which most people consider the best thing I've done, she never gave me what I ought to have had from such a model. I felt cheated, somehow, as if I'd cut a bough from a tree and in doing so destroyed all its grace. It was her gracefulness really; and dancing's the only art for that. I can't think why I didn't paint you."

"You're not going to begin now," Sylvia a.s.sured him.

"Well, of course, now you challenge me," he laughed. "The fact is, Sylvia, I've never really seen you in repose till this moment. You were always tearing around and talking. Look here, I do want to paint you. I say, let me paint you in this room with Mrs. Gainsborough. By Jove! I see exactly what I want."

"It sounds as if you wanted an ill.u.s.tration for the Old and New Year," Sylvia said.

In the end, however, she gave way; and really, it pa.s.sed the time, sitting for Ronald Walker with Mrs. Gainsborough in that room where nothing of Lily remained.

"Well," Mrs. Gainsborough declared, when the painter had finished. "I knew I was fat, but really it's enough to make any one get out of breath just to look at any one so fat as you've made me. He hasn't been stingy with his paint, I'll say that. But really, you know, it looks like a picture of the fat woman in a fair. Now Sylvia's very good. Just the way she looks at you with her chin stuck out like a step-ladder. Your eyes are very good, too. He's just got that nasty glitter you get into them sometimes."

One day in early June, without any warning, Michael Fane revisited Mulberry Cottage. Sylvia had often declaimed against him to Mrs. Gainsborough, and now while they walked up the garden she could see that Mrs. Gainsborough was nervous, and by the way that Michael walked either that he was nervous or that something had happened. Sylvia came down the steps from the balcony to meet them, and, reading in his countenance that he had come to ask her help, she was aware of an immense relief, which she hid under an att.i.tude of cold hostility. They sat on the garden seat under the budding mulberry-tree, and without any preliminaries of conversation Michael told her that he and Lily had parted. Sylvia resented an implication in his tone that she would somehow be awed by this announcement; she felt bitterly anxious to disappoint and humiliate him by her indifference, hoping that he would beg her to get Lily back for him. Instead of this he spoke of putting her out of his life, and Sylvia perceived that it was not at all to get Lily back that he had come to her. She was angry at missing her opportunity and she jeered at the stately way in which he confessed his failure and his loss; nor would he wince when she mocked his romantic manner of speech. At last she was almost driven into the brutality of picturing in unforgivable words the details of Lily's infidelity, but from this he flinched, stopping her with a gesture. He went on to give Sylvia full credit for her victory, to grant that she had been right from the first, and gradually by dwelling on the one aspect of Lily that was common to both of them, her beauty, he asked her very gently to take Lily back to live with her again. Sylvia could not refrain from sneers, and he was stung into another allusion to her jealousy, which Sylvia set out to disprove almost mathematically, though all the time she was afraid of what clear perception he might not have attained through sorrow. But he was still obsessed by the salvation of Lily; and Sylvia, because she could forgive him for his indifference to her own future except so far as it might help Lily, began to mock at herself, to accuse herself for those three months after she left Philip, to rake up that corpse from its burial-place so that this youth who troubled her very soul might turn his face from her in irremediable disgust and set her free from the spell he was unaware of casting.

When she had worn herself out with the force of her denunciation both of herself and of mankind, he came back to his original request; Sylvia, incapable of struggling further, yielded to his perseverance, but with a final flicker of self-a.s.sertion she begged him not to suppose that she was agreeing to take Lily back for any other reason than because she wanted to please herself.

Michael began to ask her about Lily's relation to certain men with whom he had heard her name linked--with Ronald Walker, and with Lonsdale, whom he had known at Oxford. Sylvia told him the facts quite simply; and then because she could not bear this kind of self-torture he was inflicting on himself, she tried to put out of its agony his last sentimental regret for Lily by denying to her and by implication to herself also the justification even of a free choice.

"Money is necessary sometimes, you know," she said.

Sylvia expected he would recoil from this, but he accepted it as the statement of a natural fact, agreed with its truth, and begged that in the future if ever money should be necessary he should be given the privilege of helping. So long as it was apparently only Lily whom he desired to help thus, Michael had put forward his claims easily enough. Then in a flash Sylvia felt that now he was transferring half his interest in Lily to her. He was stumbling hopelessly over that; he was speaking in a shy way of sending her books that she would enjoy; then abruptly he had turned from her and the garden door had slammed behind him. It was with a positive exultation that Sylvia realized that he had forgotten to give her Lily's address and that it was the dread of seeming to intrude upon her which had driven him away like that. She ran after him and called him back. He gave her a visiting-card on which his name was printed above the address; it was like a little tombstone of his dead love. He was talking now about selling the furniture and sending the money to Lily. Sylvia all the time was wondering why the first man that had ever appealed to her in the least should be like the famous hero of literature that had always bored her. With an impulse to avenge Michael she asked the name of the man for whom Lily had betrayed him. But he had never known; he had only seen his hat.

Sylvia pulled Michael to her and kissed him with the first kiss she had given to any man that was not contemptuous either of him or of herself.

"How many women have kissed you suddenly like that?" she asked.

"One--well, perhaps two!" he answered.

Even this kiss of hers was not hers alone, but because she might never see him again Sylvia broke the barrier of jealousy and in a sudden longing to be prodigal of herself for once she gave him all she could, her pride, by letting him know that she for her part had never kissed any man like that before.

Sylvia went back to the seat under the mulberry-tree and made up her mind that the time was ripe for activity again. She had allowed herself to become the prey of emotion by leading this indeterminate life in which sensation was cultivated at the expense of incident. It was a pity that Michael had intrusted her with Lily, for at this moment she would have liked to be away out of it at once; any adventure embarked upon with Lily would always be bounded by her ability to pack in time. Sylvia could imagine how those two dresses she had left behind must have been the most insuperable difficulty of the elopement. Another objection to Lily's company now was the way in which it would repeatedly remind her of Michael.

"Of course it won't remind me sentimentally," Sylvia a.s.sured herself. "I'm not such a fool as to suppose that I'm going to suffer from a sense of personal loss. On the other hand, I sha'n't ever be able to forget what an exaggerated impression I gave him. It's really perfectly d.a.m.nable to divine one's sympathy with a person, to know that one could laugh together through life, and by circ.u.mstances to have been placed in an utterly abnormal relation to him. It really is d.a.m.nable. He'll think of me, if he ever thinks of me at all, as one of the great mult.i.tude of wronged women. I shall think of him--though as a matter of fact I shall avoid thinking of him--either as what might have been, a false concept, for of course what might have been is fundamentally inconceivable, or as what he was, a sentimental fool. However, the mere fact that I'm sitting here bothering my head about what either of us thinks shows that I need a change of air."

That afternoon a parcel of books arrived for Sylvia from Michael Fane; among them was Skelton's Don Quixote and Adlington's Apuleius, on the fly-leaf of which he had written: I've eaten rose leaves and I am no longer a golden a.s.s.

"No, d.a.m.n his eyes!" said Sylvia, "I'm the a.s.s now. And how odd that he should send me Don Quixote."

At twilight Sylvia went to see Lily at Ararat House. She found her in a strange rococo room that opened on a garden bordered by the Regent's Ca.n.a.l; here amid candles and mirrors she was sitting in conversation with her housekeeper. Each of them existed from every point of view and infinitely reduplicated in the mirrors, which was not favorable to toleration of the housekeeper's figure, that was like an hour-gla.s.s. Sylvia waited coldly for her withdrawal before she acknowledged Lily's greeting. At last the objectionable creature rose and, accompanied by a crowd of reflections, left the room.

"Don't lecture me," Lily begged. "I had the most awful time yesterday."

"But Michael said he had not seen you."

"Oh, not with Michael," Lily exclaimed. "With Claude."

"With Claude?" Sylvia echoed.

"Yes, he came to see me and left his hat in the hall and Michael took it away with him in his rage. It was the only top-hat he'd got, and he had an engagement for an 'at home,' and he couldn't go out in the sun, and, oh dear, you never heard such a fuss, and when Mabel--"

"Mabel?"

"--Miss Harper, my housekeeper, offered to go out and buy him another, he was livid with fury. He asked if I thought he was made of money and could buy top-hats like matches. I'm glad you've come. Michael has broken off the engagement, and I expected you rather. A friend of his--rather a nice boy called Maurice Avery--is coming round this evening to arrange about selling everything. I shall have quite a lot of money. Let's go away and be quiet after all this bother and fuss."

"Look here," Sylvia said. "Before we go any further I want to know one thing. Is Claude going to drop in and out of your life at critical moments for the rest of time?"

"Oh no! We've quarreled now. He'll never forgive me over the hat. Besides, he puts some stuff on his hair now that I don't like. Sylvia, do come and look at my frocks. I've got some really lovely frocks."

Maurice Avery, to whom Sylvia took an instant dislike, came in presently. He seemed to attribute the ruin of his friend's hopes entirely to a failure to take his advice: "Of course this was the wrong house to start with. I advised him to take one at Hampstead, but he wouldn't listen to me. The fact is Michael doesn't understand women."

"Do you?" Sylvia snapped.

Avery looked at her a moment, and said he understood them better than Michael.

"Of course n.o.body can ever really understand a woman," he added, with an instinct of self-protection. "But I advised him not to leave Lily alone. I told him it wasn't fair to her or to himself."

"Did you give him any advice about disposing of the furniture?" Sylvia asked.

"Well, I'm arranging about that now."

"Sorry," said Sylvia. "I thought you were paving Michael's past with your own good intentions."

"You mustn't take any notice of her," Lily told Avery, who was looking rather mortified. "She's rude to everybody."

"Well, shall I tell you my scheme for clearing up here?" he asked.

"If it will bring us any nearer to business," Sylvia answered, "we'll manage to support the preliminary speech."

A week or two later Avery handed Lily 270, which she immediately transferred to Sylvia's keeping.

"I kept the Venetian mirror for myself," Avery said. "You know the one with the jolly little cupids in pink and blue gla.s.s. I shall always think of you and Ararat House when I look at myself in it."

"I suppose all your friends wear their hearts on your sleeve," Sylvia said. "That must add a spice to vanity."

Mrs. Gainsborough was very much upset at the prospect of the girls' going away.

"That comes of having me picture painted. I felt it was unlucky when he was doing it. Oh, dearie me! whatever shall I do?"

"Come with us," Sylvia suggested. "We're going to France. Lock up your house, give the key to the copper on the beat, put on your gingham gown, and come with us, you old sea-elephant."

"Come with you?" Mrs. Gainsborough gasped. "But there, why shouldn't I?"

"No reason at all."

"Why, then I will. I believe the captain would have liked me to get a bit of a blow."

"Anything to declare?" the customs official asked at Boulogne.

"I declare I'm enjoying myself," said Mrs. Gainsborough, looking round her and beaming at France.

CHAPTER X.

When she once more landed on French soil, Sylvia, actuated by a cla.s.sic piety, desired to visit her mother's grave. She would have preferred to go to Lille by herself, for she lacked the showman's instinct; but her companions were so horrified at the notion of being left to themselves in Paris until she rejoined them, that in the end she had to take them with her.

The sight of the old house and the faces of some of the older women in the quartier conjured up the past so vividly for Sylvia that she could not bring herself to make any inquiries about the rest of her family. It seemed as if she must once more look at Lille from her mother's point of view and maintain the sanct.i.ty of private life against the curiosity or criticism of neighbors. She did not wish to hear the details of her father's misdoing or perhaps be condoled with over Valentine. The simplest procedure would have been to lay a wreath upon the grave and depart again. This she might have done if Mrs. Gainsborough's genial inquisitiveness about her relatives had not roused in herself a wish to learn something about them. She decided to visit her eldest sister in Brussels, leaving it to chance if she still lived where Sylvia had visited her twelve years ago.

"Brussels," said Mrs. Gainsborough. "Well, that sounds familiar, anyway. Though I suppose the sprout-gardens are all built over nowadays. Ah dear!"

The building over of her father's nursery-garden and of many other green spots she had known in London always drew a tear from Mrs. Gainsborough, who was inclined to attribute most of human sorrow to the utilitarian schemes of builders.

"Yes, they found the Belgian hares ate up all the sprouts," Sylvia said. "And talking of hair," she went on, "what's the matter with yours?"

"Ah, well, there! Now I meant to say nothing about it. But I've left me mahogany wash at home. There's a calamity!"

"You'd better come out with me and buy another bottle," Sylvia advised.

"You'll never get one here," said Mrs. Gainsborough. "This is a wash, not a dye, you must remember. It doesn't tint the hair; it just brings up the color and gives it a nice gloss."

"If that's all it does, I'll lend you my shoe-polish. Go along, you wicked old fraud, and don't talk to me about washes. I can see the white hairs coming out like stars."

Sylvia found Elene in Brussels, and was amazed to see how much she resembled her mother nowadays. M. Durand, her husband, had prospered and he now owned a large confectioner's shop in the heart of the city, above which Madame Durand had started a pension for economical tourists. Mrs. Gainsborough could not get over the fact that her hostess did not speak English; it struck her as unnatural that Sylvia should have a sister who could only speak French. The little Durands were a more difficult problem. She did not so much mind feeling awkward with grown-up people through having to sit dumb, but children stared at her so, if she said nothing; and if she talked, they stared at her still more; she kept feeling that she ought to stroke them or pat them, which might offend their mother. She found ultimately that they were best amused by her taking out two false teeth she had, one of which once was lost, because the eldest boy would play dice with them.

Elene gave Sylvia news of the rest of the family, though, since all the four married sisters were in different towns in France and she had seen none of them for ten years, it was not very fresh news. Valentine, in whose career Sylvia was most interested, was being very well entretenue by a ma.r.s.eillais who had bought her an apartment that included a porcelain-tiled bath-room; she might be considered lucky, for the man with whom she had left Lille had been a rascal. It happened that her news of Valentine was fresh and authentic, because a lilleoise who lived in Bruxelles had recently been obliged to go to Ma.r.s.eilles over some legal dispute and, meeting Valentine, had been invited to see her apartment. It was a pity that she was not married, but her position was the next best thing to marriage. Of the Ba.s.sompierres Elene had heard nothing for years, but what would interest Sylvia were some family papers and photographs that Sylvia's father had sent to her as the eldest daughter when their mother died, together with an old-fashioned photograph of their grandmother. From these papers it seemed that an English milord and not Ba.s.sompierre had really been their grandfather. Sylvia being half English already, it might not interest her so much, but for herself to know she had English blood l'avait beaucoup impressione, so many English tourists came to her pension.

Sylvia looked at the daguerreotype of her grandmother, a gla.s.s faintly bloomed, the likeness of a ghost indeed. She then had loved an Englishman; her mother, too; herself.... Sylvia packed the daguerreotype out of sight and turned to look at a golden shawl of a material rather like crepe de Chine, which had been used to wrap up their mother when she was a baby. Would Sylvia like it? It was no use to Elene, too old and frail and faded. Sylvia stayed in Brussels for a week and left with many promises to return soon. She was glad she had paid the visit; for it had given back to her the sense of continuity which in the shifting panorama of her life she had lost, so that she had come to regard herself as an unreal person, an exception in humanity, an emotional freak; this separation from the rest of the world had been irksome to Sylvia since she had discovered the possibility of her falling in love, because it was seeming the cause of her not being loved. Henceforth she would meet man otherwise than with defiance or accusation in her eyes; she, too, perhaps would meet a lover thus.