After My Fashion (7 page)

This man from Paris, for all his heavier weight of years and certainly in spite of himself and to his evident annoyance, could not, it seemed, do anything else than
lay bare his deepest soul
before her
– and in doing this he could not prevent himself, in spite of his immense vanity, from appealing to her maternal instinct. Her betrothed was always the strong elder brother, though his years were so near her own; whereas this man, twice her own age, began to look like that grown-up child which, once in every woman's life, becomes her most fatal attraction when, among all the other appeals, he at last takes to himself a palpable embodiment.

Nelly saw nothing more of her father till half the morning was over, and nothing of Robert Canyot. This hardly surprised her, as they had had a serious misunderstanding – if it
was
a misunderstanding – on their way home the night before; and she guessed he had gone off, to punish her, upon some long solitary excursion.

This is what he invariably did when anything clouded their intercourse; and his returns from these excursions had hitherto been marked by their happiest
rapprochements
.

It was in a strangely mingled mood that Nelly busied herself with her various domestic labours that morning. The sense of being most evilly hemmed in remained with her – a feeling as if she were an
unsheared sheep pushed from behind down a narrow lane of hurdles towards the fatal jump into the sheep wash – but with it all there moved within her a new delicious thrill, vague and indistinct as the scent of an unknown flower, causing her every now and then to stop in the midst of her work and stand dreaming, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, oblivious to Grace's chatter. Grace came from the West Country and was more voluble and less civilized than the local Sussex maidens. But on this particular occasion she found her young mistress singularly
distraite
. When the morning was well advanced she left the servant to prepare their mid-day meal and went out into the garden. In an old straw hat and a still older apron she set herself to weed one of the flower borders, the one which adjoined the churchyard wall.

The wall was not a low one, but by clambering up on a little ledge created by the collapse of some ancient cement she was just able to peep over it. She found it difficult to prevent herself from repeating this manoeuvre more than once. And every time she did it she had a vague hope that she might catch sight of Richard Storm standing by his grandfather's headstone.

It was somewhere about her seventh peep – she would always henceforth associate that visionary figure with the pungent smell of ivy and its queer bitterness against her mouth – that she became aware, as she rested her chin against the tiny succulent wall plants that grew in the loose mould and moss, that her father had appeared on the scene and was doing something to her mother's grave.

Cecily Moreton had not had a particularly happy life. She had been too hard-worked. But neither had she been unhappy. And Nelly had a clear recollection of a gentle soft-eyed creature bending over her pillow. She associated her mother with the Evening Hymn of Bishop Kern, the courtier-saint of King Charles the Second, and also (such is memory!) with one rare moment of passion in which the lady had flung the big hand-bell, which stood on the hall table, full against the door through which her husband had just passed! The dent in the door, though painted over, still remained. The hand that had thrown it was less distinguishable.

What was her father doing to the grave? He seemed to be prodding at it with a trowel or spud.

She ran round to the gate and hurried anxiously to the old man's
side. What he was doing was inoffensive and natural enough. He was planting a somewhat rare wild orchid, of the kind known as ‘maculata', in the grass by the side of the monument. He was indeed ‘botanizing' on his wife's grave; but with no intent except to do her honour.

He patted the earth down with the trowel and pressed it still more firmly round the drooping plant with his aged knuckles. He rose when his daughter approached, holding the trowel in his hand.

‘Come,' he said, ‘let's show them that I'm a believer in Christ, whatever I may think about that
Eidolon Vulgaris
they call God.'

He took her by the hand and led her into the church. She noticed that the other hand, the one which held the trowel, was shaking from old age.

It was not the first time he had insisted on celebrating the Anglican Mass at the noon hour.

He retired into the vestry to robe while the girl sat, sad and thoughtful, in the pew she had known since childhood. She almost expected to see him come out with the trowel still tightly clutched in his fingers; but he was quite quiet and self-possessed when he did emerge, carrying with him the sacred elements. He went through the service in English till he came to the words of consecration. These, as he always did in his solitary celebrations, he pronounced in the traditional Latin.

Nothing could surpass in reverence the passionate faith with which he then knelt down before the substance which he believed he had been permitted to transform into the actual flesh of his Redeemer.

Nelly, with her head buried in her hands, sobbed quietly and softly. Her tears were an immense relief to her. Even as she wept she felt a strange thrill of happiness rise up from some unfathomable depth. She was too feminine to fret very much with regard to the unconventionally of the thing. The rite was a mystery to her, not a doctrine; and no irregularity in its administration could lessen its power over her senses and her soul.

She rose from her knees and left the church before the service was over. She knew her father preferred her to come and go as she had a mind. In these matters he had always been singularly indulgent. She thought as she went out how curious it was that the unruly working of the human heart, its deep dark erratic plunges into the
unknown, its incurable and obstinate fantasy, could be quelled and soothed as though by some simplicity of natural healing, in the presence of this ritual.

But an idea had come to her as she had knelt there, an idea that she could not help regarding as something put into her mind by what Grace always described as They Above. She would take the opportunity of Canyot's absence to walk over to West Horthing.

She ran into the house full of recovered courage and energy, changed her dress, put on her best hat, and made haste to prepare lunch.

During the meal her father was very silent, evidently brooding upon something. He had recovered his appetite however and looked more resolute and obstinate than unhappy. Nelly could not help thinking how strange it was that such a passionate act of faith in the very secret of love itself, as that service of the Mass amounted to, should leave a person just as little able to enter into the feelings of another person as before!

The old man seemed conscious of no kind of inconsistency, of no sort of betrayal of his high office. Fierce fanatical pride made him prepared to go through anything and remain as he chose to remain.

She looked shrewdly at his face across the table; and she knew that even if she said to him, ‘I don't want to marry Robert,' it would not alter his purpose one jot. And yet he had only just changed a morsel of bread into the very body of the Lord! Men are queer creatures!

When the meal was over – he had taken not the least notice of her dress and hat – the old man retired to sleep for a while upon the horse-hair sofa in his own study. Nelly had never presumed to improve upon that sofa. It was all she ever dared to do, just to dust his books and shelves and cabinets.

He stretched himself out at full length, a queer and disconcerting figure of inflexible assurance, his feet, with their great square-toed boots, protruding from beneath an old shawl of his wife's. In repose his face assumed the expression of a very old peasant, worn out with labouring in the fields.

Nelly took a quick glance at him through the french window as she passed down the garden. Poor old man! If only he could analyse her heart as scrupulously as he analysed his Sussex flora!

Quietly and resolutely she opened the garden gate and set out
towards the Downs. West Horthing was a village poised high above the great seigniorial park, at the point where the more luxuriant foliage of the lower slopes merges into the sheep-browsed turf of the bare upper Downs.

In less than an hour after leaving her home Nelly found herself seated at the familiar dark-oak tea table, in the dainty drawing room of her friend Mrs Shotover. The old lady was alone and in just the humour to give her whole attention to the troubles of her youthful protégée.

In earlier days, before her engagement to Robert, she had been accustomed to confide all her girlish whims, caprices, hopes and ambitions to the sympathetic ears of the mistress of Furze Lodge. But during the last six months, since she had definitely accepted Mr Canyot, her visits had become fewer and fewer. For Mrs Shotover had from the very first strongly disapproved of the engagement. Nelly had tried to dispel her prejudice. Twice or even three times she had brought Mr Canyot to see her. But it was no use. The painter had refused to be what Nelly called his ‘real nice self. He had shown himself taciturn and reserved, brusque and awkward. He had refused to respond to Mrs Shotover's friendly little jests. He had even on one occasion been positively rude. And the old lady's initial prejudice against him, a thing based upon nothing more tangible than that he wasn't Altogether the gentleman', had grown into something uncommonly like hostility. The issue of it had been that Nelly had gradually dropped the habit of confiding in her old friend.

But on this occasion, long before she had satisfied her hunger on the tea-cakes and raspberry jam which Mrs Shotover produced for her especial benefit, she had poured into her ears all her troubles.

She had even, after a momentary hesitation which made the old woman want to hug her to her heart, told her the whole story of her meeting with Richard Storm.

‘Number two eh?' laughed the ancient creature. ‘Oh, that's nothing. Don't you worry about that, sweetheart. Why, at your age, my dear, it was number five with me. You were too quick to proclaim things. That was all. No harm done. In my time we weren't allowed to make fools of ourselves till Papa and Mamma had studied half the genealogies of the county. You young people are so
hasty. On today, off tomorrow – bit like Henry the Eighth, wasn't it? You all want to have religious services performed over your least flirtations. It's the influence of that domestic immoralist Robert Browning. Never marry a man called Robert, my dear. All Roberts are descended from Robert the Devil.‘

Nelly interrupted her with a laughing sigh.

‘Poor old Robert!' she murmured. ‘He'll be really hurt, I'm afraid.' The accumulated stirrings of revolt that betrayed her into this very definite bulletin of the state of her heart frightened her as she uttered it. She had really begun to put her weight, then, against the teeth of the trap? And it seemed as if they yielded a little. Or was it just a passing response to the perilous irresponsibility of her hostess?

‘Don't you worry yourself ill over any Robert. They're none of them worth it. Nor any Richard either, for the matter of that! But you may bring number two to see me if you like. I've read something of his in the
Mercure de France
. It pleased me; if I'm not confusing him with that clever Belgian – you know who I mean?'

Nelly hadn't the least idea who she meant, but she begged earnestly to be allowed to see the article in question.

‘Not I!' laughed the old woman mischievously. ‘I'm not going to corrupt your mind. Does your Richard write in his native tongue as well?'

‘Oh yes! He wrote that Life of – of – who was it now?' And Nelly felt a vivid pang of humiliation because at that moment, when she especially wanted to do so, she could
not
recall the Life of Someone, to which reference had been made during their silly quarrel in the tea shop. ‘It was those two dogs,' she muttered, blushing.

The old woman looked at her whimsically. ‘Dogs?' she cried, getting up from the table. ‘You don't mean to say that number two writes Lives of Dogs? Well, that
is
interesting.' She stooped, as they both moved towards the sofa, and addressed a great complacent tabby-cat that lay curled up in the corner of it.

‘Do you hear that, Tabbyskins? He writes Lives of Dogs. Perhaps if you're very nice to him and don't show your claws, but only purr, when he strokes your fur the wrong way, he will write your life – the Life of Mrs Tabbyskins Shotover, the great Sussex Thinker. You'll like to have your life written by a real poet,
wouldn't you my treasure? Well, my dear– ‘and turning to her young guest she pulled her affectionately down by her side and patted her on the knee'–now tell me a little more about this Mr Storm of yours. He's a gentleman, I suppose?'

Nelly smiled. “Yes, I should certainly say he is that,' she answered. ‘When you don't notice that they're
not
, they generally
are
, aren't they, Granny?'

In earlier days Mrs Shotover had encouraged her to use this endearment; and it was a sign of reconciliation that she used it now.

‘His grandfather was a D.D. and is buried in our churchyard,' the girl added with solemnity.

Mrs Shotover smiled. ‘My dear!' she cried, ‘I hope you don't think that D.D. is a mark of gentility. They used to make ‘em D.D.s when they dedicated their sermons to Queen Anne. Parson Adams was a D.D. and they used to give him his meals in kitchens and places. What was your beau's grandfather's name?'

‘Storm,' murmured Nelly, frowning a little. Then her face brightened. ‘But it says on the tombstone that Susanna was the daughter of John Molyneux Talbot.'

Mrs Shotover chuckled. ‘You've certainly got hostages for his good behaviour in your churchyard! Susanna's a good name. Though if I remember right, one of them found it difficult once to keep herself
to
herself! But Susanna Talbot is a good sound name for anybody's grandmamma. Well, my sweet child, you must bring your Stormy Petrel over here for me to scrutinize. I'll ferret him out, depend on it! I'll show him up if he's a blackguardly villain. I'll storm his defences. What did he do in the war? Did he fight? Was he in the Legion? Of course he's in love with you, my dear! Who wouldn't be? But we must be careful. We must take our time. Who knows? He may have the most obstinate little
ménage
hidden away somewhere! We mustn't have our sweet Nell made unhappy. We must go very slow. Very slow and very carefully.' And the old lady proceeded to put her caution into practice by kissing her companion as mischievously and slyly as if it were the girl's wedding morning.