David Herbert Lawrence
   
                       The Lovely Lady


Файл с книжной полки Несененко Алексея
OCR: Несененко Алексей январь 2004

   
   At seventy-two, Pauline Attenborough could still sometimes be 
mistaken, in the half-light, for thirty. She really was a wonderfully 
preserved woman, of perfect chic. Of course, it helps a great deal to 
have the right frame. She would be an exquisite skeleton, and her 
skull would be an exquisite skull, like that of some Etruscan woman, 
with feminine charm still in the swerve of the bone and the pretty 
naive teeth.
   Mrs. Attenborough's face was of the perfect oval, and slightly flat 
type that wears best. There is no flesh to sag. Her nose rode - 
serenely, in its finely bridged curve. Only her big grey eyes were a 
tiny bit prominent on the surface of her face, and they gave her away 
most. The bluish lids were heavy, as if they ached sometimes with the 
strain of keeping the eyes beneath them arch and bright; and at the 
corners of the eyes were fine little wrinkles which would slacken with 
haggardness, then be pulled up tense again, to that bright, gay look 
like a Leonardo woman who really could laugh outright.
   Her niece Cecilia was perhaps the only person in the world who was 
aware of the invisible little wire which connected Pauline's eye-
wrinkles with Pauline's will-power. Only Cecilia consciously watched 
the eyes go haggard and old and tired, and remain so, for hours; until 
Robert came home. Then ping! - the mysterious little wire that worked 
between Pauline's will and her face went taut, the weary, haggard, 
prominent eyes suddenly began to gleam, the eyelids arched, the queer 
curved eyebrows which floated in such frail arches on Pauline's 
forehead began to gather a mocking significance, and you had the real 
lovely lady, in all her charm.
   She really had the secret of everlasting youth; that is to say, she 
could don her youth again like an eagle. But she was sparing of it. 
She was wise enough not to try being young for too many people. Her 
son Robert, in the evenings, and Sir Wilfred Knipe sometimes in the 
afternoon to tea: then occasional visitors on Sunday, when Robert was 
home: for these she was her lovely and changeless self, that age could 
not wither, nor custom stale: so bright and kindly and yet subtly 
mocking, like Mona Lisa, who knew a thing or two. But Pauline knew 
more, so she needn't be smug at all, she could laugh that lovely 
mocking Bacchante laugh of hers, which was at the same time never 
malicious, always good-naturedly tolerant, both of virtues and vices. 
The former, of course, taking much more tolerating. So she suggested, 
roguishly.
   Only with her niece Cecilia she did not trouble to keep up the 
glamour. Ciss was not very observant, anyhow: and more than that, she 
was plain: more still, she was in love with Robert: and most of all, 
she was thirty, and dependent on her Aunt Pauline. Oh, Cecilia! Why 
make music for her!
   Cecilia, called by her aunt and by her cousin Robert just Ciss, 
like a cat spitting, was a big dark-complexioned, pug-faced young 
woman who very rarely spoke, and when she did, couldn't get it out. 
She was the daughter of a poor Congregational minister who had been, 
while he lived, brother to Ronald, Aunt Pauline's husband. Ronald and 
the Congregational minister were both well dead, and Aunt Pauline had 
had charge of Ciss for the last five years.
   They lived all together in a quite exquisite though rather small 
Queen Anne house some twenty-five miles out of town, secluded in a 
little dale, and surrounded by small but very quaint and pleasant 
grounds. It was an ideal place and an ideal life for Aunt Pauline, at 
the age of seventy-two.
   When the kingfishers flashed up the little stream in the garden , 
going under the alders, something still flashed in her heart. She was 
that kind of woman.
   Robert, who was two years older than Ciss, went every day to town, 
to his chambers in one of the Inns. He was a barrister, and, to his 
secret but very deep mortification, he earned about a hundred pounds a 
year. He simply couldn't get above that figure , though it was rather 
easy to get below it. Of course, it didn' t matter. Pauline had money. 
But then what was Pauline's was Pauline's, and though she could give 
almost lavishly, still, one was always aware of having a lovely and 
undeserved present made to one: presents are so much nicer when they 
are undeserved, Aunt Pauline would say.
   Robert too was plain, and almost speechless. He was medium-sized, 
rather broad and stout, though not fat. Only his creamy, clean-shaven 
face was rather fat, and sometimes suggestive of an Italian priest, in 
its silence and its secrecy. But he had grey eyes like his mother, but 
very shy and uneasy, not bold like hers. Perhaps Ciss was the only 
person who fathomed his awful shyness and malaise, his habitual 
feeling that he was in the wrong place: almost like a soul that has 
got into the wrong body. But he never did anything about it. He went 
up to his chambers and read law. It was, however, all the weird old 
processes that interested him. He had, unknown to everybody but his 
mother, a quite extraordinary collection of old Mexican legal 
documents, reports of processes and trials, pleas, accusations, the 
weird and awful mixture of ecclesiastical law and common law in 
seventeenth-century Mexico. He had started a study in this direction 
through coining across a report of a trial of two English sailors, for 
murder, in Mexico in 1620, and he had gone on, when the next document 
was an accusation against a Don Miguel Estrada for seducing one of the 
nuns of the Sacred Heart Convent in Oaxaca in 1680.
   Pauline and her son Robert had wonderful evenings with these old 
papers. The lovely lady knew a little Spanish. She even looked a 
trifle Spanish herself, with a high comb and a marvellous dark brown 
shawl embroidered in thick silvery silk embroidery. So she would sit 
at the perfect old table, soft as velvet in its deep brown surface, a 
high comb in her hair, ear-rings with dropping pendants in her ears, 
her arms bare and still beautiful, a few strings of pearls round her 
throat, apuce velvet dress on and this or another beautiful shawl, and 
by candle-light she looked, yes, a Spanish highbred beauty of thirty-
two or three. She set the candles to give her face just the 
chiaroscuro she knew suited her; her high chair that rose behind her 
face was done in old green brocade, against which her face emerged 
like a Christmas rose.
   They were always three at table; and they always drank a bottle of 
champagne: Pauline two glasses, Ciss two glasses, Robert the rest. The 
lovely lady sparkled and was radiant. Ciss, her black hair bobbed, her 
broad shoulders in a very nice and becoming dress that Aunt Pauline 
had helped her to make, stared from her aunt to her cousin and back 
again, with rather confused, mute, hazel eyes, and played the part of 
an audience suitably impressed. She was impressed, somewhere, all the 
time. And even rendered speechless by Pauline's brilliancy, even after 
five years. But at the bottom of her consciousness were the data of as 
weird a document as Robert ever studied: all the things she knew about 
her aunt and cousin Robert was always a gentleman, with an old-
fashioned punctilious courtesy that covered his shyness quite 
completely. He was, and Ciss knew it, more confused than shy. He was 
worse than she was. Cecilia's own confusion dated from only five years 
back - Robert's must have started before he was born. In the lovely 
lady's womb he must have felt very confused.
   He paid all his attention to his mother, drawn to her as a humble 
flower to the sun. And yet, priest-like, he was all the time aware, 
with the tail of his consciousness, that Ciss was there, and that she 
was a bit shut out of it, and that something wasn't right. He was 
aware of the third consciousness in the room. Whereas to Pauline, her 
niece Cecilia was an appropriate part of her own setting, rather than 
a distinct consciousness.
   Robert took coffee with his mother and Ciss in the warm drawing-
room, where all the furniture was so lovely, all collectors' pieces - 
Mrs. Attenborough had made her own money, dealing privately in 
pictures and furniture and rare things from barbaric countries - and 
the three talked desultorily till about eight or half past. It was 
very pleasant, very cosy, very homely even: Pauline made a real home 
cosiness out of so much elegant material. The chat was simple, and 
nearly always bright. Pauline was her real self, emanating a friendly 
mockery and an odd, ironic gaiety. Till there came a little pause.
   At which Ciss always rose and said good night and carried out the 
coffee-tray, to prevent Burnett from intruding any more.
   And then! Oh, then, the lovely glowing intimacy of the evening, 
between mother and son, when they deciphered manuscripts and discussed 
points, Pauline with that eagerness of a girl, for which she was 
famous. And it was quite genuine. In some mysterious way she had saved 
up her power for being thrilled, in connexion with a man. Robert, 
solid, rather quiet and subdued, seemed like the elder of the two: 
almost like a priest with a young girl pupil. And that was rather how 
he felt.
   Ciss had a flat for herself just across the courtyard, over the old 
coach-house and stables. There were no horses. Robert kept his car in 
the coach-house. Ciss had three very nice rooms up there, stretching 
along in a row one after another, and she had got used to the ticking 
of the stable clock.
   But sometimes she did not go up to her rooms. In the summer she 
would sit on the lawn, and from the open window of the drawing-room 
upstairs she would hear Pauline's wonderful heart-searching laugh. And 
in the winter the young woman would put on a thick coat and walk 
slowly to the little balustraded bridge over the stream, and then look 
back at the three lighted windows of that drawing-room where mother 
and son were so happy together.
   Ciss loved Robert, and she believed that Pauline intended the two 
of them to marry: when she was dead. But poor Robert, he was so 
convulsed with shyness already, with man or woman. What would he be 
when his mother was dead - in a dozen more years? He would be just a 
shell, the shell of a man who had never lived.
   The strange unspoken sympathy of the young with one another, when 
they are overshadowed by the old, was one of the bonds between Robert 
and Ciss. But another bond, which Ciss did not know how to draw tight, 
was the bond of passion. Poor Robert was by nature a passionate man. 
His silence and his agonized, though hidden, shyness were both the 
result of a secret physical passionateness. And how Pauline could play 
on this! Ah, Ciss was not blind to the eyes which he fixed on his 
mother, eyes fascinated yet humiliated, full of shame. He was ashamed 
that he was not a man. And he did not love his mother. He was 
fascinated by her. Completely fascinated. And for the rest, paralysed 
in a life-long confusion.
   Ciss stayed in the garden till the lights leapt up in Pauline's 
bedroom - about ten o'clock. The lovely lady had retired. Robert would 
now stay another hour or so, alone. Then he too would retire. Ciss, in 
the dark outside, sometimes wished she could creep up to him and say: 
"Oh, Robert! It's all wrong!" But Aunt Pauline would hear. And, 
anyhow, Ciss couldn't do it. She went off to her own rooms once more, 
and so for ever.
   In the morning coffee was brought up on a tray to each of the three 
relatives. Ciss had to be at Sir Wilfred Knipe's at nine o'clock, to 
give two hours' lessons to his little granddaughter. It was her sole 
serious occupation, except that she played the piano for the love of 
it. Robert set off to town about nine. And, as a rule, Aunt Pauline 
appeared at lunch, though sometimes not until tea-time. When she 
appeared, she looked fresh and young. But she was inclined to fade 
rather quickly, like a flower without water, in the day-time. Her hour 
was the candle hour.
   So she always rested in the afternoon. When the sun shone, if 
possible she took a sun-bath. This was one of her secrets. Her lunch 
was very light, she could take her sun-and-air-bath before noon or 
after, as it pleased her. Often it was in the afternoon, when the sun 
shone very warmly into a queer little yew-walled square just behind 
the stables. Here Ciss stretched out the lying-chair and rugs, and put 
the light parasol in the silent little enclosure of thick dark yew 
hedges beyond the red walls of the unused stables. And hither came the 
lovely lady with her book. Ciss then had to be on guard in one of her 
own rooms, should her aunt, who was very keen-eared, hear a footstep.
   One afternoon it occurred to Cecilia that she herself might while 
away this rather long afternoon by taking a sun-bath. She was growing 
restive. The thought of the flat roof of the stable buildings, to 
which she could climb from aloft at the end, started her on a new 
adventure. She often went on to the roof: she had to, to wind up the 
stable clock, which was a job she had assumed to herself. Now she took 
a rug, climbed out under the heavens, looked at the sky and the great 
elm-tops, looked at the sun, then took off her things and lay down 
perfectly serenely, in a corner of the roof under the parapet, full in 
the sun.
   It was rather lovely, to bask all one's length like this in warm 
sun and air. Yes, it was very lovely! It even seemed to melt some of 
the hard bitterness of her heart, some of that core of unspoken 
resentment which never dissolved. Luxuriously, she spread herself, so 
that the sun should touch her limbs fully, fully. If she had no other 
lover, she should have the sun! She rolled voluptuously. And suddenly 
her heart stood still in her body, and her hair almost rose on end as 
a voice said very softly, musingly in her ear:
   "No, Henry dear! It was not my fault you died instead of marrying 
that Claudia. No, darling. I was quite, quite willing for you to marry 
her, unsuitable though she was."
   Cecilia sank down on her rug powerless and perspiring with dread. 
That awful voice, so soft, so musing, yet so unnatural. Not a human 
voice at all. Yet there must, there must be someone on the roof! Oh! 
how unspeakably awful!
   She lifted her weak head and peeped across the sloping leads. 
Nobody! The chimneys were far too narrow to shelter anybody. There was 
nobody on the roof. Then it must be someone in the trees, in the elms. 
Either that, or terror unspeakable, a bodiless voice! She reared her 
head a little higher.
   And as she did so, came the voice again:
   "No, darling! I told you you would tire of her in six months. And 
you see, it was true, dear. It was true, true, true! I wanted to spare 
you that. So it wasn't I who made you feel weak and disabled, wanting 
that very silly Claudia; poor thing, she looked so woebegone 
afterwards! Wanting her and not wanting her, you got yourself into 
that perplexity, my dear. I only warned you. What else could I do? And 
you lost your spirit and died without ever knowing me again. It was 
bitter, bitter - "
   The voice faded away. Cecilia subsided weakly on to her rug, after 
the anguished tension of listening. Oh, it was awful. The sun shone, 
the sky was blue, all seemed so lovely and afternoony and summery. And 
yet, oh, horror! - she was going to be forced to believe in the 
supernatural! And she loathed the supernatural, ghosts and voices and 
rappings and all the rest.
   But that awful creepy bodiless voice, with its rusty sort of 
whisper of an overtone! It had something so fearfully familiar in it 
too! and yet was so utterly uncanny. Poor Cecilia could only lie there 
unclothed, and so all the more agonizingly helpless, inert, collapsed 
in sheer dread.
   And then she heard the thing sigh! A deep sigh that seemed weirdly 
familiar, yet was not human. "Ah, well; ah, well, the heart must 
bleed! Better it should bleed than break. It is grief, grief! But it 
wasn't my fault, dear. And Robert could marry our poor dull Ciss 
tomorrow, if he wanted her. But he doesn't care about it, so why force 
him into anything!" The sounds were very uneven, sometimes only a 
husky sort of whisper. Listen! Listen!
   Cecilia was about to give vent to loud and piercing screams of 
hysteria, when the last two sentences arrested her. All her caution 
and her cunning sprang alert. It was Aunt Pauline! It must be Aunt 
Pauline, practising ventriloquism or something like that! What a devil 
she was!
   Where was she? She must be lying down there, right below where 
Cecilia herself was lying. And it was either some fiend's trick of 
ventriloquism, or else thought transference that conveyed itself like 
sound. The sounds were very uneven. Sometimes quite inaudible, 
sometimes only a brushing sort of noise. Ciss listened intently. No, 
it could not be ventriloquism. It was worse, some form of thought 
transference. Some horror of that sort. Cecilia still lay weak and 
inert, terrified to move, but she was growing calmer with suspicion. 
It was some diabolic trick of that unnatural woman.
   But what a devil of a woman! She even knew that she, Cecilia, had 
mentally accused her of killing her son Henry. Poor Henry was Robert's 
elder brother, twelve years older than Robert. He had died suddenly 
when he was twenty-two, after an awful struggle with himself, because 
he was passionately in love with a young and very good-looking 
actress, and his mother had humorously despised him for the 
attachment. So he had caught some sudden ordinary disease, but the 
poison had gone to his brain and killed him before he ever regained 
consciousness. Ciss knew the few facts from her own father. And lately 
she had been thinking that Pauline was going to kill Robert as she had 
killed Henry. It was clear murder: a mother murdering her sensitive 
sons, who were fascinated by her: the Circe!
   "I suppose I may as well get up," murmured the dim, un-breaking 
voice. "Too much sun is as bad as too little. Enough sun, enough love 
thrill, enough proper food, and not too much of any of them, and a 
woman might live for ever. I verily believe for ever. If she absorbs 
as much vitality as she expends! Or perhaps a trifle more!"
   It was certainly Aunt Pauline! How, how horrible! She, Ciss, was 
hearing Aunt Pauline's thoughts. Oh, how ghastly! Aunt Pauline was 
sending out her thoughts in a sort of radio, and she, Ciss, had to 
hear what her aunt was thinking. How ghastly! How insufferable! One of 
them would surely have to die.
   She twisted and she lay inert and crumpled, staring vacantly in 
front of her. Vacantly! Vacantly! And her eyes were staring almost 
into a hole. She was staring into it unseeing, a hole going down in 
the corner from the lead gutter. It meant nothing to her. Only it 
frightened her a little more.
   When suddenly out of the hole came a sigh and a last whisper. "Ah, 
well! Pauline! Get up, it's enough for to-day!" Good God! Out of the 
hole of the rain-pipe! The rain-pipe was acting as a speaking-tube! 
Impossible! No, quite possible. She had read of it even in some book. 
And Aunt Pauline, like the old and guilty woman she fwas, talked aloud 
to herself. That was it!
   A sullen exultance sprang into Ciss's breast. That was why she 
would never have anybody, not even Robert, in her bedroom. That was 
why she never dozed in a chair, never sat absent-minded anywhere, but 
went to her room, and kept to her room, except when she roused herself 
to be alert. When she slackened off, she talked to herself! She talked 
in a soft little crazy voice to herself. But she was not crazy. It was 
only her thoughts murmuring themselves aloud.
   So she had qualms about poor Henry! Well she might have! Ciss 
believed that Aunt Pauline had loved her big, handsome, brilliant 
first-born much more than she loved, Robert, and that his death had 
been a terrible blow and a chagrin to her. Poor Robert had been only 
ten years old when Henry died. Since then he had been the substitute.
   Ah, how awful!
   But Aunt Pauline was a strange woman. She had left her husband when 
Henry was a small child, some years even before Robert was born. There 
was no quarrel. Sometimes she saw her husband again, quite amicably, 
but a little mockingly. And she even gave him money.
   For Pauline earned all her own. Her father had been a consul in the 
East and in Naples: and a devoted collector of beautiful and exotic 
things. When he died, soon after his grandson Henry was born, he left 
his collection of treasures to his daughter. And Pauline, who had 
really a passion and a genius for loveliness, whether in texture or 
form or colour, had laid the basis of her fortune on her father's 
collection. She had gone on collecting, buying where she could, and 
selling to collectors and to museums. She was one of the first to sell 
old, weird African wooden figures to the museums, and ivory carvings 
from New Guinea. She bought Renoir as soon as she saw his pictures. 
But not Rousseau. And all by herself she made a fortune.
   After her husband died, she had not married again. She was not even 
known to have had lovers. If she did have lovers, it was not among the 
men who admired her most and paid her devout and open attendance. To 
these she was a "friend".
   Cecilia slipped on her clothes and caught up her rug, hastened 
carefully down the ladder to the loft. As she descended she heard the 
ringing musical call: "All right, Ciss!" which meant that the lovely 
lady was finished, and returning to the house. Even her voice was 
marvellously young and sonorous, beautifully balanced and self-
possessed. So different from the little voice in which she talked to 
herself. That was much more the voice of an old woman.
   Ciss hastened round to the yew enclosure, where lay the comfortable 
chaise-longue with the various delicate rugs. Everything Pauline had 
was choice, to the fine straw mat on the floor. The great yew walls 
were beginning to cast long shadows. Only in the corner, where the 
rugs tumbled their delicate colours, was there hot, still sunshine.
   The rugs folded up, the chair lifted away, Cecilia stooped to look 
at the mouth of the rain-pipe. There it was, in the corner, under a 
little hood of masonry and just projecting from the thick leaves of 
the creeper on the wall. If Pauline, lying there, turned her face 
towards the wall, she would speak into the very mouth of the hole. 
Cecilia was reassured. She had heard her aunt's thoughts indeed, but 
by no uncanny agency.
   That evening, as if aware of something, Pauline was a little 
quicker than usual, though she looked her own serene, rather 
mysterious self. And after coffee she said to Robert and Ciss: "I'm so 
sleepy. The sun has made me so sleepy. I feel full of sunshine like a 
bee. I shall go to bed, if you don't mind. You two sit and have a 
talk."
   Cecilia looked quickly at her cousin.
   "Perhaps you would rather be alone," she said to him.
   "No, no," he replied. "Do keep me company for awhile, if it doesn't 
bore you." 
   The windows were open, the scent of the honeysuckle wafted in with 
the sound of an owl. Robert smoked in silence. There was a sort of 
despair in the motionless, rather squat body. He looked like a 
caryatid bearing a weight.
   "Do you remember Cousin Henry?" Cecilia asked him suddenly.
   He looked up in surprise.
   "Yes, very well," he said.
   "What did he look like? " she said, glancing into her cousin's big, 
secret-troubled eyes, in which there was so much frustration.
   "Oh, he was handsome: tall and fresh-coloured, with mother's soft 
brown hair." As a matter of fact, Pauline's hair was grey. "The ladies 
admired him very much; he was at all the dances."
   "And what kind of character had he?"
   "Oh, very good-natured and jolly. He liked to be amused. He was 
rather quick and clever, like mother, and very good company-"
   "And did he love your mother? "
   "Very much. She loved him too - better than she does me, as a 
matter of fact. He was so much more nearly her idea of a man."
   " Why was he more her idea of a man? "
   "Tall - handsome - attractive, and very good company - and would, I 
believe, have been very successful at law .I'm afraid I am merely 
negative in all those respects."
   Ciss looked at him attentively, with her slow-thinking hazel eyes. 
Under his impassive mask, she knew he suffered.
   "Do you think you are so much more negative than he? " she said.
   He did not lift his face. But after a few moments he replied:
   "My life, certainly, is a negative affair."
   She hesitated before she dared ask him:
   "And do you mind?"
   He did not answer her at all. Her heart sank.
   "You see, I am afraid my life is as negative as yours is," she 
said. "And I'm beginning to mind bitterly. I'm thirty."
   She saw his creamy, well-bred hand tremble.
   "I suppose," he said, without looking at her, "one will rebel when 
it is too late."
   That was queer, from him.
   "Robert," she said, "do you like me at all?"
   She saw his dusky, creamy face, so changeless in its folds, go 
pale. "I am very fond of you," he murmured.
   "Won't you kiss me? Nobody ever kisses me," she said pathetically.
   He looked at her, his eyes strange with fear and a certain 
haughtiness. Then he rose and came softly over to her and kissed her 
gently on the cheek.
   "It's an awful shame, Ciss!" he said softly.
   She caught his hand and pressed it to her breast.
   "And sit with me some time in the garden," she said, murmuring with 
difficulty. "Won't you?"
   He looked at her anxiously and searchingly.
   "What about mother?" he said.
   Ciss smiled a funny little smile, and looked into his eyes. He 
suddenly flushed crimson, turning aside his face. It was a painful 
sight.
   "I know," he said, "I am no lover of women."
   He spoke with sarcastic stoicism against himself, but even she did 
not know the shame it was to him.
   "You never try to be!" she said.
   Again his eyes changed uncannily.
   "Does one have to try? " he said.
   "Why, yes! One never does anything if one doesn't try."
   He went pale again.
   "Perhaps you are right," he said.
   In a few minutes she left him and went to her room. At least, she 
had tried to take off the everlasting lid from things.
   The weather continued sunny, Pauline continued her sun-baths, and 
Ciss lay on the roof eavesdropping in the literal sense of the word. 
But Pauline was not to be heard. No sound came up the pipe. She must 
be lying with her face away into the open. Ciss listened with all her 
might. She could just detect the faintest, faintest murmur away below, 
but no audible syllable.
   And at night, under the stars, Cecilia sat and waited in silence, 
on the seat which kept in view the drawing-room windows and the side 
door into the garden. She saw the light go up in her aunt's room. She 
saw the lights at last go out in the drawing-room. And she waited. But 
he did not come. She stayed on in the darkness half the night, while 
the owl hooted. But she stayed alone.
   Two days she heard nothing, her aunt's thoughts were not revealed 
and at evening nothing happened. Then the second night, as she sat 
with heavy, helpless persistence in the garden, suddenly she started. 
He had come out. She rose and went softly over the grass to him.
   "Don't speak," he murmured.
   And in silence, in the dark, they walked down the garden and over 
the little bridge to the paddock, where the hay, cut very late, was in 
cock. There they stood disconsolate under the stars.
   "You see," he said, "how can I ask for love, if I don't feel any 
love in myself. You know I have a real regard for you - "
   "How can you feel any love, when you never feel anything? " she 
said.
   "That is true," he replied.
   And she waited for what next.
   "And how can I marry?" he said. "I am a failure even at making 
money. I can't ask my mother for money."
   She sighed deeply.
   "Then don't bother yet about marrying," she said. "Only love me a 
little. Won't you? "
   He gave a short laugh.
   "It sounds so atrocious, to say it is hard to begin," he said.
   She sighed again. He was so stiff to move.
   "Shall we sit down a minute," she said. And then as they sat on the 
hay, she added: "May I touch you? Do you mind? "
   "Yes, I mind! But do as you wish," he replied, with that mixture of 
shyness and queer candour which made him a little ridiculous, as he 
knew quite well. But in his heart there was almost murder.
   She touched his black, always tidy hair with her fingers.
   "I suppose I shall rebel one day," he said again, suddenly.
   They sat some time, till it grew chilly. And he held her hand fast, 
but he never put his arms round her. At last she rose and went 
indoors, saying good night.
   The next day, as Cecilia lay stunned and angry on the roof, taking 
her sun-bath, and becoming hot and fierce with sunshine, suddenly she 
started. A terror seized her in spite of herself. It was the voice.
   "Caro, euro, tu non l'hai visto!" it was murmuring away, in a 
language Cecilia did not understand. She lay and writhed her limbs in 
the sun, listening intently to words she could not follow . Softly, 
whisperingly, with infinite caressiveness and yet with that subtle, 
insidious arrogance under its velvet, came the voice, murmuring in 
Italian: "Bravo, si molto bravo, poverino, ma uomo come te non lo sara 
mai, mai, mail" Oh, especially in Italian Cecilia heard the poisonous 
charm of the voice, so caressive, so soft and flexible, yet so utterly 
egoistic. She hat edit with intensity as it sighed and whispered out 
of nowhere. Why, why should it be so delicate, so subtle and flexible 
and beautifully controlled, while she herself was so clumsy! Oh, poor 
Cecilia, she writhed in the afternoon sun, knowing her own clownish 
clumsiness and lack of suavity, in comparison.
   "No, Robert dear, you will never be the man your father was, though 
you have some of his looks. He was a marvellous lover, soft as a 
flower, yet piercing as a humming-bird. No, Robert dear, you will 
never know how to serve a woman as Monsignor Mauro did. Cara, cara mia 
bellissima, ti ho aspettato come I'agonizzante aspetta la morte, morte 
deliziosa, quasi quasi troppo deliziosa per un'anima umana - Soft as a 
flower, yet probing like a humming-bird.He gave himself to a woman as 
he gave himself to God. Mauro! Mauro! How you loved me!"
   The voice ceased in reverie, and Cecilia knew what she had guessed 
before, that Robert was not the son of her Uncle Ronald, but of some 
Italian.
   "I am disappointed in you, Robert. There is no poignancy in you. 
Your father was a Jesuit, but he was the most perfect and poignant 
lover in the world. You are a Jesuit like a fish in a tank. And that 
Ciss of yours is the cat fishing for you. It is less edifying even 
than poor Henry."
   Cecilia suddenly bent her mouth down to the tube, and said in a 
deep voice: "Leave Robert alone! Don't kill him as well."
   There was a dead silence, in the hot July afternoon that was 
lowering for thunder. Cecilia lay prostrate, her heart beating in 
great thumps. She was listening as if her whole soul were an ear. At 
last she caught the whisper:
   "Did someone speak? "
   She leaned again to the mouth of the tube.
   "Don't kill Robert as you killed me," she said with slow 
enunciation, and a deep but small voice.
   "Ah!" came the sharp little cry. "Who is that speaking?"
   "Henry!" said the deep voice.
   There was a dead silence. Poor Cecilia lay with all the use gone 
out of her. And there was dead silence. Till at last came the whisper:
   "I didn't kill Henry. No, No! Henry, surely you can't blame me! I 
loved you, dearest. I only wanted to help you."
   "You killed me!" came the deep, artificial, accusing voice. "Now, 
let Robert live. Let him go! Let him marry!"
   There was a pause.
   "How very, very awful!" mused the whispering voice. "Is it 
possible, Henry, you are a spirit, and you condemn me?"
   "Yes! I condemn you!"
   Cecilia felt all her pent-up rage going down that rain-pipe. At the 
same time, she almost laughed. It was awful.
   She lay and listened and listened. No sound! As if time had ceased, 
she lay inert in the weakening sun. The sky was yellowing. Quickly she 
dressed herself, went down, and out to the corner of the stables.
   "Aunt Pauline!" she called discreetly. "Did you hear thunder?"
   "Yes! I am going in. Don't wait," came a feeble voice.
   Cecilia retired, and from the loft watched, spying, as the figure 
of the lovely lady, wrapped in a lovely wrap of old blue silk, went 
rather totteringly to the house.
   The sky gradually darkened, Cecilia hastened in with the rugs. Then 
the storm broke. Aunt Pauline did not appear to tea. She found the 
thunder trying. Robert also did not arrive till after tea, in the 
pouring rain. Cecilia went down the covered passage to her own house, 
and dressed carefully for dinner, putting some white columbines at her 
breast.
   The drawing-room was lit with a softly-shaded lamp. Robert, 
dressed, was waiting, listening to the rain. He too seemed strangely 
cracking and on edge. Cecilia came in with the white flowers nodding 
at her breast. Robert was watching her curiously, a new look on his 
face. Cecilia went to the bookshelves near the door, and was peering 
for something, listening acutely. She heard a rustle, then the door 
softly opening. And as it opened, Ciss suddenly switched on the strong 
electric light by the door.
   Her aunt, in a dress of black lace over ivory colour, stood in the 
doorway. Her face was made up, but haggard with a look of unspeakable 
irritability, as if years of suppressed exasperation and dislike of 
her fellow-men had suddenly crumpled her into an old witch.
   "Oh, aunt!" cried Cecilia.
   "Why, mother, you're a little old lady!" came the astounded voice 
of Robert: like an astonished boy: as if it were a joke.
   "Have you only just found it out?" snapped the old woman 
venomously.
   "Yes! Why, I thought - " his voice tailed out in misgiving.
   The haggard, old Pauline, in a frenzy of exasperation, said:
   "Aren't we going down?"
   She had never even noticed the excess of light, a thing she 
shunned. And she went downstairs almost tottering.
   At table she sat with her face like a crumpled mask of unspeakable 
irritability. She looked old, very old, and like a witch. Robert and 
Cecilia fetched furtive glances at her. And Ciss, watching Robert, saw 
that he was so astonished and repelled by his mother's looks, that he 
was another man.
   "What kind of a drive home did you have? " snapped Pauline, with an 
almost gibbering irritability.
   "It rained, of course," he said.
   "How clever of you to have found that out!" said his mother, with 
the grisly grin of malice that had succeeded her arch smirk.
   "I don't understand," he said with quiet suavity.
   "It's apparent," said his mother, rapidly and sloppily eating her 
food.
   She rushed through the meal like a crazy dog, to the utter 
consternation of the servant. And the moment it was over, she darted 
in a queer, crab-like way upstairs. Robert and Cecilia followed her, 
thunderstruck, like two conspirators.
   "You pour the coffee. I loathe it! I'm going! Good night!" said the 
old woman, in a succession of sharp shots. And she scrambled out of 
the room.
   There was a dead silence. At last he said:
   "I'm afraid mother isn't well. I must persuade her to see a 
doctor."
   "Yes!" said Cecilia.
   The evening passed in silence. Robert and Ciss stayed on in the 
drawing-room, having lit a fire. Outside was cold rain. Each pretended 
to read. They did not want to separate. The evening passed with 
ominous mysteriousness, yet quickly.
   At about ten o'clock, the door suddenly opened, and Pauline 
appeared in a blue wrap. She shut the door behind her, and came to the 
fire. Then she looked at the two young people in hate, real hate.
   "You two had better get married quickly," she said in an ugly 
voice. " It would look more decent; such a passionate pair of lovers! 
"
   Robert looked up at her quietly.
   "I thought you believed that cousins should not marry, mother," he 
said.
   "I do! But you're not cousins. Your father was an Italian priest." 
Pauline held her daintily-slippered foot to the fire, in an old 
coquettish gesture. Her body tried to repeat all the old graceful 
gestures. But the nerve had snapped, so it was a rather dreadful 
caricature.
   "Is that really true, mother?" he asked.
   "True! What do you think? He was a distinguished man, or he 
wouldn't have been my lover. He was far too distinguished a man to 
have had you for a son. But that joy fell to me."
   "How unfortunate all round," he said slowly.
   "Unfortunate for you? You were lucky. It was my misfortune," she 
said acidly to him.
   She was really a dreadful sight, like a piece of lovely Venetian 
glass that has been dropped, and gathered up again in horrible, sharp-
edged fragments.
   Suddenly she left the room again.
   For a week it went on. She did not recover. It was as if every 
nerve in her body had suddenly started screaming in an insanity of 
discordance. The doctor came, and gave her sedatives, for she never 
slept. Without drugs, she never slept at all, only paced back and 
forth in her room, looking hideous and evil, reeking with malevolence. 
She could not bear to see either her son or her niece. Only when 
either of them came, she asked in pure malice:
   "Well! When's the wedding? Have you celebrated the nuptials yet?"
   At first Cecilia was stunned by what she had done. She realized 
vaguely that her aunt, once a definite thrust of condemnation had 
penetrated her beautiful armour, had just collapsed squirming inside 
her shell. It was too terrible. Ciss was almost terrified into 
repentance. Then she thought: This is what she always was. Now let her 
live the rest of her days in her true colours.
   But Pauline would not live long. She was literally shrivelling 
away. She kept to her room, and saw no one. She had her mirrors taken 
away.
   Robert and Cecilia sat a good deal together. The jeering of the mad 
Pauline had not driven them apart, as she had hoped. But Cecilia dared 
not confess to him what she had done.
   "Do you think your mother ever loved anybody? " Ciss asked him 
tentatively, rather wistfully, one evening.
   He looked at her fixedly.
   "Herself!" he said at last.
   "She didn't even love herself," said Ciss. "It was something else - 
what was it?" She lifted a troubled, utterly puzzled face to him.
   "Power!" he said curtly.
   "But what power?" she asked. "I don't understand."
   "Power to feed on other lives," he said bitterly. "She was 
beautiful, and she fed on life. She has fed on me as she fed on Henry. 
She put a sucker into one's soul and sucked up one's essential life."
   "And don't you forgive her?"
   "No."
   "Poor Aunt Pauline!"
   But even Ciss did not mean it. She was only aghast.
   "I know I've got a heart," he said, passionately striking his 
breast. "But it's almost sucked dry. I know people who want power over 
others."
   Ciss was silent; what was there to say?
   And two days later, Pauline was found dead in her bed, having taken 
too much veronal, for her heart was weakened. From the grave even she 
hit back at her son and her niece. She left Robert the noble sum of 
one thousand pounds; and Ciss one hundred. All the rest, with the 
nucleus of her valuable antiques, went to form the "Pauline 
Attenborough Museum".