The Greatest Works of E. M. Delafield (Illustrated Edition). E. M. Delafield
"First of all," said Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, taking her husband's arm, "how did you leave the children ?"
"All right. They were going to bicycle to Redhill this afternoon, and have tea in the woods."
"Henry dear, I don't think you should have allowed that. The servants will think it so odd. You may be sure they know perfectly well that the funeral was to-day. If Miss Vincent had been there, she would not have allowed such a thing, and the children must have known that perfectly well. It was very naughty and artful of them."
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans often suspected other people of artfulness, and it was a continual distress to her that she so frequently discovered traces of it in her own children.
"Muriel asked me if it would be all right, and I said yes; it really didn't seem to matter, so far away, and you couldn't expect the poor kids to stick indoors on a fine day like this," said her husband apologetically.
"Of course not, Henry—I am not so unreasonable as to expect anything of the kind; but they could quite well have stayed in the garden, and I think it showed great callousness to have gone tearing about the country on bicycles while their aunt, my only sister: "Mrs. Lloyd-Evans showed a tendency to become tearful.
"My dear," protested Henry, "I don't suppose they can even remember your poor sister."
"Nonsense! James was eight and Muriel nearly seven last time they stayed here. And little Zella has always been like a sister to them."
A sister with whom they had quarrelled so violently that Zella's last visit to the Lloyd-Evans's, two years ago, had been brought to an untimely end at her own request. Henry remembered the occurrence grimly, and how quietly voluble his wife had been upon the subject of Zella's deplorable upbringing, which she had stigmatized in one breath as foreign, pagan, and new-fangled.
But he had long ago learnt the futility of arguing against his Marianne's discursive inconsequence and gentle obstinacy, and he was at all times a man who preferred silence to speech.
"I wanted to ask you about Zella," continued Mrs. Lloyd-Evans—" whether it wouldn't be a good idea to take the poor little thing back with us on Saturday. It will cheer her up to be with companions of her own age, and the change will do her good. I don't know what poor Louis is going to do with her, I'm sure."
"To do with her ?" echoed Henry uncomprehendingly.
"Yes. I don't suppose he'll keep a girl of fourteen alone with him, in this great lonely place. She has had no proper education—only what poor Louis himself has taught her, instead of engaging a good sensible governess —and the best thing he could do would be to send her to some first-rate school."
"He may—eventually—-marry again."
"Henry," said his wife with gentle impressiveness, "do not say things that sound unfeeling."
Henry became silent.
"For my poor Esmée's sake," continued Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, after a suitable pause, " I want to be a mother to her child. And I can't help feeling, Henry, how dreadful it would be if Zella got into the hands of her father's French relations."
"I didn't know he had any."
"Henry! I have spoken of them to you myself times out of number. You can't have forgotten. There is that dreadful old Baronne, as she calls herself—though I always think those foreign titles sound very fishy—who pretends to be Zella's grandmother."
"How can she pretend to be? Either she is or she isn't," Henry, not unnaturally, remarked.
"She is Louis's stepmother, don't you remember? and consequently no relation whatever to Zella," explained Mrs. Lloyd-Evans resentfully. "And I must say, Henry, it seems to me very extraordinary that neither she nor her daughter should have taken the trouble just to cross the Channel, when they heard of this dreadful tragedy. Dearest Esmée was always perfectly sweet to the artful old thing, and Zella was taught to call her Granny and everything; and now this is the result."
This logical summing up of the situation was received by Mr. Lloyd-Evans in silence. Presently, however, he said tentatively:
"I suppose they are Roman Catholics?"
"Indeed they are, and I always think it is a most special mercy of Providence that poor Louis was not brought up to be one too. Luckily, his father made some wise stipulation or other before he died, that his son must be brought up in a good old-fashioned Huguenot religion; and the Baronne could not get out of it, although she and her Jesuits must have had a good try."
"Perhaps," said Henry, wisely avoiding the burning topics of the Baronne de Kervoyou and her hypothetical Jesuits—" perhaps Louis will want to keep Zella with him for the time being."
"I mean to talk to him about it, Henry. I know that gentlemen do not always quite understand; but I shall tell him that it would be the best thing possible for Zella to let me mother her for a few months, and perhaps choose a really nice school for her later on. Louis will feel much more free without her, too."
"Do you know what his immediate plans are?"
"He will certainly travel for a little while," instantly replied Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, who had no grounds whatsoever for the assertion, beyond her own conviction that this would be the proper course of conduct for her brother-in-law to pursue.
"Then, in that case, Marianne, do as you think best about offering to let Zella come to us.".
Marianne had every intention of doing as she thought best, but she said:
"Yes, Henry dear, one must do all in one's power at these sad times to help. Don't you remember the quotation I'm so fond of ?—
"' Life is mostly froth and bubble;
Two things stand like stone:
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in one's own.'"
Henry, who was always rendered vaguely uncomfortable by the most distant allusion to what he collectively termed "poetical effusions," said that it was growing very dark, and Marianne had better come in before it became any colder.
"It's not a moment when one thinks of one's own health or comfort," Marianne murmured sadly, but she followed her husband indoors.
Meanwhile Zella, kneeling at her bedroom window, with elbows on the sill and chin resting on her clasped hands, wondered miserably what was to become of her. Her mother's funeral, the culminating episode of those dreadful few days which had been as years, was over. Zella felt dully that there was nothing more to wait for, and found herself thinking vaguely that surely now mother would come soon and make everything all right again and comfort her.
But it was mother who was dead!
Her thoughts wandered drearily to her father. There had been no more silent times alone with him; since Aunt Marianne's arrival, and since that brief episode in the study that morning, every word of which seemed burnt into her brain for ever, she had not seen him at all. She wondered if he would always be broken-hearted, never to laugh and joke again, like the kind, jovial father she had always known. Were all widowers always unhappy for ever? Zella tried to recall any that she had ever known, and could only remember old Mr. Oliver, who had come with his daughter that afternoon. He was a kind, cheerful old man, who always talked a great deal and laughed at his own jokes; but, then, he was nearly seventy years old, and his wife had died a great many years ago.
"Perhaps when papa is quite old," thought Zella despairingly: "But how dreadful it will be during all the years and years before he is as old as Mr. Oliver, if he goes on being unhappy all the time! Will there be this dreadful silence all through the house, and nothing to do, and everything reminding us all the time, and never being able to say anything about mother. . . . Aunt Marianne says he mustn't be reminded of his loss. One doesn't talk about people who have died.
Uncle Henry never speak about poor little cousin Archie who died, except Aunt Marianne sometimes, in a sort of very solemn religious way. But how could one speak like that about mother? And yet we couldn't ever talk about her in an ordinary way, as if she