A reversion to type

by E. M. Delafield

I

If the interior of Squires was revealing, it was quite unconsciously so. Lady Aviolet, one felt sure, was serenely unaware of the need of self-expression that in 1905 was called “modern,” and had she been aware of it, the necessity would not have translated itself through the medium of artistic surroundings.

The original Squires had been burnt to the ground during the Chartist riots, rebuilt, and added to until the square grey mass of flint showed odd, irregular excrescences on every side.

Lower than the house, and surrounded by red brick walls that were older, lay the square stable-yard, surmounted by a clock tower. There had always been hunters in the Aviolet stables, and hounds had been domiciled there two generations earlier.

The gardens lay behind the house. In the front were smooth slopes of grass, a croquet lawn, trim gravelled paths and groups of ornamental shrubs. A square, open space of gravel beneath twin flights of stone steps topped by an openwork stone balustrade wound away between the ornamental shrubs, and eventually became the avenue that ran down the mile length of the park.

The high road lay outside the park gates, white with thick, chalky dust. Wayfarers could see the chimneys through the screening mass of elms, beech trees, and occasional yews.

The windows were better guarded, and could neither be overlooked, nor overlook.

Dr. Lucian, waiting in the hall, did not look out of the windows, but gazed round him, the familiar interior taking a new value as he gave it an attention that he had not given it for years.

The furniture was of heavy Spanish mahogany, the large armchairs upholstered in a blue-grey tapestry that was repeated in the long curtains dividing the hall from the approach to the smoking-room, library, and gun-room. The high, narrow black oak mantelshelf bore five admirable specimens of famille verte.

On the panelled walls hung portraits, all of them rather bad, of Aviolets, in heavy gilt frames. A large writing-table gleamed with silver and dark-green leather with gilt lettering on it, and a smaller table held newspapers and periodicals in orderly array. China stood in glass-fronted cabinets against the walls, and pot plants were grouped on either side of the oak staircase. There were no books, except the four that were all bound alike in loose green leather covers: “Postal Guide,” “Whittaker’s Almanac,” “Bradshaw,” and “A.B.C.,” standing together in a little green stand.

Besides the tapestry curtains, a further door opened out of the hall and Lucian amused himself by conjecturing what lay behind it. He knew that it was Lady Aviolet’s morning-room, but he had never been inside it.

He guessed at pink chintz, rather shabby now, and a writing-table fitted with innumerable pigeon-holes, laden with papers, leaflets, silver photograph frames, and little scarlet woolly garments stabbed together by wooden knitting-needles. A feeble water-colour painting of two young boys probably hung above the table—Ford and Jim Aviolet.

He felt sure that a great many smaller water-colours covered the walls, and that a draped easel set across a corner supported a representation of some such picture as Holman Hunt’s “Light of the World” or Watts’ “Love and Death.” There would be three or four little tables crowded with silver, and silver-gilt trifles, photographs of relatives, and a number of silver vases filled with flowers. A looking-glass would hang over the fireplace, and on the marble mantelshelf would be an ornamental clock, out of order, and a number of other photographs in silver or mosaic-work frames. A revolving bookcase might possibly stand in the middle of the room, containing books on gardening, one or two volumes of Kipling, a work of Whyte Melville’s, and some standard poetry.

No animal, he thought, would be allowed inside the morning-room, although Lady Aviolet was fond of Pug, and he lay in the hall now, panting and snorting. No one was fond of the black Persian cat, except Ford, to whom she belonged, but the black Persian cat, with scrupulous fairness, was also allowed to lie in the hall, like Pug.

Lady Aviolet, when she hurried in at last, even said, “Well, Puss,” as she went past, but she said it without conviction.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Dr. Lucian. I wanted to find some old illustrated papers to amuse my little grandson ... you know what children are like, in bed. You’ve not seen little Cecil yet?”

“No.”

“Not a bit like poor Jim.”

She sighed—a tribute which the doctor supposed to be extorted by convention, since no one aware of the peculiarities that had characterized the mauvais sujet of the Aviolet family could reasonably wish to see his memory perpetuated in his boy. Perhaps, however, the Aviolets did not wish little Cecil to resemble his mother, either. Dr. Lucian had not seen Mrs. Jim Aviolet, but he knew that Jim’s marriage abroad had been looked upon at the time as the crowning folly of a career that had been thickly peppered with follies throughout. Nor had Jim’s death redeemed Jim’s life, although it had the effect—to the doctor’s mind wholly desirable—of causing Sir Thomas Aviolet to offer a home to his daughter-in-law and only grandchild.

They had arrived from Ceylon a month earlier, and, so far as Dr. Lucian was aware, he was the first person in the neighbourhood whose curiosity was to be gratified by an introduction.

He followed Lady Aviolet’s squat, heavy-footed figure up the stairs and along passages so thickly carpeted that their footfalls were inaudible.

Passing through a green baize-covered door, they passed into a chillier region of stairs covered with oil-cloth and pitch-pine cupboards redolent of polish. A pink-sprigged paper covered the walls instead of oak panelling.

“You’ve not seen the nurseries for many years; I think not since Ford and Jim were up here?”

“Not since they both had measles. Jim was only ten years old.”

The doctor remembered that earlier occasion, and his own preference for the scapegrace Jim who had flatly refused to take his medicine while his elder brother Ford, far less ill, had lain with exemplary patience working out chess-problems in bed, and obediently swallowing nauseous draughts.

Lady Aviolet knocked at the door of the room that had been the night nursery, and went in.

“Here is Dr. Lucian, Rose—my daughter-in-law.”

Mrs. Aviolet did not look more than four or five and twenty, built on a large scale, and with something of the slouching awkwardness of an overgrown schoolgirl. Her hair, which was untidy, was a very light brown in front and yellow where it was turned up at the back, and her eyes, big and brown, had beautifully upturned black lashes. Deep dimples showed at the corners of her pretty mouth, and her teeth were white and even. Her worst point might have been her skin, but it was glaringly evident, even to the doctor’s masculine perceptions, that she made lavish and unskilful use of cosmetics.

They looked, at Squires, as much out of place as did her clothes—frilled where Lady Aviolet’s were plain, papery, in spite of their blackness, where the other’s were heavy and substantial.

She gave Dr. Lucian a large and very capable-looking white hand, heavily laden with rings.

“How d’you do? This is my little boy—he’s got a chill.”

The little boy sitting up in bed was very like her, with the same brown eyes, fair hair, and deep dimples, but with a look of fragility. There was nothing in his appearance to recall any of the Aviolets. He was not shy, but eager to talk and to answer questions.

“We hope to get some colour into his face presently,” Lady Aviolet observed. “You know what these Eastern children are.”

She looked at the little boy with dissatisfaction.

“He’s quite healthy,” said Mrs. Aviolet shortly.

She began to give an account of his health, speaking rather defiantly.

“Yes. Yes. I’ll just take his temperature. Put this under your tongue and don’t talk until I take it away again.”

Little Cecil opened his mouth and received the thermometer and then began to laugh, looking round him with big, mischievous eyes.

The doctor held up a warning finger.

“Be quiet, Cecil,” said his grandmother sharply. “Didn’t you hear what Dr. Lucian said?”

“Just you be quiet, Ces,” coaxed his mother. She looked down at him, stroking his forehead.

Lady Aviolet moved to the window. “He’s spoilt,” she said to the doctor, in what she evidently supposed to be an inaudible aside. “We’re looking for a good nursery governess. Just think—seven years old and can’t read yet!”

“When does your son get back?”

“He is back, I am glad to say. It’s difficult to know what to do——” she broke off. “I’d like you to examine Cecil, and see if you think he’s really delicate. I believe they were in some healthy part, up in the hills, but of course it isn’t the same thing as being properly brought up in England.”

The doctor went back to the bedside, made friends with the little boy, and accomplished a very fairly general examination.

“We shall have you up and about again in a couple of days. How do you like England?”

“Very much indeed, thank you. I like the garden, only I’m not allowed to pick the flowers, and there are no monkeys.”

“I’ve got a monkey. Would you like to come and see it?”

“Yes, please.”

The little boy looked delighted.

“A dear little fellow,” said the doctor, as Lady Aviolet took him downstairs again. “I don’t think there’s any need to be uneasy about him at all.”

He repeated the assurance to Cecil’s mother, who had followed them out of the room.

“I knew he was all right. There’s never been anything wrong with him; and this is simply a passing chill—and no wonder, after the heat in the Red Sea.”

“No wonder at all,” the doctor agreed. “He’ll be all right in a day or two.”

Rose Aviolet thanked him, but it struck him that her mother-in-law was still dissatisfied. When they were once more in the hall, and Rose had returned to the nursery, she spoke.

“What do you think of the general health of the child?”

“Excellent, I should think. Heart, lungs, all the rest of it, in very sound order I should say.” He felt faintly surprised at her anxiety. In all the years that he had known her, Lady Aviolet had never struck him as the sort of woman to indulge in foolish, maternal terrors.

“Of course, a tropical child’s first visit to England is always liable to cause a few alarms,” he said tentatively.

“Oh, I’m not nervous. His mother has some idea of his not being fit for school, but as Sir Thomas says, that’s all nonsense. Anyway there’s more than a year before we need think about that.”

“He seems intelligent, but I suppose he’s not had the usual chances of education, if he’s always been in the East.”

“He can’t read or write, but perhaps one couldn’t expect it. But he never seems to have played any games, poor little chap, which is a much more serious disadvantage. As Sir Thomas says, boys can never begin games too young.”

The doctor was not sufficiently in sympathy with Sir Thomas’s dictum to make any reply.

“I am afraid,” said Lady Aviolet in a hesitating way, rather as though the words were forced from her under the compulsion of some unusually strong feeling. “I am afraid that the little boy is going to be a disappointment to Sir Thomas. He is so utterly unlike the Aviolets.”

Dr. Lucian wondered whether she did not rather mean he was so exactly like his mother. The few moments that he had spent in the night nursery had served strongly to confirm the popular verdict that the Aviolets were not pleased with their newly seen daughter-in-law.

“You remember poor Jim, of course. Cecil isn’t in the least like him.”

The doctor inwardly congratulated Cecil on so desirable an escape.

“You were so very kind at the time of all our trouble with poor Jim that I really do want your opinion about the boy. Of course, one hopes that Ford may marry, but meanwhile, this little boy is the only Aviolet of the younger generation, and it does seem so very unfortunate that he should have had the dreadful disadvantage of being brought up abroad.”

The doctor knew that Lady Aviolet would never say what she really meant, which was “the dreadful disadvantage of being brought up abroad by a mother who cannot possibly be described as a lady”; but her grey, prominent eyes, that rather resembled those of a sheep, begged him to take into consideration the whole of the facts that perturbed her, without requiring what she would have regarded as the impropriety of describing them.

“If he may be allowed to come and see us, my sister will be delighted, and it will give me an opportunity of seeing rather more of him and judging as to his fitness for school.”

“Oh, there’s no question about that,” said Lady Aviolet rather quickly. “I’m sure Rose will quite see reason about that, and of course Cecil must go to school. The fact is, there’s a tendency that makes me anxious—it’s so dreadfully un-English. The poor little fellow doesn’t always speak the truth.”

Lucian looked at Lady Aviolet, gravely considering her troubled, stupid, high-bred face. He could gauge accurately the weight that she attached to the accusation by the mere fact that she had brought herself to put it into words.

“Whatever poor Jim’s faults, he was truthful. And you can imagine what it means to Sir Thomas—the soul of truth and honour—to find that this unfortunate little Cecil doesn’t seem to know the meaning of the word.”

“Has he been frightened—punished too severely, or anything like that?”

“No, it’s not that sort of thing. Sad though that might be, one could understand it. No, the fact is that he—romances. I don’t know what else to call it. And he doesn’t seem to know when he’s doing it—that’s the dreadful part of it.”

“He is highly imaginative, I suppose?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Lady Aviolet in a resentful voice. “I was an imaginative child myself. My next sister and I were always playing with dolls, and making them go through imaginary adventures—shipwrecks and fires, and all sorts of things—but I never remember being unable to distinguish between reality and pretence. If either of us had told a story, we should have been whipped, but I never remember such a thing happening.”

“I am not sure that whipping is the best method of treating a child that doesn’t speak the truth. It may only frighten——”

“I know those are the modern ideas,” said Lady Aviolet, seeming rather piteously eager to demonstrate her readiness to accept views that were new to her, and which the doctor knew that she therefore distrusted instinctively.

“It was Ford’s idea that we might consult you about it. It’s not the way we were brought up, if you’ll forgive me saying so—a naughty child was a naughty child, and a sick one was a sick one—but Ford says that everyone now has this idea that the mind and the body are very closely concerned, and react on one another. I daresay there may be something in it.”

“Everything, I should say.”

“And Rose—my daughter-in-law—speaks of this trouble as a kink. She says it’s always been there—that little Cecil’s word has never been reliable. I don’t really know whether she quite realizes what a sad and shocking thing it is. Of course, her own upbringing—— However, that’s neither here nor there. Of course, she spoils him dreadfully.”

“A risk that all only children must run,” the doctor reminded her.

“I don’t know. Ford was an only child for nearly five years, and he wasn’t spoilt.”

There was a sort of obtuse naïveté about Lady Aviolet’s habit of referring any question to her own individual experience that somehow detracted from the glaring certainty that her experience was of a singularly limited kind.

“It was my maid who first spoke to me about Cecil—poor Dawson. You know how devoted she is to us all, and always has been, and I always thought that Jim, if anything, was her favourite of the two boys. So you can imagine that she wouldn’t be very likely to look for faults in Jim’s boy. But she’s been looking after him till we’ve found a governess, and almost from the very first evening he started telling her the most wonderful stories. About things he’d done—or rather hadn’t done—in Ceylon. He told her he always rode on an elephant, and had little native children to pick up his toys, and I don’t know what else—all pure invention, of course.”

“That might have been in the spirit of boasting!”

“But how dreadful! Why should he boast?”

Dr. Lucian shrugged his shoulders.

“Besides, he stuck to it afterwards. Nothing would make him own that it wasn’t true. Dawson tried to make him say he’d just been inventing, and I asked him about it myself. But he kept on saying: ‘It is true, it is true.’ It really seemed as though the child had made himself believe in his own invention.”

“Very imaginative children may sometimes be really incapable of distinguishing fancy from fact.”

“Then all I can say is, they’re not normal,” said Lady Aviolet with decision.

She looked very unhappy, and it was evident that by “normal” she really meant sane.

“Is there anything else—besides the boasting, I mean?”

“Anything else? I don’t know what more you want,” said poor Lady Aviolet, with a certain tartness in her manner. “He is always telling us about things that never happened, and it’s perfectly impossible to depend on his account of anything. And if there’s one thing Sir Thomas finds it hard to forgive, it’s any least little want of openness. He is dreadfully disturbed about it.”

“And your son?”

“Ford hasn’t seen as much of him as we have, besides he’s been away on business since they came. But of course Ford will take him in hand. It’s my one hope. But mercifully, poor Jim left the guardianship of his boy to Ford—jointly with Rose, of course.”

“She is very young?”

“Only twenty-five. She wasn’t nineteen when this child was born. It was the most foolish marriage poor Jim could have made, but one knows what these sea-voyages are. She was going out to the East, and they were engaged before they reached Colombo. Naturally, we were told nothing about it until it was all over. Poor Jim!”

Dr. Lucian felt quite as much inclined to say, “Poor Rose!” Jim Aviolet had been drinking hard long before he was sent out to a tea-plantation in Ceylon, and the doctor saw no reason to suppose that the East had improved him.

“Of course,” said Lady Aviolet, “Jim had his failings. You, of all people, know what we went through with him. But he was never, never anything but straight—I—I can’t imagine any Aviolet being anything else.”

The range of Lady Aviolet’s powers of imagination had never seemed to the doctor to be anything but restricted in the extreme, but his own would not have included anything so unthinkable as the coupling of any Aviolet with an absence of blatant, matter-of-fact, unsparing and uninspired truthfulness of the most literal description. Nevertheless, he made an exception mentally of Ford, whom he had always judged to be capable of un-Aviolet-like subtleties. The thought made him say again:

“Is your son at home now?”

“Yes, I’m glad to say he is. Of course, being little Cecil’s guardian, he has every right to make the child’s upbringing his own affair, and we quite count on him for advising Rose, who is naturally inexperienced. She is by way of being rather clever, don’t you know, and of course Ford has always been clever, so I quite hope she’ll listen to him.”

She spoke rather as though that which she termed cleverness were some peculiarity which set its victims in a class apart from the rest of mankind.

“In what sort of way is Mrs. Aviolet clever?” the doctor asked, mechanically adopting Lady Aviolet’s vocabulary.

“I don’t quite know, but she tells me that she plays the piano, and she seems fond of reading. I often see her with a book, quite early in the day—a thing which was unheard of a few years ago, except in the case of a regular blue-stocking, as we used to call them. If my dear mother had seen any one of her ten children reading a book before six o’clock at the very earliest, she would have asked if we couldn’t find anything to do. But none of us would have thought of doing such a thing. No Amberly has ever been clever, that I know of. In fact, Sir Thomas and I have often wondered how Ford turned out clever, because the Aviolets have none of them ever been in the least odd, either.”

The doctor had so often wondered exactly the same thing, that he could not resist pursuing the subject.

“I am very much interested in problems of heredity,” he admitted, quite aware that Lady Aviolet would see no eccentricity in such preoccupation on the part of a member of the professional classes. “Didn’t an Aviolet marry a Spaniard a good many generations ago?”

“Yes, indeed, not so very long after the Armada. Sir Basil Aviolet. I believe he was in Cornwall, seeing some property the family had there in those days, near Launceston, and he found this girl on the coast somewhere, and fell in love with her. Of course, she must have been English on her mother’s side, and her father a Spanish sailor. I forget her name, but we have a painting of her.”

She indicated the portrait amongst those hanging against the wall.

“It’s difficult to see what the attraction was, but it must have been very strong, or he could never have been so foolish as to marry her,” said Lady Aviolet simply.

The Spanish ancestress had not been beautiful. If the presentation was a faithful one, her long, narrow, wedge-like face had been of a uniformly brown complexion, her dark eyes set too close together, and her upper lip of an inordinate length.

“Some of her descendants would seem to have taken after her,” said Dr. Lucian.

“Yes. Ford is very like this picture. But her own two sons were regular Aviolets, as it happened. Their portraits are in the dining-room. But I suppose foreigners are always rather apt to be clever, so perhaps Ford is a throwback, in that sort of way.”

Widely apart though their respective standpoints for viewing this phenomenon might be, the doctor had long ago reached the same conclusion as had Lady Aviolet.

“A Latin mentality allied to a Saxon physique is a combination which presents some rather interesting contradictions.”

She looked at him quite blankly, and then said with a certain dignity: “I thoroughly believe in heredity myself. Look at the Amberly nose.”

The doctor did not take the injunction literally. He knew the long, straight feature, slightly flattened, with small, insensitive nostrils. He had seen it on Lady Aviolet’s own face, on those of both her sons, and on the faces of almost all the Grierson-Amberlys living on the other side of the county.

“Poor little Cecil isn’t in the least like the Aviolets; though,” she added, with an obvious desire to be just, “he is a good-looking child, I must say.”

“Very,” said the doctor emphatically.

He had taken a curious fancy to the intelligent, mischievous-looking little boy, and he was already keenly interested in the perverseness of imagination that so greatly distressed Cecil’s grandmother. Abnormalities in psychology were, to the doctor’s way of thinking, better worth studying than the majority of the books regarded with so unsympathetic an eye by Lady Aviolet.

Sir Thomas passed through the hall, a tall, broadly-built, elderly man, with a heavy jowl and expressionless eyes.

“Good-morning, doctor. East wind again to-day.”

“Good-morning. Yes, spring’s late in coming this year. Well, I must be off.”

The doctor made his farewells, aware that the presence of her husband would put an immediate end to the inarticulate confidences of Lady Aviolet.

Driving down the avenue, however, he was overtaken by a slim, tweed-clad figure advancing through the beech-glades.

“Hullo, Lucian! Which way are you going?”

“Whitebourne.”

“The very thing, if you’ll give me a lift.”

The doctor watched Ford Aviolet spring with great activity on to the seat of the high dog-cart and adjust himself and his pince-nez with a series of unconscious, accustomed little gestures.

Ford Aviolet had for the past four or five years expressed at intervals a fear that his views were daringly democratic, and the doctor, during a corresponding period, had strongly suspected that he himself was in use as a practical demonstration of Mr. Aviolet’s socialistic tendencies.

The idea had never served to add any charm to their intercourse.

“I suppose you’ve been to see the hope of the house?” Ford’s tone was pensively ironical, as who should hint at inverted commas for the descriptive phrase of which he had made use.

“Your brother’s little boy? Yes. There’s nothing much wrong there—he’ll be running about again in a couple of days.”

“You saw his mother?”

“I did.”

“The likeness between them is rather remarkable. The boy hasn’t anything about him that recalls poor Jim, has he?”

“No, there’s no likeness.”

“Of course, one would have liked the boy to look like an Aviolet, at least. It’s a disappointment to my father, especially as Cecil will no doubt inherit Squires one of these days. At least, so poor Jim appears to have thought.”

There was gentle scorn in Ford Aviolet’s low voice and rather distinct enunciation.

“If he thought such a thing I wonder he didn’t send his wife and boy home long ago,” said Dr. Lucian curtly.

“My dear Lucian, you have been in the family councils ever since you saved Jim’s face over that horrible business of the blacksmith’s girl. You can hardly suppose that Jim imagined my dear father and mother, to say nothing of my humble self, would welcome a bouncing young woman who was barely eighteen on her wedding day, rejoicing in the good old English name of Smith. My charming sister-in-law has already informed us with great candour that she has never set foot in a country house before. The fact, I may add, was almost glaringly obvious.”

The doctor glanced sharply round at Ford. He knew of old that peculiar lucidity of utterance which he had long ago qualified as a curious and elaborate emanation of bitterness. It was as uncharacteristic of the Aviolets as Ford himself was uncharacteristic of his caste.

Physically, he resembled his mother, but his eyes, neither grey nor obtuse, were long and narrow, very dark-brown, and set close together under superciliously curved eyebrows. He was clean-shaven, which added to the youthful appearance of his slight person, standing nearly six foot high, but narrow-shouldered, and with unusually small and delicate hands and feet.

“I gather that Rose’s avocations in Ceylon were dancing, making her own clothes and the child’s, and trying to wheedle money out of Jim for their preposterous bills whenever he was sufficiently drunk to listen to her.”

The doctor, as sincerely disgusted by these confidences as any one of Ford’s own family might have been, continued to maintain silence.

“A man of your profession, Lucian, should be less squeamish at the sight of other people’s dirty linen,” said Ford mockingly. Then his tone changed.

“Of course, it’s in abominable taste to discuss my sister-in-law at all—you’re perfectly right. You must forgive me. The fact is, the whole business has got on my nerves, and you know the utter impossibility of discussing any unpleasant situation with my beloved parents. That generation has such a miraculous capacity for evading the unpleasant. As a matter of fact, I’m really in hopes of your giving me some advice about the boy.”

“Your mother told me. Well, get them to allow Cecil to come and have tea with my sister, and play with the live stock, and see the monkey, and that’ll give me a chance of having him under observation for a bit. It’s probably a case of a lively imagination and the company of native servants.”

“No doubt,” agreed Ford politely; “but it’s an unpleasant peculiarity, and one would like to eradicate it before the wretched child goes to school, if only for his own sake. Could you drop me here, Lucian? I want to speak to the farrier fellow.”

The doctor drove off alone with a distinct sensation of relief.

He had known Ford and Jim Aviolet since their babyhood. His relations with both had been more than merely professional, for he had covered the graceless Jim’s tracks on more than one occasion, and Ford, of later years, had taken pains to demonstrate that he was willing to accept Dr. Lucian as intellectual affinity rather than as family physician.

Nevertheless, the doctor, although he had not liked Jim, liked Ford even less.