Britannia Mews Page 5

  “What about?” asked Mr. Lambert.

  “About us, of course.”

  “My dear Adelaide,” said Mr. Lambert, withdrawing his hand and beginning to walk on again, “if I speak to your father, you will immediately be taken to Switzerland, or at any rate Torquay.”

  This was so true that Adelaide could not deny it. She did not actually fear a removal to the Alps, the expense and upheaval would be far too great; but Mr. Culver would undoubtedly make himself unpleasant. Adelaide did not pause to ask herself why: the fact was obvious.

  “We must do nothing in a hurry,” said Mr. Lambert.

  “No,” said Adelaide.

  “Until my future is more assured.”

  Adelaide felt it wonderful to be dependent upon the future of an artist. And what a future it would be! She thought of Sir John Millais, and her heart swelled.

  “Shall you have a picture in the Academy?” she asked longingly.

  “If I’ve time to paint one,” said Mr. Lambert, with great carelessness.

  “But you must! You must make time!” cried Adelaide—and thought how glorious it would be if she could only help him to make it, arrange his still-necessary drawing-lessons, serve him nourishing meals, guard his scanty hours of unremitting toil. For she read what was in his mind: he wished to wait until he could bring her his success as a wedding gift, give her the pride of overwhelming Culvers and Hambros alike with the splendour of her match.… As if I cared for that! thought Adelaide. Indeed she desired not only love but work, a life-work: the proper life-work of the woman, ancillary to the male.…

  The rest of their brief interview was passed in making plans for Henry Lambert’s Academy picture. They decided that it should have a religious but non-sectarian subject, and contain a great many life-sized figures. Adelaide suggested the finding of Moses in the bulrushes, and Mr. Lambert agreed that the combination of an infant (Moses) and a semi-nude (Pharaoh’s daughter) had definite possibilities. Adelaide had never before heard even a semi-nude actually referred to in conversation; to use the term herself produced a wonderful sense of emancipation. Neither referred again to the prospective interview with Mr. Culver. There was no need, for Adelaide had instantly accepted her lover’s decision that the time was not yet ripe. After all, they had only to wait until May, when Henry’s genius; would burst upon the world with the opening of the Academy; for the meanwhile Adelaide felt quite as strongly as he did—and without even seeking a reason—the necessity of concealment.

  With the greatest ease, without a pang, she slipped into the ways of deceit.

  A hundred feminine shifts, long-used, long-tried, lay ready to her hand; Adelaide found she knew them all, as if by instinct. To take the matter of letters: Mrs. Culver sometimes opened her daughter’s correspondence, but she never opened a letter from Mr. Lambert, because they came addressed to—James Seeley. He was the previous occupier of the house, and genuine letters still came for him occasionally; it was anyone’s duty to forward them to his bank, but often they lay about for days, and Adelaide had no difficulty in making off with them. This was her own contrivance—its elaborateness perhaps betrayed the prentice hand, and Mr. Lambert made use of it rather warily. (Adelaide wrote often.) Her walks in the Gardens had become an accepted routine: still, cunningly, for greater security, Adelaide sometimes complained of a bleak day, was a little late (with what curbings of impatience!) in setting out, so that her mother sharply reminded her of the time. How intoxicatingly sweet, spiced with secrecy, were the half-hours that followed, in the autumnal Gardens, under the falling leaves, under the bare branches! How delicious the weekly drawing-lessons, spiced with danger as eyes met, hands touched, behind Alice’s back! What wonder that Adelaide, standing in Mrs. Orton’s supper-room, had so much to think about that Miss Yates’s talk was as the babble of a brook; or that her cousin Alice, with two plates of chicken salad, at last ate both herself?

  CHAPTER IV

  1

  Alice came round early the next afternoon to go through the old Culver toys; there was, as she remembered, quite a quantity of them, packed away in a battered tin trunk. The two girls hauled it from the box-room and sat down on the top landing to pull out china dolls, jumping-jacks, wooden soldiers and a sheaf of scrap-books; and right at the bottom found a large shell, faintly pink under a tracery of white, with four blunt spines. Adelaide rubbed her finger along the smooth inside of the lip and looked at it thoughtfully.

  “Where did that come from?” asked Alice.

  “Do you remember, ages ago, Mamma took me to call on a Mrs. Burnett—and never again? I wonder who she was.…”

  “Why, don’t you know?” exclaimed Alice. “She’s your aunt!”

  It was typical of Adelaide that she did not burst into ejaculations. She looked at her cousin, looked at the shell, and waited.

  “I know,” went on Alice, rather importantly, “because your Miss Bryant told our Miss Grigson (isn’t it astonishing how governesses find out everything?) and one day Grigs told me. Mrs. Burnett was Isabel Culver, she’s your Papa’s sister, and she married a Mr. Thompson. And, my dear … perhaps I shouldn’t tell you this … but if I know, I don’t see why you shouldn’t—”

  “Good gracious, I don’t suppose she murdered any one,” said Adelaide, at last impatient.

  “No, of course not. But, my dear”—Alice dropped her voice—“she’s been divorced.”

  For a moment Adelaide was too startled to speak. She was thoroughly shocked. For to have a divorce in the family was little better than having insanity, and indeed not so respectable. She felt at once repelled and extraordinarily curious.

  “When did it happen?” she asked nervously.

  “Oh, years and years ago—quite soon after she married. And she went to Paris with—with Mr. Burnett. Wasn’t it awful!”

  Adelaide nodded. She did feel it to be awful, but curiosity gained over horror. There was so much she didn’t understand. She firmly believed, as her education had taught her, that the wages of sin was death; and all she could remember of her aunt pointed to some suspension of this law. The luxury of that drawing-room off Curzon Street; the extreme smartness of the page; even the lavish garland of velvet adorning Mrs. Burnett’s gown, gradually reappeared to her memory in the most precise detail. Even more bewildering was the fact that she herself, as a child, had been allowed the opportunity of observing them. She had been taken to call on the sinner.…

  “Mamma can’t have known,” said Adelaide suddenly.

  “My dear, she must have!”

  “Then why did she take me? You’d have thought—”

  “Yes, wouldn’t you?” agreed Alice.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  Alice put on a worldly and very grown-up air.

  “Well, Mr. Burnett left her an immense deal of money, and I suppose she’s got to leave it to some one.”

  “I think that’s perfectly horrid,” said Adelaide coldly.

  She stooped again over the trunk and pulled out another doll, part of a toy theatre, a bundle of old Christmas-cards that had evidently been saved for scrap-books. There was a short silence, while Alice looked injured.

  “I’m sorry I told you, Addie, if you’re going to be upset.”

  “I’m not upset. At least, not about that. But I do think it’s horrid to suggest that Mamma was thinking about Mrs. Burnett’s money.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what else she could have been thinking about!” cried Alice.

  It was very distasteful—but at the back of her mind Adelaide began to think that her cousin might be right. She remembered the peculiar atmosphere of the whole visit: her mother’s nervousness, her own childish impression that they were doing something unusual, something that needed explaining. Or was it possible that Mrs. Culver, by the production of the infant Adelaide, was making a tacit offer to readmit a penitent sister-in-law to the respectable family circle? Did she hope by the spectacle of such innocence to soften a sin-hardened heart? If so, the attempt had f
ailed. Either Mrs. Burnett didn’t care for family life, or she had failed to repent.

  “Oh, never mind,” said Adelaide. “It’s over and finished with; I’m sorry I snapped. Alice, do you really want all this rubbish?”

  “All of it,” said Alice good-humouredly. She easily forgave Adelaide’s touchiness, because after all Mrs. Burnett was her aunt, it wasn’t the Hambros who had a divorce in the family. “Look, Addie, let’s tie a Christmas card to each thing, and put who it’s from!”

  Overriding Adelaide’s objection that it wasn’t yet Christmas, and the gifts weren’t from anyone in particular, Alice swept up a lapful of toys, seized the cards, and carried them to the old schoolroom table; and the idea turned out to be quite amusing. From Santa Claus, wrote Alice, From Mr. Pickwick … From Mother Goose.… Adelaide wrote cards from Robinson Crusoe, Hans Andersen, and the Sleeping Beauty. They exhausted fairy-tale characters, they went on to Sir Garnet Wolseley—“Do you remember the Black Watch?” asked Alice; and Lord George Sanger—“Do you remember going to the circus?” cried Adelaide—“Oh, dear, do you remember sliding down the Redan?” They had all their youthful memories in common; even their present occupation was familiar, for the young Culvers and Hambros always bought their Christmas cards and Valentines together, and addressed them together, so that they shouldn’t send the same one to a common friend. Adelaide actually found a card with Alice’s name on it: frost and robins, for Alice always went in for robins, as the twins always went in for coaches: it must have been the last card to come to the house in Albion Place.…

  For perhaps half an hour, in the old schoolroom, Adelaide slipped into a mood very rare with her: a mood in which family ties seemed the solid basis of life, their detail absorbing, their continuity a promise of stability for the future; perhaps she caught it from Alice, to whom such an attitude was so accepted, such a commonplace, that she took it for granted. But it had no real hold over Adelaide; it was as though she had walked by accident into someone else’s room, into someone else’s garden—and watched children playing there, and then walked out again.

  Already, as they went downstairs to tea, leaving a great parcel for the twins to fetch, she was considering how she should break the news about Mrs. Burnett to Henry Lambert.

  2

  For of course she had to tell him. On that point Adelaide never had the least doubt. She could conceal nothing from the man who was to be her husband. She hoped Henry would be broadminded enough to realize that it wasn’t her fault, and saw no incongruity in seeking forgiveness for something she hadn’t done. As Alice had silently pointed out, Mrs. Burnett was her aunt, her blood-relation; reason as she might, Adelaide could not quite free herself from a sense of guilt.

  When Adelaide had to do anything unpleasant, it was her instinct to rush at it. As soon as she saw Mr. Lambert next morning she rushed into confession.

  “Henry, there’s something I have to tell you. Something dreadful. I only found out yesterday or I’d have told you before.”

  Mr. Lambert, who had taken her arm, gave it a reassuring squeeze. He was in a very good humour—poor Henry! He said:—

  “You look like a little girl who’s been stealing jam.”

  Adelaide drew a deep breath.

  “I’m serious, Henry. It is serious. Henry, there—there’s a divorce in our family.”

  Watching him closely, she observed with relief that though startled, he was not overwhelmed. He didn’t even drop her arm. She hurried on.

  “It happened years and years ago, and I don’t think many people know, but it was papa’s sister, my aunt Isabel. Her husband divorced her and she went to live in Paris.”

  “With her lover?” asked Mr. Lambert calmly.

  Adelaide flushed.

  “With Mr. Burnett. Of course they got married. Now he’s dead.” (Adelaide felt that Mr. Burnett’s death slightly improved matters.) “Henry, I’m so sorry.…”

  But Mr. Lambert now appeared rather interested than in any way shocked—and also slightly incredulous. His raised, arched eyebrows gave him the air of a dog with its ears cocked.

  He said, “Look here, are you possibly talking about Belle Burnett?”

  “Belle?” repeated Adelaide. “Her name’s Isabel—I suppose it might be. I dare say she’d very likely change it …”

  “And she lived in Paris? Do you mean to say Belle Burnett’s your aunt?”

  “Why, do you mean you knew her?” cried Adelaide, startled in turn.

  “I didn’t exactly know her, I wasn’t grand enough,” said Mr. Lambert, more startlingly still. “But everyone knew who she was. She was one of the smartest women in Paris. I’m damned.”

  Adelaide felt slightly annoyed, both at his swearing in her presence and at the peculiar angle from which he seemed to regard the whole subject. She also, more obscurely, resented his way of referring to Mrs. Burnett without any prefix—though indeed that unfortunate woman had so nearly forfeited her right to it that perhaps this was natural.

  “I suppose Paris is different,” she said severely. “I dare say a few people would call on her there; but as for your not being grand enough—”

  “My dear child, of course I wasn’t. Belle Burnett went in for politicians and the Embassies; she said she left artists to the cocottes. She had the most elegant salon—”

  “Then why did she come back to England?” demanded Adelaide sharply.

  “Because the Austrian minister was transferred here—At least, I’ve no doubt she had good reasons. If you’d ever seen her—”

  “But I have. Mamma took me to call on her once, when I was a little girl.”

  Mr. Lambert whistled.

  “Your mother took you …? Why on earth did she do that?”

  “Because she was sorry for her. She felt it her duty. I think she was perfectly right.”

  “Oh, so do I,” agreed Mr. Lambert. “Still, it’s surprising.”

  For a moment his expression was rather like Alice’s; then he looked into Adelaide’s earnest face and let the thought go. “And what did you,” he asked, “think of your aunt?”

  Adelaide paused. Annoyed and disturbed as she was, she could not deny the memory of that white throat, those white hands, that silky rustle and faint sweet scent.

  “I thought she was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen,” she said honestly.

  There in the Gardens, Mr. Lambert swiftly put his arm round her and kissed her on the cheek.

  “You’re a darling,” he said. “Thank God you’re not prejudiced like the rest of them. Adelaide, I adore you.”

  There was now no point in asking him whether he minded her having Mrs. Burnett for an aunt, since he plainly did not; and as Adelaide walked home alone she found that her own attitude was already changing: she could think of Mrs. Burnett without shame.

  3

  Something else was changed too. From that conversation dated a subtle alteration in her relations with Henry Lambert. He gained assurance with her; his love-making became bolder. A prejudiced observer might have said that he treated her with slightly less respect. Adelaide however saw only a delightful increase in intimacy, and followed wherever he led.

  A day or two later, going up to the box-room with a broken lamp, she noticed the lid of the tin trunk still open. Before closing it she glanced inside: it was almost empty, but in one corner lay the Indian shell. Either through delicacy, or because she saw no use in it, Alice had left it behind. After a moment’s hesitation Adelaide picked it up and carried it downstairs and set it on her bedroom mantelpiece. Then she hesitated again; and at last put it out of sight in her bureau drawer.

  CHAPTER V

  1

  It was too much to hope that these daily meetings would never attract notice. The Gardens were frequented by Mrs. Culver’s friends, who, while they praised her broad-mindedness in permitting Adelaide to walk there unchaperoned, were not at all averse to letting her know its consequences.

  “Mrs. Orton saw you in the Gardens this morning, Ade
laide.” Adelaide thought swiftly.

  “Did she, Mamma? I didn’t see her. But I saw Mr. Lambert.”

  Mrs. Culver waited. There was no telling whether Adelaide’s tone had deceived her or not. In any case, she waited.

  “He walked as far as the bridge with me,” went on Adelaide. “He said he hoped we should go and see his picture in next year’s Academy.”

  “Will he have one there?” Mrs. Culver looked very slightly pleased; a picture in the Academy, unlike most manifestations of art, was something she could recognize as a definite achievement. Not sufficient, of course, to alter Mr. Lambert’s standing, but creditable in one’s drawing-master.

  “I said we always went anyway,” finished Adelaide carelessly. “Mamma, have you any message? I’m writing to Treff.”

  The dangerous moment passed. Now and then it would recur. Alice was observant; she began to notice that Mr. Lambert spent more time at her cousin’s shoulder than at her own, and fortunately remarked on it to Adelaide, who was able to give Henry warning. But they were in greater danger from Alice than from anyone, and it was particularly lucky that during that winter she was unusually occupied with her own concerns.

  For Alice was about to have an offer. Like everything to do with the Hambros, it was a thoroughly family affair; even the twins, when Freddy Baker came to call on Sundays, regarded him with interested and speculative eyes. He came so regularly, and stayed so long; he listened so attentively to Mr. Hambro’s political views. He went to all the dances Alice went to, and put her in the proud position of being able to book three waltzes as soon as she received her programme. Before matters reached this point Mr. Hambro naturally made a few enquiries: Mr. Baker’s income (he was in Lloyd’s), connections, and character were all satisfactory. When at last, on the third of January, he actually proposed, all the Hambros were pleased, and all advised Alice to accept him.

  “Any one would think my family wanted to be rid of me,” Alice told her cousin indignantly. “The children want to be bridesmaids, and the twins say they don’t want me to be an old maid, and Mamma and Papa keep saying how sad it is to part with a daughter—but they’re quite prepared to part, they say they’ll resign themselves. I suppose it’s the first time Papa has resigned himself in his life!”