Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie (great books to read TXT) 📕

can you bear to let Sylvia manage you like this? It’s absolutely intolerable.”

“She’s been horrid to me today,” said Lily resentfully.

“Well, why do you put up with it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I hate always squabbling. It’s much easier to give way to her, and usually I don’t much mind.”

“You don’t much mind whether we’re married!” Michael exclaimed. “How can you let Sylvia persuade you against marriage? Darling girl, if you marry me you shall do just as you like. I simply want you to look beautiful. You’d be happy married to me⁠—you really would.”

“Sylvia says marriage is appallingly dull, and my mother and father didn’t get on, and Doris doesn’t get on with the man she’s married to. In fact, everybody seems to hate it.”

“Do you hate me?” Michael demanded.

“No, I think you’re awfully sweet.”

“Well, why don’t you marry me? You’ll have plenty of money and nothing to bother about. I think you’d thoroughly enjoy being married.”

For an instant, as he argued with her, Michael wavered in his resolve. For an instant it seemed, after all, impossible to marry this girl. A chill came over him, but he shook it off, and he saw only her loveliness, the eyes sullen with thoughts of Sylvia, the lips pouting at the remembrance of a tyranny. And again as he watched her beauty, the bitter thought crossed his mind that it would be easier to possess her without marriage. Then he thought of her at seventeen. “Michael, why do you make me love you so?” Was that the last protest she ever made against the thralldom of passion? If it was, the blame must primarily be his, since he had not heeded her reproach.

“Lily,” he cried, catching her to him. “You’re coming away with me now.”

He kissed her a hundred times.

“Now! Now! Do you hear me?”

She surrendered to his will, and as he held her Michael thought grimly what an absurd paradox it was, that in order to make her consent to marry him, he like the others must play upon the baser side of her yielding nature. There were difficulties of packing and of choosing frocks and hats, but Michael had his way through them all.

“Quite an elopement,” Mrs. Gainsborough proclaimed.

“A very virtuous elopement,” said Michael, with a laugh.

“Oh, but shan’t I catch it when that Hottentot comes back!”

“Well, it’s Sylvia’s fault,” said Lily fretfully. “She shouldn’t worry me all the time to know whether I like her better than anyone else in the world.”

The man arrived with a truck for the luggage.

“Where are you going?” Mrs. Gainsborough asked. “I declare, you’re like two babes in the wood.”

“To my sister’s in Huntingdonshire,” said Michael, and he wrote out the address.

“Oh, in the country! Well, Summer’ll be on us before we know where we are. I declare, my snowdrops are quite finished.”

“Is your sister pretty?” Lily asked, as they were driving to King’s Cross.

“She’s handsome,” said Michael. “You’ll like her, I think. And her husband was a great friend of mine. By the way, I must send a wire to say we’re coming.”

VII The Gate of Ivory

It was only when he was sitting opposite to Lily in a first class compartment that Michael began to wonder if their sudden arrival would create a kind of consternation at Hardingham. He managed to reassure himself when he looked at her. The telegram might have puzzled Stella, but in meeting Lily she would understand his action. Nevertheless, he felt a little anxious when he saw the Hardingham brougham waiting outside the little station. The cold drive of four miles through the still, misty evening gave him too long to meditate the consequences of his action. Impulse was very visibly on trial, and he began to fear a little Stella’s judgment of it. The carriage-lamps splashed the hedgerows monotonously, and the horses’ breath curled round the rigid form of the coachman. Trees, hedges, gates, signposts went past in the blackness and chill. Michael drew Lily close, and asked in a whisper if she were happy.

“It makes me sleepy driving like this,” she murmured. Her head was on his shoulder; the astrakan collar was silky to his chin. So she traveled until they reached the gates of the park: then Michael woke her up.

There was not time to do much but dress quickly for dinner when they arrived, though Michael watched Stella’s glances rather anxiously.

Lily put on a chiffon frock, of aquamarine, and, though she looked beautiful in it, he wished she had worn black: this frock made her seem a little theatrical, he fancied; or was it the effect of her against the stern dining-room, and nothing whatever to do with the frock? Stella, too, whom he had always considered a personality of some extravagance, seemed to have grown suddenly very stiff and conventional. It used always to be himself who criticized people: Stella had always been rather too lenient. Perhaps it was being married to Alan; or was Lily the reason? Yet superficially everything seemed to be going all right, especially when he consoled himself by remembering the abruptness of Lily’s introduction. After dinner Stella took Lily away with her into the drawing-room and left Michael with Alan. Michael tried to feel that this was what he had expected would happen; but he could not drive away the consciousness of a new formality brooding over Hardingham. It was annoying, too, the way in which Alan seemed deliberately to avoid any reference to Lily. He would not even remind Michael of the evening at the Drury Lane pantomime, when he had met her five or six years ago. Perhaps he had forgotten driving home in a cab with her sister on that occasion. Michael grew exasperated by his talk about cricket pitches; and yet he could not bring himself to ask right out what Alan thought of her, because it would have impinged upon his pride to do so. In about ten minutes they heard the sound of the piano, and tacitly they agreed to