THE COLLECTED NOVELS OF E. M. DELAFIELD (6 Titles in One Edition). E. M. Delafield
happiness was not even dashed when Mother Veronica instantly pounced upon them, and said:
"Kathleen and Zella, please find a third at once, and you know very well that linked arms are not allowed."
That night Zella prayed ardently:
"Do let me have Kathleen for a friend! . . . Oh, do let it be all right, and let her get fond of me; I will be so good if only I may have Kathleen for a friend! Oh, do let it be all right," she impatiently apostrophized the Almighty.
She wondered if it would be of any use to follow Dorothy Brady's example, and press the inhabitants of Purgatory, hypothetical or not, into the service. She decided that it was worth trying, since it couldn't do any harm and might do good. Besides, God might be rather touched at this slightly pathetic evidence of faith from one who did not really belong to the Church.
(Zella, quite unconsciously, had already come to look upon the Catholic Church as The Church.)
"If you'll make Kathleen really get fond of me, and be my friend," she hurriedly instructed the souls of the departed, " I'll say—I'll say a whole rosary for you every day for a month. In fact," she added with an outburst of generosity, "I shall begin it now, at once," and felt that, if that didn't move the Powers that be, nothing could be expected to do so. There was also a slight sense of daring to enliven the proposal, for Zella had never said the rosary before.
The next day, by a characteristic inspiration, she said rather timidly to Kathleen Mallet:
"Would you mind lending me your rosary? I haven't got one, you know; but I've promised to say one every day for the souls in Purgatory until I get a—a very special intention that I want."
The phraseology of the convent by this time came to her glibly.
"Of course, I shouldn't ask any of the other girls, but I thought perhaps you would let me have yours. . . ." She hesitated.
"Of course I would," said Kathleen heartily; " but as a matter of fact, you know, one can't lend a rosary."
"Why not?" asked Zella, bewildered, wondering if she should ever come to the end of these incomprehensible Catholic conventions.
"Is it against the rules?"
"No, of course not. But, you see, if someone else used my rosary I should lose the indulgence," said Kathleen mysteriously.
"But why?"
"Oh, because the indulgence is only for the person who uses that particular rosary. If you used it, the indulgence would belong to you, and not to me. That's why they are blessed, you know." Zella was confounded.
"I never heard that before. It seems so—so selfish, in a way."
"Oh, it isn't a bit, really, you know," Kathleen assured her with the vague, unreasoned confidence that Zella was beginning to think characterized these daughters of the Faith.
"But of course you must have a rosary. It's frightfully nice that you should want to say it."
I'll tell you what the intention is some day," said Zella shyly—" that is, if I get it."
"Oh, you're sure to get it. The Holy Souls are perfectly ripping. Look here, don't do anything about the rosary yet, and I'll see about it somehow before Benediction this evening."
Zella felt rather excited.
That evening Kathleen rushed up to her, slightly out of breath, and thrust a string of blue beads into her hand.
"I got leave to give you one," she explained rather confusedly, "and it's been blessed and everything."
Zella's thanks were out of all proportion to the gift bestowed, but so also was her joy at this unexpected token of affection.
She went into the chapel with a sense of brilliant, exhilarating happiness that was perhaps destined to compensate for the inevitable disillusionment that ended her first friendship.
It added to the bitterness of Zella's misery, which was as intense as were all her emotions, that she brought calamity upon herself, and destroyed with her own hand the slender fabric of her friendship with Kathleen, soon after it had become a recognized fact.
It was Zella's birthday, and she took her place in the refectory for breakfast rather nervously. It would, she considered, appear rather young and amateurish to have a quantity of birthday presents from home, and the other girls would most probably look upon her with contemptuous eyes as a " spoilt child."
She saw with relief that only one parcel awaited her. No striking disgrace, surely, could be attached to the reception of one solitary parcel, even though flanked by a small pile of letters. The parcel, of course, was from Aunt Marianne, by whom the ritual of birthdays was always held sacred and inviolable. There was a letter from her, full of birthday wishes tinged by a sort of hopeful melancholy, a dutiful expression of "Many happy returns of the day " from Muriel, and three pages of gracefully expressed auguries and congratulations from Tante Stéphanie. The Baronne, good-humouredly contemptuous of modern customs and implacably Catholic, declined to consider any birthday as worthy of note, and reserved her annual felicitations for the feast-day dedicated to St. Gisele.
Last of all, Zella opened a letter from her father. As she unfolded it, a postal order for a pound fluttered on to the table before her. It was a Sunday, and talking was therefore allowed at meal-times.
"I say, Zella, is it your birthday?" asked Dorothy Brady, round-eyed.
"Yes. That's my birthday present from my father," said Zella hastily, in obedience to her frequent and quite unreasoning sense that an explanation was required of her.
"A pound! You are lucky."
"I wish my father sent me a pound on my birthday," said someone else.
"So do I. You are in luck, Zella," light-heartedly remarked Kathleen, without a trace of consciousness in her manner.
But Zella suddenly remembered, with a sharp pang, Mary McNeill's description of the Mallets' poverty. "Sometimes not enough in the house to eat . . . Kathleen minds never having a single penny."
Without an instant's reflection, acting on one of the sudden, violent impulses that occasionally overtake the most perceptive people, Zella pushed her pound across the narrow table.
"Kathleen, do take it. I should love to give it to you."
The next moment she was overwhelmed by a sense of appalling disaster.
She saw that she had made an irretrievable mistake.
Kathleen Mallet flushed scarlet, and then turned white with anger. They looked at each other for the space of perhaps one instant in dead silence. A sort of frozen speechlessness seemed to have fallen upon the girls round them.
Then Kathleen, with a furious gesture, pushed back the flimsy bit of paper.
"I don't want your money. You must be mad, I think."
Her voice, choked with one of the most elementary of the emotions, sheer anger, was almost unrecognizable. There was an appalling silence, and Zella, feeling physically sick, saw in one lightning flash that she had lost her friend, and had made a mistake that would never be forgotten or forgiven by those who had witnessed it.
By a curious effect of breeding, it was Zella who, with her cosmos in fragments round her, found voice to break the spell of horror by speaking some commonplace aloud.
The girls followed her lead thankfully. Only Kathleen, still white, and shaking a little, remained perfectly silent.
Zella attempted no explanation with her. She knew instinctively that it would be of no use. Kathleen would never understand, and her friendship was gone for ever. Zella herself could not understand, afterwards, what madness had prompted her to an act that surely every reasonable being with a spark of pride must consider nothing less than insulting. She wept tears of shame and agonized regret over the error, and knew that the other girls never altogether forgot it. Only in curious fugitive flashes, of which she would have strenuously denied the existence even to herself, did it occur to Zella