Chapter 41
"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,
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?"