Daphne in Fitzroy Street/Chapter 17

by E. Nesbit

 

“YOU!” she said.

She could not get up to greet him. The hidden pink feet embarrassed.

“Did you not expect me?” he asked. “Did not Vorontzoff——”

He came to her with hands outstretched. To put her hands in his was the simplest thing, and she did it. He seemed to her like a dream come alive—a dream that she had had when she was a child, a very long time ago.

“Mr. Vorontzoff told me—a friend,” she said. “I did not know it would be you.” And, on that, got her hands away. “Do sit down,” she went on hurriedly, “he has gone out to buy lunch. And how is everyone? Did you ever meet anyone else in the chestnut tree?”

That was a false move, and she felt it, even as she felt that the chestnut tree was not to him, as it was to her, a childish memory of a school-girl romance, but a reality, a thing to be reckoned with.

“So my princess hasn’t forgotten?” he said, tenderly, gaily. “Oh, yes, I’ve met Columbine and Madeleine and Alberte. I know them all.”

“You must tell me all about them,” she said, in her most conventional tone; “it seems so long since I left school. Why don’t they tell me?”

“It is,” he said, “very, very long. Why did you never answer my letters?”

“I never had any letters.” One's life, then, it seemed, was to be spent in answering questions about letters—her own or another’s.

“I wrote,” he said, “many times.”

“I never had your letters.”

“Then you must have thought—oh, princess, what must you have thought?”

“I never,” said Daphne, very deliberately, “thought about you at all.”

“That,” said he, troubled now as much as she, “is not true. Why are you saying things that are not true?”

“Do sit down,” she said, indicating a remote chair over which a red robe lay. If He should come in, and find this man hanging over her—what might he not think? But of course he wouldn’t come. He wasn’t the friend who had wanted to meet her.

Slowly St. Hilary walked to the allotted chair and sat down.

“I see,” he said slowly, “you aren’t my princess any more. Or—you’ve been enchanted by some wicked magician.”

She laughed, and hoped that her laugh sounded more natural to his ears than to her own.

“Oh,” she said, “one leaves off playing at princesses when one leaves school.”

It was a horrible position. She hated Vorontzoff for having placed her in it. And no doubt with deadly Russian discreetness he had gone out for that lunch just at the time when he knew St. Hilary would come. He would probably come back in five or six hours “But you’ve got lots to tell me,” she said. “How did you meet Mr. Vorontzoff?”

“Columbine told me you knew him. I looked him up directly I came to town. He’s a celebrity, you know. Anyone may call on him. I bought two of his pictures and asked him to ask you to come here—and to ask me too. Was I wrong?”

“Of course not,” she said with false heartiness and her eyes on the door. “But why didn’t you come and call on me, like a reasonable person, instead of arranging this wonderful surprise party?”

“I didn’t know but that your home might be infested with aunts and uncles. And I thought you’d like the surprise party. Was I wrong?” he asked again.

“No—of course I’m frightfully pleased,” she answered with hurried politeness, “but it seemed a little odd till you explained it.”

“Are you ill?” he asked, breaking a silence in which she had had time to wonder again for the thousandth time who was the lady whom the door hinge had shown to the bearer of her letter.

“No—why?”

“Because you’re changed. You’re not my princess any more,” he said from the far-off chair to which she had exiled him.

“One can’t go on being people’s princesses forever,” she said, and made herself smile. “I was a child then. Lots of things have happened to me since then.”

“I see they have,” he said. “Do you mind telling me—I know I’ve no right to ask—but you promised me you wouldn’t—wouldn’t play at enchanted princesses for a year. You haven’t, have you?”

“Of course I haven’t,” she said, her chin in the air. “I promised, didn’t I?” But in her heart she was wishing feverishly, longingly, that the man who had made her advance her lips to his kiss had ever wanted her to take part with him in such beautiful play. He had not. He had only wanted——

St. Hilary was leaning back in that remote chair, his eyes fixed gloomily on the ground. She looked at him. He was good to look at, and he loved her. He was far, far handsomer than a dozen Henrys, and he loved her. To him she was a fairy princess—to Henry she was—what?—a desirable model?

Some instinct of which she was completely unconscious, some instinct of prudence, of insurance, some shrinking from the burning of boats made her say:

“I know I must seem perfectly horrid, but I do hate surprises. Don’t think me absolutely hateful. And I got so wet, getting here, and I’m so tired and—— If I’d known you were coming—you see, don’t you? No, please stay where you are.”

He stayed. His handsome face took on a rather mulish look.

“I see,” he said slowly, “that nothing is as I thought it would be. But I won’t bother you. Rest till Vorontzoff comes back. I won’t talk. I want to think.”

At first Daphne was grateful for the silence, but soon it began to be more embarrassing than his words had been. To have this man sitting on that chair behind the door screen, looking at her—this man who, over the head of Doris, had kissed her. She sought hurriedly in her troubled mind for something to say. Something true yet not unkind. And she could find nothing. Such a silence as this could not be broken by such banalities as were all she could command.

“What a day—oh, what a horrible day,” she told herself. But to have told him this would not have mended matters, and the silence endured. What broke it at last was the sound of feet on the steps outside. Daphne breathed an almost audible sigh of relief. Vorontzoff and the lunch would be shields. If only he would not be tactful.

And then Henry was in the room, his hat thrown in a corner, coming toward her with hands held out as St. Hilary’s had been and—“Well, my lovely lily!”—on those lips that were so smooth and soft.

And even as he spoke, though his eyes never left Daphne, he perceived the other man. He came on without change of voice or face or gait. “What godlike chance brings——” Then he stopped short.

“A thousand pardons, Miss Carmichael,” he said, in exactly the right tones. “I’m blind with the rain and the wind—I thought you were Miss Joyce, who’s sitting for my Love Lily picture. How delightful to find you here. How do you do?”

He held out one hand now—there was no lingering about the withdrawal of it.

“What ghastly weather, isn’t it? There was to have been a picnic today, wasn’t there? But of course in this rain——” Here he appeared to become conscious of the presence of St. Hilary, who had risen.

“Mr. Henry, Mr. St. Hilary,” said Daphne. “Mr. Vorontzoff has gone out to get lunch.”

The two men exchanged guarded bows.

“Queer little place, this of Vorontzoff’s,” said Henry, conversationally.

“Delightful,” said St. Hilary, conventionally.

“There will be a picnic after all,” said Henry; “meals in studios are always rather like picnics, aren’t they?”

“I’m afraid I have no experience,” said St. Hilary.

“Have you any experience yet, Miss Carmichael?” he asked, and she wondered why, since it was at a studio supper that he had first met her. Or perhaps he had forgotten that?

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’ve been to lots of studio parties. They’re great fun, aren’t they?”

Oh, but this was difficult! If only Vorontzoff would come back. Suppose his Russian discreetness should prolong itself for hours and hours. How was she to get away? She tucked her bare feet more carefully under her chair and hoped that no one had noticed the brown shoes drying on the hearth.

“Mr. Vorontzoff and Mr. Henry are going to have an exhibition in the autumn,” she told St. Hilary.

“I am sure it will be very interesting.”

“I am afraid not to the ordinary person,” Henry could not help saying.

“Mr. St. Hilary admires Mr. Vorontzoff’s work very much,” Daphne went on laboriously; “he has bought two of his pictures.”

“Ah, yes,” said Henry, in the tones of politeness overlying a blank lack of interest.

“Have you seen Mr. Seddon lately?” Daphne went on, desperately. It seemed very important that there should be no silences. Surely the others must see this, too. They might have helped a little, she thought, and looked at one and the other resentfully. Both men saw and understood the look, but it was St. Hilary who answered it.

“There were wonderful doings at the Distribution des Prix,” he said. “I was invited, with monsieur, of course. Your friend Miss Columbine got all the first prizes except those that Madeleine got. I knew Miss Carmichael when she was at school,” he made himself say, for Daphne’s sake.

“You were fortunate,” said Henry, in tones that robbed the words of all meaning.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Daphne—“the prizes I mean,” she was silly enough to add. “Madame always gives heaps of first prizes to the girls who are leaving. She thinks it makes other parents send their girls. And were the prizes all gilding and as big as tea-trays, just as they used to be? You’ve no idea, Mr. Henry, how big and thin and gilded French prizes are.”

“It must be most amusing,” said Henry. The other two might try as they would. “It’s no use trying to include him in this silly talk,” Daphne told herself, “but thank heaven he isn’t all over charcoal today. There’s always something to be thankful for.” She felt, somehow, suddenly, less wretched. Henry was here, at any rate. To be where he was was already enough to change the colour of the world. She gave up the attempt to draw him into the conversation, and talked with St. Hilary of the school and the girls and a thousand little things that Henry knew not of. Presently it began to be a pleasure to her to show him that she could talk to someone else in his presence, as though he were not there.

Henry walked quietly round the studio, turning back the canvases that leaned there against the wall, and looking down at their painted faces. Presently he strolled up to the hearth where St. Hilary, an arm on the mantelpiece, was talking down to Daphne, immovable in her chair.

“I’m afraid I can’t stay longer,” he said to her. “Would you be kind enough to tell our friend, if he ever returns, that I was sorry to miss him—but time is time and light is light.”

“I’ll tell him,” said Daphne, but her eyes implored. “Must you go? He’s sure to be back in a minute.”

“I must go,” he said, looking at her as one looks at an unattractive stranger whose petty question one is obliged to answer. “I have learned to bow to the inevitable. Good-bye, Miss Carmichael. Good-bye, Mr. St. Hilary.”

And he was gone.

“Is he any good as an artist?” St. Hilary asked, as one who realised that the other could not possibly be any good in any other capacity.

“I don’t know,” said Daphne; “he’s supposed to be Really Great. I’ve hardly seen anything of his, but I like the ones I have seen.”

“He must be pretty good if his work’s going to count for anything beside Vorontzoff’s,” said St. Hilary—“or perhaps our excellent Russian wants a foil.”

“I didn’t think you were like that,” said Daphne, simply.

“I’m not, of course,” St. Hilary obligingly explained. “Do you never say things just to annoy other people?”

“No,” said Daphne—“at least——”

“Exactly,” said he, “so you understand. Look here, princess, all the green chestnut dreams are shattered to bits, scattered to the winds. It’s all over. I was a fool to think it all meant anything to you.”

“Oh, it did,” said she, reproachfully, “only I——”

“Whichever way you put it, I was a fool,” he persisted. “But one thing I can’t and won’t stand. And that’s your being afraid of me.”

“I’m not,” she assured him, “afraid of anybody.”

“I mean,” he said, “that however little there was in the green chestnut dream, there was enough in it to make me forever your friend. Blot out everything that doesn’t belong to that—there was little enough, God knows. Give me your hand, and let’s be friends. Tell me all about the child.”

And Daphne, reassured and almost at ease, was telling, when the Russian returned with paper bags, and an air of having only just gone out for a moment.

“You come to arrive—good!” he cried with gestures of welcome made awkward by the parcels; “and here I have in my arms the déjeuner.”

“Mr. Henry has been here,” said Daphne; “he said he was sorry not to see you, but time was time and light was light.”

“Alas, this dear Henry,” said Vorontzoff, bundling down the parcels among the litter on the model’s throne, “ah, there is a genius par exemple, Monsieur St. Hilaire, a true genius. When we have our little expositiondejeunerthen the world will know what genius it has ignored.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t much faith in ignored geniuses,” St. Hilary said. “If a man’s worth anything the world knows it.”

“Poof!” The Russian snapped his fingers immediately under the other’s nose. “You are infidel to all progress. It must that some be first. The prophets, the pioneers to the beginning no one to them believes. You are atheist. You deny the Spirit of God.”

“Have you a tablecloth?” St. Hilary asked.

“I have the idea that mademoiselle gave me such things,” said the Russian, “but all things itself conceal. Mademoiselle, of pity! Where are the nappes?”

He drew near to ask the questiondejeunerand she spoke low.

“Talk with him over there,” she said; “go to fetch water—what you will—I wish to replace my stockings.”

“Ah, foolish that I be!” said the Russian aloud. “Monsieur, let us talk a little behind the screen. Mademoiselle desires to shoe herself. Her stockings that were so wet, are dry now, and her naked feet are no doubt cold.”

The two men turned away, leaving Daphne ashamed of having been ashamed in this matter of her bare feet that the Russian treated so simply.

The stockings weren’t dry, of course. Still, that couldn’t be helped. With a conscious and quite successful effort Daphne, as she drew them on, put away at the back of her mind all thought of Henry. That would keep. She freed her mind from it but she could feel it lie heavy on her heart. Heavy—yet not for worlds would she have been without it. Its weight was as the weight of a sleeping child on its mother’s breast.

This gift of being able to put aside, at will, the troubling things of life, laying them apart till a more convenient season, not cowardly, shrinking from them, but bravely holding them for a time at arm’s length, this gift is one of the best that the gods bestow. Courage it is not, but it needs courage. It is not self-control only, though self-control is needed. Needed, too, are imagination, the power to discriminate, to weigh, to appraise. It is a gift that stamps its owner brave, and keeps him young.

The stockings were put on; the tablecloth was found, behind some leaning picks and mattocks, crumpled into a ball. Altogether, newspapers were deemed neater, more satisfying.

The food the Russian had bought was bread and cold meat, large rounds of purple sausage spotted with squares of white fat, butter in a greasy paper, bananas, dry, limp biscuits. Yet they made a merry meal. St. Hilary began to see again his princess as he and she washed up the impossible crockery—to which the dry remnants of food weeks old stuck like glue. Daphne herself felt the pleasure that was always hers in the exhibition of competence. To her, to be mistress of whatever she undertook, was in itself happiness. To control all things, events, herself, others, this was her ideal. In her relations with Henry she could control neither events, nor him, nor herself. She allowed herself the thought as she took the seat of honour before the newspaper-covered table. “If it had been this other man, I should never have known what it feels like to fail.”

They were gay, with the rain peppering the skylight and the fire glowing in its brick corner. St. Hilary had much to tell of the school, of Columbine, of Madeleine.

“How did I come to know her? Oh, I sent a note by Marie Thibault, asking for an assignation.”

“In the chestnut?” Daphne asked.

“Where else? And your friend came. We met many times to talk of our absent friends. An inexhaustible subject, is it not, Monsieur Vorontzoff? Also she told me secrets, swearing me to secrecy. My tongue itches to tell them, Miss Carmichael, but my lips are sealed.”

“Secrets?”

“Ah, that intrigues you. She insisted that she herself must tell you. She writes often, doesn’t she?”

“She hasn’t written at all lately,” said Daphne, and was sorry that she had not before been sorry that her friend had not written.

Then there was coffee, and talk, and in the end the Russian asked for, and got, an invitation to tea in Fitzroy Street. It was impossible not to stretch it to include Mr. St. Hilary. And then it was time to go.

“You permit me to conduct you to your house?” the Russian asked.

“Or me?” said St. Hilary. “I am going that way.”

“I should like you both to come,” said Daphne, warmly, “but I want to go home in a hansom, and three people can’t ride in a hansom. If Mr. St. Hilary didn’t mind getting one—I think it’s stopped raining—I saw some in a side street near a station—Stepney, I think it was.”

When he was gone, she turned to the Russian.

“I was sad when I came to-day,” she said earnestly. “I expect I talked folly. Forget it, will you? I am quite happy now.”

“Is it ce beau St. Hilaire who renders you happy?” he asked in his pitiful, pitiless, Russian way, “or is it that you have seen this dear Henry?”

“Neither,” said Daphne—“It is you who make me happy. You are so kind and you were glad to see me, and——”

“I should wish,” he said slowly, “to render you always happy. All the world I would render happy if I could, and you more than all the world.”

“I wonder,” she said, on an impulse, “whether everyone who has suffered is like you.”

“Like me?”

“So kind, so gentle—so brotherly.”

“All those who have suffered aright, little sister,” he said.

The long cab-drive back to Bloomsbury held space for the thoughts she had put aside, but she would not look at them yet. She would go through the rest of the day deaf and blind to the voice and the eyes that were waiting for her to listen and look. At night, when the others were asleep. Till then she would not.

As the cab swung into Fitzroy Street a man stepped out of a doorway, with hat raised and hand that signalled. She rattled the trap above her head, that the cabman should stop. Because the man was Henry.

“Ah!” he said, “Drive to Chelsea,” threw back the streaming apron of the cab—it was raining now harder than ever—and took the place beside her. When the glass was down, and the hansom again moving, he took her hand, let his shoulder rest against hers, not closely, yet as a shoulder that had a right to be where it was, and said:

“Now tell me all about it.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” she said, and could not cast away the comfort of that contact.

“You said you wouldn’t sit. So I came after you to Vorontzoff’s.”

“But how did you know?”

“Your cabman was venal. I asked him where you were going. I’ve lost a day’s work—aren’t you sorry?” He had unfastened her glove, and torn it off. Now her hand, cold and bare, curled in his.

“Yes—but—the cabman said there was a lady there with you.”

“My model—yes. I’ve had to pay her for the whole day. But you wrote the letter before you knew that. Why?”

“I don’t know. I thought you—I wished I—I didn’t want to see you again.”

His hand caressed her hand.

“Go on,” he told her.

“And then at Mr. Vorontzoff’s—you were—horrid!”

“I desired to impress your pink and white friend with the utter impossibility of my having meant my opening speech for you.”

“You were horrid,” said Daphne, repeating the phrase for the sake of the sweet sense of daring familiarity that it gave her.

“Only when I realised that you weren’t alone. When I came in I called you my lovely lily—what more do you want?”

“I don’t want anything,” she said, and her hand pretended to come back to her—vainly, “only it’s so hateful not to know whether you’re friends with people or not—and——”

“Do you know now?” he and his hand asked in unison.

“Yes—but——”

“Yes—but——?” Ah, if he would always speak to her like this.

“It’s all nonsense,” she said, and let her shoulder feel the touch of his.

“Yes—but?” he insisted.

“Last night—I wasn’t sure——”

“You weren’t sure?”

“I wasn’t sure—I didn’t know whether you really liked me, or whether you just wanted to make me do what you wanted.”

“I meant you to do what I wanted. Are you going to hate me for it?”

“I mean,” she said in haste, “I thought perhaps you just wanted me to sit for you—and you didn’t like not getting your own way and——”

“I don’t like not getting my own way—and——?”

“And they said you’d gone away from the theatre to get some trifle you wanted and——”

“You wouldn’t have had me tell them how much it was that I wanted? And——”

“And I thought perhaps—I don’t want to say any more—it’s all right. I’ll sit for you.”

“And you thought perhaps?” he repeated, with the inexorableness of a machine.

“I thought perhaps you didn’t like me.”

“Ah,” he said, “you thought that? Well—I do like you. I like you very much. Are you satisfied?”

His hand asked the question too. The clock tower stood up in front of them, outlined to her in rainbow-colours. All this time he had looked straight before him. Now he turned and looked at her.

“Don’t cry,” he said, very gently and aloofly. “Don’t cry. Believe me I’m not worth it.”

“Oh, yes, you are,” said Daphne, no longer mistress of herself. “Oh, I have been so miserable.”

Her head leaned toward him behind the rain-streaked window of the hansom The plash of the horse’s feet in the wet road emphasized the silence.

“Let’s have the glass up,” he said; “it’s stopped raining. I should like to point out to you the beauties of the landscape.”