“But was not your father fond of you?”
“He took me to Italy several times during my long vacations. I remember being taken by him to the Uffizi Gallery and being told to look at the pictures;—I used to stand transfixed in front of Raphael’s Madonnas. Then dad would turn up—too soon—with some Italian lady whom he had no doubt picked up—by appointment—and my dream was over.”
“And your mother, Lion, was she pleased when you came home? You must have been such a dear boy!”
“Home! Mother! I can hardly articulate the sacred words.”
“Tell me about her; for of course I have only heard what the world had to say of her, of her reckless life and tragic death in the hunting-field; but I want you to tell me, for between us there can never be any secret, nor any subterfuge.”
“Tell you, Gwen; there is so little to tell. The lives of fashionable women are not so full of adventures as the lower classes seem to think. It is not for the things they do they should be blamed, but for all they do not do. There are a great many legends about Society women that are, in fact, but twaddly prose; there is a great deal of fuss all round a fashionable beauty, and very little worth fussing about. Spite and vanity are at the root of many rotten homes. I know my home was an arid desert, because my father never forgave my mother for having brought him to the altar; and she vented her spite on him by compromising herself with every man available or unavailable. The more my father showed his contempt to her, the more she threw herself into a vortex of frivolity. Her vanity could only equal her coldness. Her curse was to be incapable of any love. She never for one instant loved the man she inveigled into matrimony; she never cared a jot for her children, and she certainly had no passion, however ephemeral it might have been, for any of the men with whom she compromised herself. In this lies the ghastliness of such lives. Were there more bona-fide passion, there would be less cruelty and less levity.”
“Go on, Lionel.”
“I never once saw my mother lean over the cot of her child; she rarely entered the nursery, and we only came down at stated hours to be looked at by visitors. These ordeals were painful. To appear motherly, my mother occasionally laid her hand on my curly head. Ah! those fingers scintillating with diamonds and precious stones; those hard bracelets penetrating into my delicate skin! How I loathed that hand on my head—it was such a hard hand.”
“Poor Lionel, but you do not say how your little sister died.”
“The least said about it the better. There are noble griefs, and there are ugly sorrows: mine was of the latter order. When Cicely died, my mother was at a State Ball. She knew the child was hopelessly ill before she went, but a dress had arrived that morning from Paris, and a State Ball is a duty; in fact, all social functions are duties which come before mere human feelings. After so many years, I can still see that gorgeous apparition as she came into the room to speak to the hospital nurse. I did not understand the meaning of it all, but felt awed by the soft murmurs of the nurse, the dim light, and the haughty manner of my mother. Next day the nursery was closed; I was kept in the room of the head nurse to play with my toys, and told severely not to make a noise. I asked for Cicely. The under-housemaid, a good sort of a country girl, took me by the hand and led me into the room where little Cicely was laid out. One bunch of narcissus was lying on her feet; they were the nurse’s last tribute to her little dead patient. And that was all. I realised nothing, I was seven years old. The days that followed were miserable; I missed my playmate and was daily brought down to my mother’s boudoir, to be interviewed by simpering old dowagers who gave me a cold kiss, and waggish young men who shook hands with me and called me “old fellow,” as if I had already entered some crack regiment, or won the Derby. My mother, in her diaphanous black chiffon, distributed cups of tea right and left, while she related in short sentences the end of little Cicely and the brilliancy of the State Ball.”