Lucinda

Today in the living-­room at Paigles they were sitting about in their different characteristic postures.

One could not avoid the thought that the repetition of a family face induces a kind of dislike, like a hackneyed tune. Individually, they are charming, these Quarles. But, collectively, the little eyes set too close together, the long nose with the slight twist to the left, the dome-­shaped forehead, grow overwhelming. One looks away with relief to the mother, whose chiselled good looks make her seem as a statue of Phidias might against a background of Hapsburg portraits.

With her blue eyes and yellow hair, Mrs. Quarles is so gaily tinted that it is hard to believe her bright blood flows in the veins of the long-­visaged, sallow children whose heads were bent so absorbedly to-­night over their various tasks.

They make a stranger in their midst feel lonely. They would never love you for yourself, but for some mystical reason which has nothing to do with your reality.

However, they let me come and go, sit in their midst and drink them in. And there is no thought I have not learned to read on their solemn Spanish faces. Years ago an ancestor brought back a wife from Spain. Her portrait hangs over the fireplace in the room in which we were forgathered to-­night, a sombre brooding woman with tragedy in her eyes. She left an impress on that English stock from which it has not yet recovered.

I think I know them better than they know each other. A guest has not much to do in this ancient house except to poke and pry, to live vicariously in the intense and narrow minds about her. They do not dream how closely I watch them.

Venetia, aloof in a corner, was writing in her manuscript book. To it she confides her strange, troubled thoughts about God and beauty. They are written in a swift, passionate, illegible script. To-­day she had been moved by the texture, shapes, and colour of some tulips which came from London packed in a wooden box. She had extracted the tin-­tacks and parted the tissue paper as though performing some sacrificial rite. (Her fingers are so long, she could almost pick a black bud on Yggdrasil or hook a Pleiad from the sky. Regal, creative hands, which seem to have a separate life, apart from her.)

I watched her take out the cold sheaves which sighed in their sleep, and touch a waxen cup with her cheek.

‘Oh, Theodora!’ she breathed, ‘there should be some strange, jewelled adjective for this chill translucency—as though light and water were drying into silk.’

Theodora, whose fingers are not so long, almost closed her small eyes with amusement.

‘Mamma would say, “Venetia is too fantastic for common people who eat mutton and puddings. She should nibble fungus and sleep in a cathedral pew.” ’

Venetia was silent. She loves poetry as a gardener loves the dark, wistful violets which take the airs of March with fragrance. I watched her arranging the pale flames of the flowers in jars which she set sacrificially about the room, absorbing through her finger-­tips, her nose and eyes, the little, cool souls, as of Naiads, that dwell in tulips.

And in the evening, when the lamps were lit and the family gathered about the hearth, Venetia sought for the adjective Shakespeare would have used. Theodora was writing to a schoolfriend; Clare, with horn-­rimmed spectacles on her prominent nose, was reading history; Duncan transposing a song into a different key; and Lewis—but Lewis was smoking a pipe in idleness, his thoughts busy with something that withdrew him entirely from the scene.

Mrs. Quarles alone looked as if she were quite aware of her surroundings. Yes, she was aware of the white walls and the old oak and the lamplight, and of the wood fire burning with a blue flame, as she turned over the contents of her workbox, a faint frown between her eyes.

‘Drat that Lucinda!’ she remarked presently, in her sweet, light soprano. ‘The minx must have hidden my thimble.’

Her words had the effect of a handful of pebbles thrown in at a window. All the other occupants of the room (save one) started out of their absorption and looked at her with hostile eyes. I could not help signalling to her from my corner my secret amusement.

Five shocked voices murmured ‘Mamma!’ on different notes of the scale.

The lady’s nostrils twitched with inward laughter as she looked round at the family face.

‘Oh, you Quarles, with your long noses! I beg all your pardons, I’m sure,’ she giggled, looking radiant, delicate and impish.

‘We are your children, too, Mamma,’ remarked Duncan in a gentle, reproachful voice, as he stooped his nose again over his task.

‘Yes, but I’ve always looked upon you more as begotten than conceived, if you know what I mean,’ she replied, pressing a handkerchief to her lips. ‘You must forgive me for not being born a Quarles. After thirty years of marriage, I’ve not been able to arrive at the proper frame of mind as regards Lucinda. But you children respected her in the cradle; psychic brats from birth, Quarles, every one of you to the marrow. I should have liked one neat, pretty child, with no nonsense about it,’ she added plaintively.

‘Darling, there’s no nonsense about me,’ beamed Clare.

‘Yes, there is, there’s Lucinda. You’re all possessed. You all hope, in the daylight, to catch her one day at her tricks, and you’re all afraid at night that perhaps you will. Besides, Clare, there’s your face. Papa is going down to posterity all right, but what about me?’

‘I shall take a negress to my bosom. That might alter the strain,’ chuckled Lewis from the deeps of the arm-­chair by the fire.

‘My dear, it wasn’t a black woman you were thinking of when I roused you just now from your reverie. I dare say Lewis, we should all be a little surprised if your thoughts suddenly took visible shape.’

‘Clare’s face, and my evil mind; now what have you got up your sleeve for Theodora, Mamma; and Duncan; and Venetia? Come now, why should they be let off?’

‘I suspect that anything unpleasant there is to say about the family is being said by Theodora in her interminable letter, and wittily said, too. I am not going to be baited by you, Lewis. Besides, I am only spiteful impromptu.’

‘My wit,’ said Theodora, outwardly unperturbed, ‘is certainly sardonic. I find infinite material in the family circle, and a perfect audience in Mary Sandberg. She has a subtle, if rather cruel, humour.’

‘I have no doubt that the only person you do not lampoon is Lucinda. Your own mother could not expect to be spared. I have always thought loyalty the most beautiful of the virtues,’ she sighed.

‘Now, Mamma, you know Theodora was only laughing at you,’ said Clare. ‘Of course, all this Lucinda business must be very tiresome for you; but you must admit she adds a zest to life. What Paigles would be without her, I don’t know.’

Suddenly Venetia looked up with dark troubled eyes.

‘I know that she is here, in the room. She looked over my shoulder ——’

‘Your secrets are not secure from Lucinda, my dear. There is one in this house who reads your cryptic heart,’ said Duncan in a low voice to his favourite sister.

A look with which I was familiar had come into their eyes. How shall I describe it? Expectancy was in it, and awe, and a deep excitement. It is the look that music-­lovers have who wait for the first strains of a symphony.

Only the bright eyes of the mother were clear and untroubled as her gaze went from one face to another of her strange children.

‘She is all things to all men,’ she said, and her little malicious smile flickered out as fast as a lizard that slips into a crack. ‘It is time someone in this house spoke the truth about this phantom.’

‘Mamma! Mamma!’ cried Clare imploringly.

One found it in one’s heart to pity her. I know what Lucinda means to Clare, who loves with passion the old black-­and-­white house with its twisted chimneys. Paigles without Lucinda would be as shallow as a roseless June. She is the uncapturable essence of the past. Sometimes one almost sees her shadow on the wall. Sometimes, looking into a mirror, one almost surprises a face not one’s own, a submerged, lost face, like a star in a pool.

‘Yes, Clare,’ said the light, merciless voice, ‘it is high time someone spoke out. Lucinda is only a fancy name for the madness with which you are all tainted. She was invented by Robert Herrick to explain the malaise he suffered, poor creature, during his visit here. In his pretty way, he gave a name to the Quarles kink.’

Strangely enough, Theodora had just quoted in her letter to Mary Sandberg an extract from her ancestor’s memoirs:

‘Bob Herrick from Dean Prior to stay a sennight. I would for my part it were twice as long. His conceits much after mine own heart. Will have it that a spirit walks at Paigles—one who gathers the invisible roses of the Moon. Eye hath not seen but heart hath felt her quaint enchantment. Aye, a poet’s heart. I would not that Luisa, my wife, had wind of this most incorporeal Beauty.’

Looking up, Theodora repeated the last words, her small eyes glittering.

‘Mamma, being a beauty herself, can’t do with this incorporeal rival,’ said Lewis.

Mrs. Quarles’ nostrils twitched again. ‘If it weren’t for my Attic sense of humour, I should surely perish of a sense of my own unworthiness,’ she said.

She now heaped up her bright wools in a basket and, still holding in her laughter, went out of the room.

‘What did she mean?’ asked Venetia, a worried pleat between her brows.

‘I suppose we rather make her feel there is something special about us—this Lucinda ichor in our veins which sets us apart from common humanity,’ said Theodora, folding up her letter. She lighted a candle which stood at her elbow and held in the flame a stick of sealing-­wax.

The others watched her deft fingers at work with eyes which looked fascinated, but were in reality dark with abstraction. Finally, she set her seal upon the yielding wax and watched it set into a crisp device with a pleasant sense of secrecy.

But she didn’t feel quite so secret as usual. Her mother’s remark had disconcerted her. Mamma was diabolically acute. But the others hadn’t noticed it.

After all, was she not conferring a kind of immortality upon her family, making them come alive for Mary Sandberg in the realm of Art? For she drew them a little more grotesque and fantastic than life, as though her mind turned a limelight upon them. She made them dance to her secret tunes, like a malicious showman dangling his puppets.

‘It must exasperate her to distraction. Why, she doesn’t even believe,’ said Clare.

‘Beautiful as she is, she is nevertheless material to her finger-­tips. Those sweet, as she would say tidy little faces, have faith only in what they can see,’ said Theodora. ‘I adore Mamma, she has such a caustic wit—but as for anything else . . . She walks with light feet over wells of darkness, never hearing the stones ring hollow.’

‘I sometimes think,’ sighed Venetia, slipping her book behind a cushion, ‘that if it were not for her, we, some of us that is, would see Lucinda.’ She exchanged a look with Duncan. ‘Sometimes she seems so close. She was just now. But Mamma with her commonsense is like—is like—electric light in a room which a moonbeam is trying to enter.’

She pushed up her heavy hair with her long hands as though it were a crown she would fain lift from a brow grown weary. ‘Duncan in his music, I in my poetry—sometimes she almost gets through to us.’

Theodora giggled. She had written to Mary Sandberg, ‘Mamma says “Duncan’s music is like an orgy of grasshoppers.” Not a bad description for this scratchy modern stuff, all broken reeds and frustrated rhythms.’

‘I sometimes think,’ said Lewis, ‘that we are all as mad as hatters, and that Mamma, with her scepticism and her commonsense, must hate the stink of occultism there is about this house.’

‘Stink is too strong a word for the delicate perfume of Lucinda. What is she to you, Venetia?’

‘Poetry,’ said Venetia.

‘Music,’ said Duncan.

‘I suppose, history—the sense of the past,’ said Clare, slowly.

‘With her help, I turn life into drama,’ said Theodora.

‘Since Theodora has dragged us all into the confessional and has herself confessed,’ said Lewis, ‘I suppose I must add my dark secret. Lucinda, to me, is just—woman. I have committed adultery with her in my heart.’

Upstairs in her bedroom, Mrs. Quarles was writing in her diary:—

‘Abused Lucinda to the family; told them she doesn’t exist. I hug my secret to my heart—it gives me infinite joy. Saw her again to-­night in my mirror. She made a moue before she disappeared. What should we do without each other? Is it not a celestial jest that I who am no Quarles alone know her? I know her funny, malicious mind, which is akin to my own. When I make my little jokes, it is Lucinda, bless her, who laughs the deepest. I know she is rippling all through her crystal, as when you throw a stone into a pool. I alone know that she has hair the colour of amber and eyes as blue as squills. . . .’

But here I was too impatient to read any more. For my hair is raven-­black and my eyes are green. She has not seen me—only her girlhood’s face in the glass.

Alas, poor me! Poor lonely ghost!