III
“I am very glad that Rose should form any friendship,” said Lady Aviolet, in a tone which savoured rather of resentment than of gladness.
The friendship in question had risen, with un-Aviolet-like rapidity, between Rose and the Lucians.
She had taken Cecil to tea there, and had been asked again.
“Please have the carriage at whatever time suits you, my dear,” said Lady Aviolet, who had frequently met the doctor’s sister, but had never called upon her, and would never have contemplated the possibility of doing so.
Rose and Cecil departed joyfully.
“Mummie, when are we going back to Ceylon?”
“I don’t suppose we shall go back at all, darling. I told you we were coming to live in England.”
“But I don’t think I like it much,” said Cecil, opening his brown eyes with a piteous look.
“That fine maid Dawson is kind to you all right, isn’t she?” his mother asked sharply.
The corners of Cecil’s mouth turned down. “She says I tell stories.”
“Well, so you do sometimes, as you very well know. Not that you aren’t going to break yourself of it, because of course you are. Aren’t you, my precious?”
Rose looked at him rather anxiously, and squeezed his little hand tightly in hers.
“Yes, Mummie,” said Cecil confidingly.
He leant against her, playing with her rings. He was an affectionate little boy.
“Here we are. Don’t you want to see the monkey again?”
“Yes. And Miss Lucian,” said Cecil politely.
Miss Lucian had been very kind to him on their first visit, and had thereby won Rose’s confidence as well as Cecil’s.
“He’s been longing to come again,” she cried, as she shook hands with her hostess.
Dr. Lucian’s sister was a small, slight person, not young, but looking so because of the rapidity of her movements and the mobility of her small face.
“Would you like to look at pictures in the drawing-room or go and play in the garden?” she asked Cecil.
“The garden, please.”
“Then we’ll call you when it’s tea-time.”
Rose looked at her gratefully.
“That’s just what he enjoys—being let alone to play out of doors. It’s all new to him, you see.”
“There’s a lovely garden for him at Squires.”
“Oh, yes—and a lady’s maid turned on to trot behind him so as to see that he doesn’t do any damage!” Rose interjected scornfully.
“Why, he seems such a good little boy.”
“So he is.”
“I never heard such nonsense,” exclaimed Miss Lucian, with a warmth equal to Rose’s own.
It needed nothing more to inflame Rose’s ardour, never greatly tempered by discretion.
“The whole thing seems nonsense to me,” she remarked vehemently. “Him being put into a nursery and having his breakfast and supper upstairs and that ridiculous old maid Dawson putting him to bed, and not so much as knowing if his little pyjamas fastened in front or behind—honestly, she didn’t, silly old ass! In Ceylon, I had him with me all the time.”
“And can’t you do that at Squires?”
“Oh, Lord, no. They’re always at me about not spoiling him, and making him manly. It’s quite right, I daresay.”
She threw a sudden odd glance round, as though afraid of being overheard, and then said in a lowered voice:
“I’m going to let them have their own way about all the things that don’t matter much. When it comes to something that does, it’ll be time enough to make a fuss. I think it’s rather good of them, really, to put up with me, considering they think Jim was a fool to marry me, and they don’t like me much, either. But they want Cecil to be brought up just like all the Aviolets.”
“That’s natural.”
“I daresay it is. They seem very stupid people, though,” said Rose reflectively. “I say, will you tell me something?”
“Certainly, if I can.”
“Is living in the country, in England, always like this? I mean, do you always potter about all day without doing anything, and look at the papers while you’re waiting for the next meal, and take the dogs for exercise, and never—never—never talk about anything but the rotten old garden, and whether it rained in the night and if the carriage can go to meet the four-thirty train? Don’t you ever, any of you, do anything?”
“You mustn’t ask me, you know. My brother and I are not like the Aviolets—not like county people. He’s a doctor, and works harder than most people, and I run his house, and we’ve only one servant, so that I’m busy, too.”
“Oh——” said Rose Aviolet.
Relief was detectable in her voice.
“Oh, I didn’t know that. I thought you were just like them,” she said naïvely.
“But don’t you like it at all, being at that big house, and never having to think about expenses or anything of that sort?” asked the doctor’s sister.
“I do like it in a way,” Rose admitted grudgingly. “It feels so safe, after the scrambling way that poor Jim and I lived. I like to see Ces having roast chicken, and rice puddings, and all that good milk to drink—as much as ever he wants it. And, of course, I like the comforts and luxuries for myself. Why, I’d never even seen a room like the room I’ve got there—not even at big hotels. But I think the life’s awful, all the same—and the people.”
“Don’t they ever have any one to stay?”
“Not with me and them being in such deep mourning. I think later on they will—Ford said something about it. A man came the other day to take some photographs of the house for a book he’s writing, and I talked to him, but I could see they didn’t like it. Snobs, I call them.”
Rose’s candour was checked only by the doctor’s entrance into the room with Cecil.
“Can we have some tea, Henrietta?”
They had tea in the dining-room, and afterwards Miss Lucian earned Rose’s warm, effusively expressed gratitude for her kindly display of treasures and curiosities on Cecil’s behalf.
The little boy, intelligent and enthusiastic, was delighted with everything, and especially with a little snuff-box of carved cornelian that played a tiny tinkling tune when the lid was opened.
“That belonged to my great-grandfather, Cecil.”
“I do like it,” said Cecil longingly.
His mother interposed hastily, circumventing his evident intention of suggesting that the ownership of the red cornelian box should be transferred.
“It’s awfully pretty. I’ve never seen one quite like it before. It’s worth ten pounds any day.”
Miss Lucian laughed.
“We should put a much higher value than that upon it, I’m afraid.”
“People always do, but you wouldn’t get more than ten from a dealer,” said Rose simply. “My uncle that I used to live with is Alfred Smith the pawnbroker, so I know. Why, I daresay I could price everything in the room for you.”
Miss Lucian appeared to be more diverted than gratified by her guest’s surprising faculty, but the doctor laughed outright.
“Have you offered to do that at Squires?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “They wouldn’t say thank you. Besides, the stuff there isn’t the sort you ever get hold of. I shouldn’t know about any of it, much, except perhaps the china. The bits on the mantelpiece in the hall are good—famille verte.” Her accent was atrocious.
“Lady Aviolet’s particularly fond of them, I believe.”
“Yes. She dusts them herself, and the servants aren’t supposed to touch them. One day I offered to do them for her, but she wouldn’t let me. I only did it to see what she’d say.”
Rose laughed rather drearily, as though the exercise of experimenting with her mother-in-law’s susceptibilities were lacking in charm.
Indeed, as she was leaving the house she remarked with her almost alarming frankness:
“I must say I loathe going back there. It’s been much more fun here. Thank you so much for having us.”
“Like a nice child remembering her good manners,” said the doctor pityingly, after he had put her into the carriage.
“God help her in-laws, is what I say,” Miss Lucian returned crisply.
“Now why, Henrietta? Don’t you like her?”
“Yes, I do, but they don’t, and never will. However, she’ll certainly marry again and then it’ll be all right.”
The doctor was silenced, somehow not enchanted by the proposed solution for the difficulties of the Aviolet establishment.
“Maurice! Where’s the little musical snuff-box?”
“You must have put it down somewhere.”
They looked at one another doubtfully, and then, with silent thoroughness, searched.
The cornelian snuff-box was gone.
It was the outspoken Miss Lucian who finally voiced the thought that had been in both their minds from the beginning.
“Little Cecil was so much taken with it—you don’t think he could have kept it, do you?”
“Surely not. If he’s got it, poor little chap, it must be by mistake.”
“He’d be welcome to anything else, but not to great-grandpapa’s snuff-box,” said Miss Lucian with decision.
“Certainly not. But he’ll probably be brought in tears to-morrow to apologize for taking it away with him.”
“I ought to have put it away at the time,” said Miss Lucian remorsefully. “It was all my fault.”
“Whatever happens, Henrietta, don’t let him be frightened of us and think we’re going to despise him, even if he took it out of naughtiness pure and simple.”
“Do you take me for a fool?” said his sister indignantly.
The doctor was so far from taking her for anything of the sort, that he was inclined to accept the view which she obviously held, that Cecil had purposely, in a fit of baby covetousness, taken the little cornelian box.
It caused him to make his way to Squires next morning, on the pretext of an ailing servant, in the vague hope of seeing Rose Aviolet and avoiding the problem of direct inquiry such as he feared that his sister meditated.
His first sight of Lady Aviolet put the suspicion in his mind beyond question at once.
“I’m so glad to see you. My naughty little grandson seems to have taken advantage of Miss Lucian’s kindness to him yesterday. He picked up a most charming little box, and I’m sorry to say, brought it home with him. One of the housemaids found it under his little pillow, when she made his bed, and took it to my maid, who of course told me.”
“Children are like magpies—they pick things up and hide them.”
“Of course he knew nothing of its value, but it does seem very odd that a child of that age shouldn’t have been better taught. However, I believe he told the truth when his mother taxed him with it, which I was most thankful for. I’m bound to say that she generally gets the truth out of him eventually, though why he couldn’t have been brought up to speak it in the first place, as a matter of course, I can’t imagine. However, Rose tells me he owned at once that he took the little box, meaning to play with it at home, and then take it back. I’m so sorry, Dr. Lucian.”
The doctor laughed.
“Not at all. It was very natural. If I may take the thing away with me, no one will think any more about it.”
“Oh, but that wouldn’t do at all,” said Lady Aviolet, unsmiling. “I don’t mean to punish him, as he spoke the truth, but he must certainly be made to remember that he has done a very wrong thing. He must give you back the box himself, and say that he is sorry.”
The doctor, profoundly averse as he felt himself to be to the proposed scene of restitution, knew that it would be useless to protest against it.
He waited, unresignedly, while Lady Aviolet rang the bell and asked for Mrs. Aviolet and Master Cecil.
Rose Aviolet came downstairs, leading the little boy by the hand.
“Cecil, come here,” said his grandmother directly.
“Good-morning, Grandmama.”
“Good-morning, my dear. Now listen to me. You know that Dr. Lucian and his sister, who were so kind to you yesterday, have lost something?”
“No,” said Cecil guilelessly.
“Ces!” his mother exclaimed sharply.
He stared up at her with big, innocent brown eyes.
“Rose, I thought you told me——”
“So I did. Ces, you know you were a naughty boy, and took——”
“Leave him to me, if you please, Rose. I should like to get to the bottom of this. If the child confessed his naughtiness to you this morning, there’s no reason he shouldn’t own to it again now, in front of Dr. Lucian. Now, Cecil, did you take away anything that didn’t belong to you, when you went to this gentleman’s house yesterday?”
“No, Grandmama.”
Rose Aviolet shrugged her shoulders and made as though to speak.
“One minute, please, Rose. Grandmama won’t be angry, Cecil, if you speak the truth. You know you’ve already told your mother that you were sorry for doing such a naughty thing.”
“Mayn’t we leave it at that?” said the doctor, low.
“I don’t understand it,” Lady Aviolet said, with obvious truth. “He knows that we know already. It’s only saying what he’s already said once. He did own up to you, didn’t he, Rose?”
“Yes, he did. Come on, darling, tell Dr. Lucian you’re sorry you took what wasn’t yours.”
“And that you will never be so wicked as to steal again,” Lady Aviolet supplemented impressively.
“I didn’t,” said Cecil, looking frightened.
His grandmother looked utterly confounded. “Cecil!”
“Don’t!” cried Rose sharply. “Don’t frighten him!”
The doctor leaned forward and took the little boy’s hand, speaking very gently.
“Never mind, little fellow. You know we all do wrong and foolish things sometimes, and then the only way out is to tell the truth and try and undo the mischief. I think I understand how it happened. You thought it would be nice to have the box to play tunes whenever you wanted to, and so you slipped it out of sight and afterwards you were afraid of being seen putting it back. Wasn’t it something like that?”
Rose’s ardent eyes flashed gratitude at him; but her mother-in-law seemed to be more distressed than ever.
“It’s very kind of you—but please don’t make excuses for him. He ought to be made to understand how naughty he’s been. Cecil, are you, or are you not, sorry for having deliberately acted like a thief?”
“I didn’t, Grandmama.”
“Didn’t what?” Her voice had risen slightly.
“Didn’t take the little music-box.”
The little boy’s face was so innocent, his voice so assured, that Lucian glanced at him sharply. He had been staring straight up at Lady Aviolet with his great brown eyes whilst he spoke, but immediately afterwards he dropped them.
The doctor, trained to observation, sighed involuntarily.
A sound like a gasp echoed him, from Lady Aviolet.
“Now, Ces, what’s the good of saying that,” Rose broke out, “when we know already that you did do it? Why, this morning you told me so yourself.”
“No one is going to punish you, Cecil, if you tell the truth. It’s little boys who tell lies that are punished. You shall have one more chance, the last one. Will you tell Dr. Lucian how sorry you are that you took his musical box?”
He gazed at her dumbly, with suddenly scared eyes.
“You are an obstinate and untruthful little boy, Cecil,” said Lady Aviolet in great agitation.
“He’s not,” Rose cried passionately. “For goodness’ sake, Ces, tell the truth. They shan’t do anything to you.”
“I didn’t take it,” said Cecil.
“A flat lie,” said Lady Aviolet, her face grey with consternation.
Rose stamped her foot. Her arm shot out round the child’s shoulders, gripping him tightly to her.
“Rose, don’t attempt to coax and spoil him. He has told two absolutely direct lies at least, and nothing can alter it.”
Little Cecil’s eyes dilated, and his mouth shut.
“I’m dreadfully, dreadfully shocked and sorry, Cecil. This isn’t the first time you’ve said what isn’t true, you know, and now we can none of us ever trust you again.”
Rose Aviolet shot a look of fury at the elder woman.
“Please don’t tell him that. Ces darling, Mummie trusts you. I know you want to tell the truth really, and you can if you only will. Now out with it, and it’ll be all over.”
“How can it be over, when he has lied? There is nothing more terrible than a liar, and Cecil has proved himself one over and over again. If he did tell the truth now, it would only be because he knows he’s been found out.”
At her indictment, Cecil at last burst into tears.
“I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it,” he sobbed abjectly.
Rose put her hand over his mouth.
“You’ve told him that you’ll never trust him again and that he’s a liar even if he does own up,” she said bitterly. “That’s enough.”
“How can you defend him?”
“I don’t defend him. Of course he took the box.”
“That is not the point. Taking the box was mischievous and ill-bred, even dishonest, if he has been taught the commandments, as I suppose he has,” said Lady Aviolet, rather as though supposing the reverse. “But to own to you that he’d taken it, and then deny it flatly to us, is simply pointless falsehood for the sake of falsehood. I told him no one would be angry if he told the truth.”
“Well, he won’t now,” said Rose Aviolet, and she took the little boy away.
He was still crying, and they could hear him, as Rose pulled him up the stairs, repeating like an automaton: “I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t!”
Lady Aviolet looked terribly distressed, but she turned with a rather pathetic politeness to her visitor. “I’m sorry to have inflicted a nursery court-martial upon you. I never dreamt of this. The boy had confessed to his mother. His lies just now were not only wicked, but utterly pointless. I couldn’t have believed it.”
“The child is vain and sensitive. I can imagine that when he saw what he had done looked upon as a—an act of dishonesty, it may have become extraordinarily difficult to him to own to it in front of other people. His denials struck me as being instinctive, rather than based on any idea of deceiving.”
Lady Aviolet looked utterly at a loss.
“But how terrible, if he is to tell lies by instinct,” she said helplessly. “It seems like some frightful taint. Heaven knows, he never got it from the Aviolets.”
She caught herself up, almost upon the words, with the implication they carried.
“I will fetch your little box, Dr. Lucian.” She went away, leaving the doctor thoughtful and strangely saddened.
“I hope they won’t tell Ford,” was the outcome of his reflections.
His sister said the same thing that evening.
“The fuss must have frightened the poor little thing until he didn’t know what he was saying. I hope they’ll leave it alone now, and not drag the high-and-mighty Mr. Ford into it. If they frighten the child, they’ll never teach him to speak the truth. I should have thought Lady Aviolet would have known that much.”
“I tried to tell her so.”
“What did Rose do?”
In common with everybody else, the doctor’s sister made a liberal use of Christian names in the absence of their owners.
“She seems sensible—though I think she spoils him, in a way. But she’s hopeless with her mother-in-law, and doesn’t seem to know the meaning of tact. I should imagine that they get upon one another’s nerves the whole time. She’s a different creature, at Squires, to what she was down here.”
“Poor thing! I hope she’ll come here again.”
“She’ll come fast enough if she can bring the boy. He’s her one thought in life, I can see that.”
“Of course she can bring him,” Miss Lucian declared vigorously. “What do I care how many fibs he tells, poor little chap!”
The doctor was too well used to his sister’s trenchant methods of expressing herself to protest at such singularly perverted tolerance of spirit.
Rose Aviolet came to see them again, but this time she did not bring Cecil with her. She arrived on foot and with something of the aspect of one who has embarked upon an illicit expedition and is anxious to forestall comment on the proceedings.
“I can’t stay, but I wanted a walk, and so I—I came this way. I wanted to tell you how awfully sorry I was about my little boy having taken your musical box—but indeed he didn’t understand what he was doing.”
“My dear, of course he didn’t. Don’t let’s say any more about it.”
“You are good!” Rose informed her hostess with ardent thankfulness in her voice. “And your brother was awfully kind that morning he came up to Squires, too. I wanted to thank him.”
She turned her liquid brown eyes upon Maurice Lucian.
“You know, he’d have owned up, I think, if it had only been you and me there. He didn’t make any fuss at all about telling me, when they first found out about it.”
“You think he’s afraid of Lady Aviolet, then?”
She hesitated.
“He is, and he isn’t. She doesn’t ever punish him, you know. I shouldn’t let any one but me punish him—but she and that Ford have such a way of making one feel as if they despised one for doing anything wrong.”
Lucian nodded.
“Is little Cecil afraid of being despised?”
“Well, of course he is. Who isn’t, I should like to know?”
The doctor answered her indignant inquiry as though she had meant it literally.
“The very obtuse are not, nor the essentially self-satisfied. Neither, I think, are the absolutely sincere—but then, they are seldom the very young. It is the weak, and the sensitive, and those who are unsure of themselves, who are afraid of the contempt of their mental inferiors. And so they degrade themselves by lying.”
He spoke so simply and earnestly that the protest died away on Rose’s lips.
“Mrs. Aviolet, I’m intensely interested in your boy. May I ask you something?”
She nodded, her eyes full of tears.
“Can you analyse this weakness of his? I mean, what do his untruths spring from?”
“I don’t know.” She looked puzzled. “He invents things that never happened, sometimes—that never could have happened—and then when I try to make him say that it’s all pretending, he won’t. Sometimes I think he doesn’t know whether he’s inventing or speaking the truth.”
The doctor nodded, reflective.
“Is he generally the hero of his own stories?”
“I suppose he is. He tells me about things that he says happened to him, and he really and truly describes it all just as if he’d seen it.”
“I daresay. Has the tendency always been there?”
“Pretty well always. He used to hear Jim boasting very often, and I know I exaggerate myself, when I talk, and always did, though God knows I’m trying all I know to get out of it now. But Jim used to make Ces worse by frightening him. He’d ask him questions, just as if he was laying a trap for him, and then Ces would fib, and his father would whip him. So next time he’d be scared, and not know what he was saying, and contradict himself because he’d see Jim didn’t believe him.”
“Poor little fellow!”
She threw him a very expressive look of gratitude.
“That’s awfully decent of you. Everybody up there is shocked at him, poor little boy. They haven’t the imagination to be sorry for him. I wish I could get him right away with me somewhere.”
“Can’t you?” said Miss Lucian.
“Well, I haven’t got a penny. Jim left nothing but debts, and his father gives me an allowance. I’d rather earn my own living, but of course they wouldn’t hear of that, because of Cecil—besides, I’m sure I don’t know what I could do that would bring in anything worth having. Their plan is to keep us hanging on at Squires till Ces goes to school, and then I suppose they’d let me go off on my own, and bring him there just for the holidays. But that’s exactly where me and them will come to loggerheads, one of these days.”
The doctor looked at her attentively. He was extremely interested in Rose Aviolet.
Underneath the paint and the white powder, he could see that she had flushed deeply.
“About sending my Ces to school. That’s what they want to do, of course. Well, I wouldn’t say a word if he was like other boys, but he isn’t. You’ve seen that for yourself—and besides they talk enough about it, goodness knows. You know what’s wrong with Cecil. Well, I think school will make that worse. He’s not fit for school.”
She spoke with extraordinary vehemence, and both her hearers were silent. Presently Henrietta Lucian said:
“There’s never been an Aviolet yet, I suppose, who hasn’t been a public-school boy?”
“Never, and there’s never been an Aviolet like Ces is, either. But he can be put right, I know he can. Why, I always get the truth out of him in the end. But if he goes to school, and gets told he’s a liar and finds nobody trusts him—why, he’ll lie himself black in the face to try and make himself seem what he isn’t. I’m his mother, and I know. But he isn’t going to school.”
“Isn’t his uncle his guardian?”
“Yes. A bit of poor Jim’s tomfoolery that was, too. Of course I never knew about it. I suppose he thought it’d make them take more interest. But even Ford won’t make me give in about this school business.”
“Are you quite sure it mightn’t be a good thing for your boy?” the doctor asked.
“Quite,” she said fiercely. “I’ve seen what a public-school education made of Jim, and though I don’t say I wouldn’t have let Cecil go if he’d been an ordinary child, I won’t, as things are. A thing may be all right for ninety-nine people and wrong for the hundredth. Ces is the hundredth.”
“You’ve got a fight before you,” Lucian told her plainly.
“I don’t care,” said Rose Aviolet, and laughed defiantly. “I’m rather good at a row.”
The doctor quite believed her. But he did not believe that at Squires there ever would be, any more than there ever had been, a “row.”