Instead of the Thorn Page 9

  “No, I don’t. You haven’t learned the meaning of love yet, but your mind has become a kind of sentimental sponge which makes it receptive to a fancied emotion. Do you see what I mean?”

  “I’d rather not see,” Elizabeth said frigidly.

  “I know that. It’s your attitude towards everything that’s unpleasant. But I warn you, Elizabeth—and I speak as one who’s very fond of you—that sooner or later you’ll have to face unpleasantness. Your rosy, gossamer little world’ll be torn up, and it’ll be a shock. I don’t want to see you hurt in that way. Facts have a way of forcing themselves upon you; you’d better face ’em now, and start being honest. And, Elizabeth, I hate to see you cheating yourself. It’s rotten, and it’s cowardly.”

  Her underlip trembled; he wondered whether she were about to cry.

  “I don’t see what—all this—has got to do with—my engagement!”

  “Everything. With all his faults, Ramsay’s honest— as honest as a man can be. A bit blind, perhaps, but sincere. Doesn’t it rather stand to reason that you’ll be in danger of clashing?”

  “Stephen knows me better than you do!”

  He smiled in boundless wisdom.

  “He will, child, certainly. He’s in love with you now, and being an idealist—almost a romantic, I think—he doesn’t see any faults in you. When a man’s deeply in love, he doesn’t.”

  “I think you’re being—unkind and—and cruel, Mr. Hengist.”

  “I expect you do, and I’m sorry. If I didn’t love you I shouldn’t bother to upset you. I want you to consider well before you plunge into marriage with Ramsay. If you’re really in love with him incompatibility of temperament and ideals won’t matter. If you’re not—well, your chance of happiness is slender.”

  Elizabeth tried to capture dignity, but her voice quivered.

  “It—seems to me, Mr. Hengist, that you think—Stephen has made a mistake.”

  “I do,” he said. “He’s not your sort. You’re poles apart. I believe in affinities, you know. If you marry him you’ll very soon see the need for adaptation, and as he’s a man it’s you who’ll have to adapt yourself. Even then—oh, Elizabeth, you’re only a kid, and I’m afraid you’re going to make a mess of things!”

  “I think—it’s a matter for me to decide.”

  “Certainly it is.”

  “What is more, my father entirely approves.”

  Mr. Hengist started to say, Your father be damned, and recovered himself in time.

  “Auntie too,” Elizabeth said gently.

  “Oh, lord!” groaned Mr. Hengist.

  To Lawrence he said more, forcibly, but Lawrence put his finger-tips together and was blandly complacent. You could make no impression on him; he wanted to have Stephen, Ramsay as a son : in-law.

  And all the time Stephen was kicking against the barriers that were attendant upon engagement. Hotly he desired Elizabeth, and chafed against restraint. She was his, but not his. He could take her out in his car, to dances, to the theatre; he could sit alone with her at her home but all the time he was conscious of the convenances hedging them round and witholding Elizabeth.

  He would not take her to see Queen’s Halt. Tentatively she suggested it, and he laughed, and the blood stole up to the roots of his hair as he confessed his whimsical fancy.

  “I don’t want to take you there until you’re my wife, sweetheart. I can’t explain why not, and I suppose it sounds ridiculous, but I—well, I won’t. I’m getting incurably sentimental. All your fault, you adorable little angel. Soon I shall be seized with a longing to lift you over the threshold. Wouldn’t it be awful?”

  “I think it would be rather attractive,” she said, reflecting.

  “All right, I’ll do it, and brave the sniggers of the cook and the housemaid. It’s a bet.”

  “Would they snigger? It wouldn’t be very nice, then.”

  “Sure to. Probably think me mad. Oh, no, they’d say, Ah, well, he’s a writer, with an indulgent smile. You can do anything if you’re a writer, darling. Awfully useful. People rather expect you to be eccentric. Provided you wrote or painted they’d say, How delightfully Bohemian, if you turned up at a dinner-party in a tweed coat.”

  “Or threw kippers out of the window,” Elizabeth added, remembering.

  His eyes narrowed in a puzzled way peculiar to him.

  “What’s the joke?”

  “Mrs. Ramsay—I mean, mater—said you did that once.”

  “Did I? Oh, yes, I know! How base of mater! If I promise never to do it again can our engagement stand?”

  “Stephen, you silly!”

  “Elizabeth, you pet! When will you marry me?”

  It always came back to that. He argued until her excuses seemed foolish; her defences were weakening; she thought how masterful he was.

  “My things aren’t nearly ready yet.”

  “Damn your things, darling.”

  “I must get my trousseau together, Stephen. You know I must. You don’t want a dowdy wife, do you?”

  “Don’t care a bit as long as I get her. You don’t suppose I’m marrying your clothes, do you?”

  “Yes, but I can’t, Stephen. Not yet. Please wait just a little while. We’ve been engaged such a short time.”

  That was how it ended, always. Then at last one day he pleaded so adroitly and with such winning fervour that she named her date, promising to marry him in June, if her father consented. It would make their engagement of three months’ duration; he must admit that it was short.

  He began to plan their honeymoon; she listened breathlessly while he spoke of Paris and Brittany, or perhaps Florence, and Rome and Sicily. She was dazzled and eager. Life was beautiful.

  Lawrence put forward no objections; it was Miss Arden who begged Elizabeth to wait. Lawrence said that he should like to see his little girl married among the roses, and was she to be married from a hotel or from home?

  That diverted Miss Arden’s thoughts a little; the battle raged over Elizabeth, and in the end Lawrence won. She was to be married from a hotel, with a champagne breakfast. It was all very exciting and queer, and there was so much to be done that Elizabeth’s thoughts rarely travelled further than to the wedding itself. “Afterwards” was in the misty future; now there was her dress to be made, and her going-away frock to be chosen.

  And as the time drew nearer she began to wish that it were over, and looked forward to the actual date as a day when all the wearisome preparations should be over and she might pause to draw breath.

  Stephen grumbled at her constant preoccupation, but he submitted because he knew that soon, very soon, it would all be over, and he would be able to carry her off, away from a fussy aunt and trite father, and away from excited and admiring girl-friends.

  It seemed to him that Elizabeth had no time to give him now; she was busy trying on clothes or acknowledging presents. She was looking tired, too, and there was no sense of repose in her home. Miss Arden saw to it that everyone, including herself, was in a continual state of bustle. She enjoyed it, and spent the day running up and downstairs, forgetting first this and then that, and growing steadily wearier and, therefore, more irritable.

  When Stephen came he bore Elizabeth off in his car, motoring her out to lunch at some quiet, lovely spot, waiting on her with tender, solicitous care, treating her, she thought, as though she were made of porcelain. It was so pleasant that she found herself counting the days to her wedding, almost longing to get away from home and her strenuous aunt.

  Her bridesmaids worried her too, with their chatter and their giggling enthusiasm. Sarah was the only one of them she liked to have with her for any length of time; the others were all “nice” girls, approved of by Miss Arden.

  She saw Cynthia Ruthven many times, and Cynthia was always civil. She knew that Cynthia did not like her. Anthony was different; you could not be afraid of him, any more than you could be afraid of Mrs. Ramsay, or of Stephen’s aunt who lost all her luggage on the way to town and could still smil
e. She did not care much for Stephen’s best man, John Caryll, who spoke in a drawl and quoted unknown verses, but she knew that he was clever, and supposed, sighing, that one must make allowances for him.

  Lawrence, full of plans and importance, was in his element, and Miss Arden’s way. He criticised all Elizabeth’s clothes, to Miss Arden’s annoyance. Elizabeth knew that his taste was good, and listened to all that he had to say. Since she was soon to leave him his interference and his mannerisms hardly irritated her at all, but she wished he would not embrace her so often or so lingeringly.

  But if Lawrence was outwardly concerned only with the trivialities attached to a wedding, inwardly a greater problem was worrying him. Parental duty, before so light a burden, became suddenly heavy and brought a frown to his brows. He felt himself responsible and so carried his responsibility to Miss Arden.

  She knew that he had something on his mind by the way he fidgetted and allowed his pipe to go out. Twice he cleared his throat and seemed about to speak, yet did not. Only when Miss Arden folded up her work before going to bed did be manage to broach the question that bothered him.

  “Er—Anne!” he said casually, scraping out the bowl of his pipe.

  “Yes? What is it, Lawrence?”

  He thought, and rightly, that it was going to be difficult. Very badly he wanted to abandon his attempt, but for once sense of duty triumphed.

  “Um— Well. Er—there’s something I rather wanted to say to you. Ask you about, you know.”

  “Yes?” she said again.

  “It’s—well, of course I’m only Elizabeth’s father, and —well, you know what I mean. Naturally I can’t speak to her, but—er—well, I’ve been wondering whether we— er—oughtn’t to—er—ask someone—a—a married woman, I mean—to—to—well, have a talk with Elizabeth. Don’t you—er—think so?”

  Miss Arden sat very straight. He did not look at her, but began to fold the evening paper, fiercely. Miss Arden’s voice was dangerous.

  “I don’t think I quite understand you, Lawrence,” she said. He knew that she did understand, and was angry.

  “Well, er—I don’t know—how much—er, I mean, what Elizabeth knows, but she—um—I can’t help feeling that perhaps if Mrs. Cockburn talked to her a bit—before she’s married ...”

  “May I ask why Mrs. Cockburn is to be put in my place?” said Miss Arden icily.

  “Well, but—hang it all, Anne, you’re not a married woman, and—and it’s not a job for a—a spinster.”

  “I can assure you, Lawrence, that I am perfectly capable of telling Elizabeth all that she ought to know. I fail to see that this is your department.”

  “No, er—quite. Only Elizabeth hasn’t got a mother, and—well, she’s very—er—innocent. Besides it’s not— not a pleasant task for you, and—”

  “I am not at all likely to shirk my responsibilities.”

  “Now, Anne—now, really, Anne, did I suggest such a thing? All I meant was—”

  “You would be most ill-advised to ask Mrs. Cockburn to interfere—or anyone else for that matter. A great deal of nonsense is talked nowadays on this subject. Provided the man is nice it is most undesirable that girls should know too much. You may take it from me, Lawrence, that it simply puts silly ideas into their heads.”

  Lawrence wanted to tell Anne that as she had never been married she knew nothing about it, but he dared not.

  “Yes, yes, I daresay. But at the same time I don’t think it’s—well, fair.”

  “Really, Lawrence! I should never have thought that you would have fallen for this modern craze of telling girls everything.”

  “It’s not exactly— What I mean is, it isn’t fair to—”

  “If you haven’t enough faith in Stephen—”

  “Not fair to him,” Lawrence said surprisingly.

  Miss Arden stared at him with uplifted brows.

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Not fair to either of them—beastly for Stephen.”

  “I think you’re making mountains out of molehills.”

  Lawrence was silent, wondering whether this were indeed so. If it were, his course was easy to see: he could relapse into inanition. After all, he supposed that Anne must know Elizabeth better than he did, and could be trusted to do and say what was right.

  “Well, anyhow, Anne, you must find out just what Elizabeth—”

  “My dear Lawrence, you can safely leave it to me,” Miss Arden interrupted. She spoke with finality.

  “As long as you tell her what she ought to know—”

  “I shall do all that is necessary.”

  Lawrence sighed with fast returning comfort of mind. “I expect you know best, Anne. I leave it to you.” He went to bed with the pleasant conviction of having performed a disagreeable duty. Incidentally, he had sloughed his responsibility. It rested on Anne’s shoulders now, and on her conscience.

  Chapter Eleven

  Elizabeth awoke on her wedding-morning with an odd feeling of mingled excitement and foreboding. As she lay-in bed she could see her new trunks, one open, with her evening-frocks, carefully folded in tissue-paper, bulging up out of the tray; the other locked and strapped, and with the initials E. R. shining on the side, in big, black letters. E. R.—Elizabeth Ramsay. How funny it sounded, and how unreal. She repeated it to herself, half-dreaming, and then fell to wondering how Stephen felt this morning; whether he too were excited, and whether he knew, or guessed, that underneath his bride-to-be’s excitement, vague melancholy lurked, and a certain shrinking.

  Her mind wandered back to last night. She and Aunt Anne had laid the last things in those trunks, and had marked the last batch of handkerchiefs. And while she had packed that taffeta dance-frock that peeped above the side of the box Aunt Anne had talked, very quickly and mysteriously, of things that Elizabeth only partially comprehended.

  Thinking it over now, Elizabeth subconsciously compared her aunt’s words to the pills she had been made to swallow in her childhood, smothered in raspberry jam. You had never tasted the pills: there was too much jam, but you had felt that they were there, and that they were nasty. Just so had Aunt Anne talked last night, telling you nothing, but hinting that you were about to enter on quite a new life, filled with new experiences, some of them not pleasant.

  She had wanted to know more, and yet she had been thankful when Aunt Anne stopped. She had been shy, and red in the face, and she made Elizabeth shy, more withdrawn into herself.

  How dismal her room looked, dismantled, and with one wardrobe door yawning to show dark emptiness within. How queer to think that this was the last time she would lie in bed in her room, waiting to be called. She had never before realised how much she loved her room, everything there was in it, and its exquisite privacy. That brought her to another disturbing thought. She tried to picture Stephen here, and thought how impossible it was; how impossible, and how embarrassing. Probably she would not feel that in a new, strange room. And yet . . . Hurriedly she switched her mind away from that picture, and turned on her side to look at the bridal dress, laid over the back of a chair. How pretty it was, with its soft, dull folds, and its long train. It would be nice to wear her mother’s veil, too, and to carry the sheaf of lilies that would arrive this morning. The going-away frock was packed in that suit-case; she would change from her wedding-dress to that in the hotel. It was queer to think that even your brushes and combs were new, a wedding present from Aunt Anne. It was as though you became a different person all at once when you had a fitted dressing-case of your own, and threw away all your old clothes.

  The housemaid came with a can of hot water, and congratulated Elizabeth as she pulled up the blinds. Everyone seemed to think that this was the happiest day of your life; no one realised how mixed were your feelings.

  She got up, and slowly dressed, putting on an old skirt and a knitted jumper. Stephen’s present to her lay in the flat velvet case on the dressing-table. He had brought it yesterday, but she thought she would not wear it unti
l she changed into her wedding-dress. But she opened the case, so that while she brushed her hair she could look at the long string of pearls, and occasionally touch them.

  She was to he married at twelve, so there would not be much time to attend to all the countless little jobs that were left. Perhaps that was as well. If you had nothing to do you might brood, and grow unhappy at the thought of leaving your home.

  Lawrence looked unfamiliar at the breakfast-table, already dressed, save for the flower in his button-hole. When Elizabeth entered, he said, Here she is! as though he had been anxiously awaiting her. Miss Arden rose and kissed her with tears in her eyes, and said, My darling. Elizabeth clung to her for a moment, and then turned to open her letters.

  The morning passed in a dream. More presents came and had to be acknowledged. She had to ring up the shop that was supplying her shoes, and tell them to send at once. Then Sarah appeared, ready, as she said, for the fray. Sarah was going to help her to dress, with Miss Arden; Sarah was cheerful, and full of jokes; she made Elizabeth laugh.

  The orange-blossom was exotic in scent, and heavy. They fixed her wreath over her veil and coaxed her hair into curls about her ears.

  “How pale you are, my darling!” Miss Arden sighed.

  “Rot!” said Sarah briskly. “Now for the pearls! Elizabeth, you lucky little beast!”

  The pearls lay milk-white against her neck, and rose slightly with the heave and fall of her breast. The lilies lay upon the table, tied with white satin ribbon, and beside them her long kid gloves reposed chastely between folds of tissue paper.

  They told her to look at herself in the glass. She saw a stranger, white and with apprehensive eyes.

  “It hangs well,” she said, in a gasp. “I think—if you’d put a pin just there ...”

  Then Sarah said she must fly; someone came to take the trunks to the station cloakroom; Miss Arden hurried away to put the finishing touches to her own toilette.

  Elizabeth wandered about her room, to see that nothing had been forgotten. How funny it would be to see Stephen in a cut-away coat and top-hat! Yesterday when he came he had said that his boot-maker hadn’t sent yet. She wondered whether he had had to ring up too, and whether it was an unlucky sign. Stephen had said that he was getting the wind up, but that he looked to John to pull him through. Perhaps John would pull her through too; he looked as though he would be able to do anything.