Chapter 40
When Sylvia got back to Mulberry Cottage she found an invitation from Jack Airdale to dine at Richmond and go to a dance with him afterward.
Conscious from something in Michael's watchful demeanor of a development in the situation, she was pleased to be able to disquiet him by insisting that Lily should go with her.
On the way, Sylvia extracted from Lily that Michael had asked her to marry him. It took all Jack Airdale's good nature not to be angry with Sylvia that night--as she tore the world to shreds. At the moment when Lily had told her she had felt with a despair that was not communicable, as Olive's despair had been, how urgent it was to stop Michael from marrying Lily. She was not good enough for him. The knowledge rang in her brain like a discordant clangor of bells, and Sylvia knew in that moment that the real reason of her thinking this was jealousy of Lily.
The admission tortured her pride, and after a terrible night in which the memory of Olive's grief interminably dwelt upon and absorbed helped her to subst.i.tute the pretense, so pa.s.sionately invoked that it almost ceased to be a pretense, that she was opposing the marriage partly because Michael would never keep Lily faithful, partly because she could not bear the idea of losing her friend.
When, the next day, Sylvia faced Michael for the discussion of the marriage, she was quite sure not merely that he had never attracted her, but even that she hated him and, what was more deadly, despised him. She taunted him with wis.h.i.+ng to marry Lily for purely sentimental reasons, for the gratification of a morbid desire to save her. She remembered Philip, and all the hatred she had felt for Philip's superiority was transferred to Michael. She called him a prig and made him wince by speaking of Lily and herself as "tarts," exacting from the word the uttermost tribute of its vulgarity. She dwelt on Lily's character and evolved a theory of woman's owners.h.i.+p by man that drove her into such illogical arguments and exaggerated pretensions that Michael had some excuse for calling her hysterical. The dispute left Lily on one side for a time and became personal to herself and him. He told her she was jealous. In an access of outraged pride she forgot that he was referring to her jealousy about Lily, and to any one less obsessed by an idea than he was she would have revealed her secret. Suddenly he seemed to give way. When he was going he told her that she hated him because he loved Lily and hated him twice as much because his love was returned.
Sylvia felt she would go mad when Michael said that he loved Lily; but he was thinking it was because Lily loved him that she was biting her nails and glaring at him. Then he asked her what college at Oxford her husband had been at. She had spoken of Philip during their quarrel. This abrupt linking of himself with Philip restored her balance, and coolly she began to arrange in her mind for Lily's withdrawal from London for a while. Of pa.s.sion and fury there was nothing left except a calm determination to disappoint Master Michael. She remembered Olive Fanshawe's, "Like ice, dear, she was like a block of ice." She, too, was like a block of ice as she watched him walking away down the long garden.
When Michael had gone Sylvia told Lily that marriage with him was impossible.
"Why do you want to be married?" she demanded. "Was your mother so happy in her marriage? I tell you, child, that marriage is almost inconceivably dull. What have you got in common with him? Nothing, absolutely nothing."
"I'm not a bit anxious to be married," Lily protested. "But when somebody goes on and on asking, it's so difficult to refuse. I liked Claude better than I like Michael. But Claude had to think about his future."
"And what about your future?" Sylvia exclaimed.
"Oh, I expect it'll be all right. Michael has money."
"I say you shall not marry him," Sylvia almost shouted.
"Oh, don't keep on so," Lily fretfully implored. "It gives me a headache. I won't marry him if it's going to upset you so much. But you mustn't leave me alone with him again, because he worries me just as much as you do."
"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
"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.