III
If a sister knows not a brother’s heart he has none to know.
If a sister knows not a brother’s heart he has none to know.
If a sister knows not a brother’s heart he has none to know.
If a sister knows not a brother’s heart he has none to know.
“Dearest Sibyl,”wrote Marcus, “why didn’t you tell me you were in London and taking Diana to her first dance? I had always meant to give her a pearl necklace for her coming-out ball. I will take her, of course, while you are abroad, on one condition, and that is that she isn’t always rushing off to her aunt in the country. I dislike that woman, as you know. I dislike all strong-minded, self-opinionated women. You are quite right, she is no fit companion for a girl of Diana’s age. Who has a better right to Diana than I have? I can’t have Miss Carston interfering. Sibyl, my dear, I am longing to see you.”
Hardly had he written the words when the telephone bell rang at his elbow.
He lifted the receiver and heard Sibyl’s voice telling him he was a darling old owl. In answer to his gentle reproof she said, Of course she had written to tell him she was bringing Diana to London, but she had forgotten to post the letter! Couldn’t he have guessed that? There was the same tenderness in the voice there had always been. She used the same absurd endearments she had always used.He knew she must be unchanged. Might she come and see him? Now? At once? She would!
He put back the receiver—and was astonished at his emotion. The force of his feelings shocked him. He had imagined himself past caring for anything very much. His life was so easy—so well ordered—so few demands were made upon him, except for money—and those were easily met. There was nothing to disturb him—nothing to excite him—except perhaps now and then a rather bigger venture than usual in the city—which as a rule meant more money (he was lucky) with which to buy china, glass, prints, anything he liked, and to his manifold likes his room testified. His house was beautiful and the things in it were chosen for their beauty. For these things he had come to care because he had been left alone in the world. He liked to think of himself as neglected. He had felt for his sister a deep affection and she had chosen to marry and leave him.
He couldn’t compete for her love. He never competed. Even as a collector he had suffered from this amiable inability to assert himself. Now he deputed others less sensitive to buy for him. In his young days, before he had gone to America, he remembered at an auction losing a vase he had particularly wanted. He had allowed himself to be outbidden by a girl with wide, grey eyes—whowore dogskin gloves. He could have outbidden her, but something had moved him to pity. Her gloves probably—they betrayed such a lack of social knowledge. It was a blue vase he would have bought. He loved the colour of it—the feel of it. She could have known nothing of the feel of it, for she held it in gloved hands, for which lack of feeling and understanding he pitied her—pitied her ignorance. She held the vase upside down to look at the mark: even about that she was undecided—or else she was short-sighted, which probability the clearness of her eyes questioned. Having examined the mark, she handed the vase back to the man from whom she had taken it and sharply bid a figure to which Marcus could have gone if he had wished. But he had not. So the vase became hers and she looked him straight in the eyes—and her eyes said “Beaten!”
“Goth!” thought Marcus as he recalled the scene. “She held the vase in gloved hands. Vandal—nice grey-eyed, clean, ignorant woman—” But he had thought of her oftener than he knew in those days, bemuse for a certain time he had thought of her every time he had seen a woman whose eyes were not grey.
Marcus, thinking now only of his sister, walked to a mirror that hung on the wall between two windows and looked at himself anxiously. Wouldshe find him changed? At forty-six he was bound to look different, a little grey, of course. That did not matter, so long as she was not grey. He lit a cigarette; then put it down unsmoked, remembering that as a girl she had hated the smell of tobacco. Then he went to the window and ran up the blind; then pulled it down again halfway: not too strong a light, he decided; and pulled all the blinds down halfway. It would be kinder to Sibyl. Or should he pull them right up and face the worst? Leave her to face the light? A taxi stopped in the street below. It was absurd, but he was too nervous to go down and meet her and he counted the seconds it would take Pillar to get upstairs, to open the door. One! He must have been waiting in the hall. Supposing she were grey-haired, old, and wrinkled—or fat—? How should he keep it from her that he was shocked, distressed, pained? The door opened and in a moment two arms were round his neck. He almost said, “Where is your mother?”—was delighted he should almost have said it; wished he had really said it. What prettier compliment could he have paid this delightful being he held in his arms?
She was still young—still brown-haired—still impulsive. He held her at arm’s length—Still in love with Eustace! He could see that: no woman remains so young who is not in love.
“Marcus, Marcus, you dear funny old thing!”
“Why funny?” he asked, gently disengaging himself from her arms; “let me look at you again.”
With a feeling of apprehension he knew to be absurd, he looked again, gaining courage as he looked. Had he overestimated the youthfulness of her appearance? Did not her pallor detract just a little from the radiance that had been her greatest beauty? Had he missed wrinkles? Yes, one or two—finely drawn, put in with a light hand, emphasizing only the passage of smiles—nothing more. If she had lost anything in looks she had gained much in expression. He might have left the blinds up. Her eyes were large. There were women he knew whose eyes got smaller as they grew older; that he could not have borne. Sibyl’s eyes were just as they had always been. They had lost naturally something of their look of childlike questioning. That he did not mind. The childlike woman he had long ceased to admire. He read here true womanliness; a depth of real understanding, and a certain knowledge of the big things in life—things that mattered.
“Sit down,” he said, and he drew her down on to the sofa beside him. “She looked like a rose, did she?”
“My Diana?”
Marcus nodded. “Pillar saw her.”
“Did he say she looked like a rose? Well, then it must have been very evident.”
“Not necessarily,” said Marcus, unconsciously championing Pillar. Not that he altogether trusted Pillar’s taste. He had shown in the Louvre, Marcus remembered, a weakness for Rubens’s women. He might have admired the consummate technique of a great master while deploring a certain coarseness in his choice of subjects, but he had not done so—
“Is she pretty?” asked Marcus.
“She’s rather delicious.”
“When is she coming to see me?”
“At any moment, but she’s a will-o’-the-wisp. She comes and goes as she wills.”
“She’s slight, then?”
“Oh, slight! You could pull her through a ring.”
Marcus was glad of that.
“Now tell me about your dear self, Marcus.”
There was so little to tell, he said.
“Not when everything interests me—Give me a cigarette.”
“But you used not to—” he began, handing her his cigarette case.
“Smoke? No—but Eustace likes me to sit with him, and we smoke—you get to like it in hot climates.”
“I shouldn’t have let you smoke if you had been mine.”
“No?” she laughed gently. “Dear old Marcus!”
Looking at Sibyl, and finding her so perfectly satisfying to his artistic sense, he fell to wondering what Diana was really like. And whom she was like? He dared not ask. He had no wish to hear she was like her father. She could not be like her mother or the papers would be bound to have got hold of it. He was glad they hadn’t—but still girls far less prettywereadvertised.
“I’m so glad,” said Sibyl; “it shows you won’t let Diana.”
“Smoke? No, certainly not.”
“You don’t know Diana—I must tell you about her—a little about her, without saying she is like her father, is that it?” She laughed—how gay she was! When she had told him that little, omitting that much, she asked: “Does she sound nice?” And Marcus, smiling, said she sounded delicious.
“She is.”
Marcus laughed; this was the old Sibyl back again, with all her enthusiasms, the same charming companion she had been as a girl. Because of that charm of hers, he liked to think, he had not married.
“Sibyl, is she like you?” he asked impatiently.
“Yes.”
He breathed again.
“And I so wanted her to be like her father,” she added.
“I suppose so—Is his sister—the one you call Elsie—married?”
“No.”
“You said she had no children—”
“She hasn’t.”
“But naturally. It was hardly necessary to say it, was it?”
And Sibyl laughed. Marcus needed just what she was going to give him, a disturbing young thing to live with him. Marcus dreaded it, although he would not have said so because of that sister he so disliked, who wanted Diana.
“I won’t have Diana running off whenever Miss Carston chooses to send for her. That I think you understand.”
“But there will be times when you will want to get rid of her. You won’t want to give up travelling, will you?”
“Couldn’t she come with me?”
“You can’t conceive, dear, the trouble a woman is travelling. You would hate to have to think of some one else—another place to find in a crowded train—another person’s luggage to look after—another ticket to lose—you would hate it.”
“Then I shan’t travel.”
“But surely it would be easier to send Diana to Elsie than to do that.”
“I detest that woman—”
“She has—nice eyes. You are a dear old thing, Marcus, and not a bit changed.”
“I never change.”
Marcus waited all day. Diana did not come. He was disappointed. It showed a want of reverence for the older on the part of the younger generation. At last he went to bed with a volume of Rabelais to read (in order to keep up his French). He read until he grew sleepy. He put out the light and slept until a flash of light awoke him and he wondered—What was this thing sitting on the end of his bed in white—a being so slim and so exquisite!
“Darling! the same old Marcus,” the being exclaimed,—“so sleepy and I woke him up. I couldn’t wait to see him—such years since we met!”
“Sibyl!” he murmured.
“Not this time, it’s Diana—is she like Sibyl? I am so glad—well, darling, talk!”
The slim being sat on his bed and sticking out her feet, on which twin shoe-buckles twinkled, urged him to amuse her. He dreaded “This little pig went to market” played through the bedclothes. He saw Diana eyeing the spot where she must know his toes were bound to be.
“How did you get here?” he asked.
“Pillar opened wide the portal and we walked in. He wasn’t in the least surprised.”
“Not surprised?”
“Not in the least. He said we might turn up the carpet and dance—if we liked. He offered us a gramaphone—his own—to dance to.”
“My dear Diana, you ought to be in bed.”
“Ought? Why?”
“It’s time.”
“What is he reading?” She put out her hand. He seized the book.
“A bedside classic, is it?”
He put it under his pillow.
“You look nice in bed,” she said softly, “but not a bit what I expected.”
“I am not what I was, of course,” he said hastily.
“Are you a Once Was? Poor darling—does it hurt? Do you like my frock?”
He said he liked it—enormously.
“And my shoes?”
He nodded.
“Mother says I get my slim feet from you.”
“Oh, does she? Do go home, my child. How are you going home?”
“Where are your slippers?” She dived down.
“You’ve kicked them under the bed,” he moaned; “theywerethere.”
“I never touched them; here they are!” She slipped her feet into them; huge, red morocco slippersthey were. Pillar would have remembered where they had been bought, the day on which they had been bought, and what kind of a woman she was who had passed at the moment of buying. They must have been the only size left in the bazaar. Diana sat on the edge of the bed again and put out her feet, the slippers swinging like pendulums from the tips of her toes. “Mummy must retract her words—she spoke in her haste—Marcus, my Once Was, I’ve been dancing—did you ever dance?”
“Dear child, do go, who is taking you home?”
“Six people. Pillar is taking care of them downstairs—Well, if you insist, I suppose I must. I shall love to stay with you. You don’t mind my coming like this—do you? Look at me! D’you like me?”
She was exactly—in theory—what Marcus would have liked another man’s niece to be, slight, graceful, with just that amount of assurance he found right in woman; but one does not always want one’s theories to live with one.
When he awoke a few hours later, he was firmly convinced he had dreamed and had dreamed pleasantly enough, and he closed his eyes to dream again; but the dream had vanished. Pillar remained. He brought him his tea, pulled up the blinds, put his things in order, stooped and picked up from thefloor something that sparkled and laid it down on the dressing-table.
When he had gone Marcus jumped out of bed, went to the dressing-table and saw lying upon it a small stone of glittering paste. He had not dreamed then. He was glad—in a way. Diana would be a disturbing element in a quiet life—distracting, perhaps, rather than disturbing.