THE COLLECTED NOVELS OF E. M. DELAFIELD (6 Titles in One Edition). E. M. Delafield
said Zella, with an uncontrollable outburst of self-pity, "I am so miserable."
"Yes, my poor child," said her aunt, not without a tone of latent satisfaction in her voice. "The way of transgressors is—yes, yes, Henry, I am coming! Do leave the door alone, dear. Well, Zella, one is very sorry to leave you like this; but, as I always say, as the tree falls."
"Marianne, you will miss your train," said Louis, in his turn appearing at the door.
"Gentlemen are always so impatient," ejaculated Mrs. Lloyd-Evans in a tone that boded ill for the peace of Henry's drive to the station.
"Good-bye, dear, and God bless you; but you have made your bed, and so must it lie."
Thus Aunt Marianne, hurried but still reproachful, was borne away from Villetswood.
Louis was driving to the station.
The house, in the heat of the midsummer afternoon, was very still and lonely.
Zella sank on to the floor and leant her head against the window-sill, still crying wearily, because it was easier to go on crying than to do anything else.
She did not wish that she had accepted Stephen, but she wished that her surroundings would admire her and think well of her for refusing him; and, instead of this, every one of those who made up her small world either pitied or blamed her. Except James. But James had gone away on the morning after the fancy-dress dance, and had not even written to her, as Zella had half expected him to do. Besides, the thought of James was too tiring just now. The high level of his uncompromising sincerity, his harsh truths and judgments, seemed to her ugly and uncomforting. She wanted to receive the relief of understanding, and yet the tenderness of pity and the blindness of love.
The door opened softly before Stéphanie de Kervoyou.
Zella looked up, with her small pale face and great tear-stained eyes, but did not move.
Stéphanie gave a little soft sound of pitying dismay, and came gently forward. Zella dreaded lest she should be implored, however kindly, to get up from the floor, or to stop crying, or told that she would make herself ill.
But Mdlle. de Kervoyou said nothing at all. She merely seated herself in the arm-chair nearest the window, and held out her hand half timidly, as though almost expecting to be rebuffed.
Something in the appealing gesture touched Zella, and she leant her brown head against the arm of the big chair, and felt Stéphanie's hand softly stroking her hair.
There was a strange comfort in the unreasoning, unquestioning tenderness, and presently Zella stopped crying.
"Pauvre cherie!" murmured Stéphanie. Her tone was almost mechanical, as though Zella would always be "pauvre cherié " whatever the cause of her tears.
Zella thought of Aunt Marianne's reproachful farewell, and of Alison's semi-contemptuous one:
"Good-bye, little Zella. Do not play with the big things of life; they are not for you."
Her self-confidence depended absolutely upon the good opinion of the people round her. The brilliant sense of security of two days before had fled, and Alison's tolerant patronage had given her a stab out of all proportion in its intensity.
At the remembrance of it, tears rose again to her eyes; but her head ached, and it seemed hardly worth while to begin crying again when there was no one to be sorry for her.
"Pauvre cherié!"
Tante Stéphanie was sorry, after all.
Zella felt a sudden definite wish to talk about herself, and to put into words that point of view which must reinstate her in her own consciousness as the heroine of the hour.
"You know about it, don't you, Tante Stéphanie?"
"Only that you have refused the offer of marriage of Mr. Pontisbury," said Stéphanie mildly.
"And that he was very angry—and—hurt—and thought that he had every reason to expect a different answer. And Aunt Marianne and everyone blames me, and thinks that I have behaved very badly to him."
Stéphanie stroked her hair in silence.
"Even papa has hardly said one word to me."
"He does not blame you, Zella."
"What did he say?"
"Hardly anything, my dear. He only told me that you were unhappy, and that he feared Mrs. Lloyd-Evans might have distressed you. He would prefer anything to seeing you rush into a marriage where you would not be happy."
"I have not behaved dishonourably," said Zella angrily, refuting an accusation which had not been made. "It's not even as though we had been engaged, and I had broken it off. He asked me to marry him, and I said that I did not care for him."
She waited for Stéphanie to endorse the view she had held out, but Mdlle. de Kervoyou remained silent.
Zella's unwisdom urged her to press for the assent that she yet knew she would not receive.
"Did I behave so very wrongly, after all? Could I have done otherwise?"
"You could not have done otherwise than tell him that you did not care for him."
"But before that?"
"Before? It was perhaps a pity; that seems to me the most that one can say, Zella. I do not say you gave Mr. Pontisbury cause to expect such a reply from you; but I do not think, either, that the shock will have broken his heart."
Stéphanie was even smiling a little over the tragedy.
Zella felt a transient pang of mortification, and yet a distinct and deeply rooted sense of relief, as though she were seeing the strange chaos of emotions that had constituted the episode of Stephen relegated to its true place in the scale of relative values.
"Tante Stéphanie, you are very understanding," she said, with more surprise in her voice than she knew "Talk to me. I am so tired, and I am still muddled ahout it all."
"Poor child! But you are glad that you had courage, even a little late in the day, are you not? An engagement of marriage is a more serious thing to break than you realize; as maman said always, ça ne se fait pas. She was very scrupulous in matters of honour, as you know. And, then, in her day things were so different. These situations did not arise."
"Things were simple then. Everything was settled for one. After all, it would be very restful," said Zella, now sufficiently restored to indulge in a moment of attitudinizing.
Stéphanie de Kervoyou disconcerted her by replying gently:
"But no, Zella! do not deceive yourself. It would not suit you at all. You must have the situations, the dramatic crises, in your life. If they were not there, you would be almost tempted to manufacture them. I think les emotions are a necessity to you: is it not so?"
"Perhaps it is," Zella admitted, with a sense of candour, and inevitably absorbed in any discussion of her own character.
"These things, one outgrows them," said her aunt placidly, " but the process is sometimes painful. Monsieur Stephen is not the only desillusione, perhaps. For you also a glamour has disappeared, and it grieves you, although it was only of your own creation. But, Zella, though it does not seem so to you at present, it is but a little thing in reality. Had you married this man, indeed, things would have been different. But you have escaped, thank God."
Zella, struck suddenly by her tone, looked up.
"Why do you thank God? Do you think, too, that I should have been unhappy with Stephen?"
Stéphanie gazed at her with an almost fanatical horror in her pale eyes.
"That you can ask the question, even, poor child! I knew well that you realized in no way the peril encompassing you, but for that very reason it was the greater. Zella, three years ago you were admitted into the Church. Did it then mean nothing to you?"
Zella was confounded. It shot through her mind with an unescapable conviction