Lilia, so similar to her husband in many ways, yearned for comfort and sympathy too. The night he laughed at her she wildly took up paper and pen and wrote page after page, analysing his character, enumerating his iniquities, reporting whole conversations, tracing all the causes and the growth of her misery. She was beside herself with passion, and though she could hardly think or see, she suddenly attained to magnificence and pathos which a practised stylist might have envied. It was written like a diary, and not till its conclusion did she realize for whom it was meant.
“Irma, darling Irma, this letter is for you. I almost forgot I have a daughter. It will make you unhappy, but I want you to know everything, and you cannot learn things too soon. God bless you, my dearest, and save you. God bless your miserable mother.”
Fortunately Mrs. Herriton was in when the letter arrived. She seized it and opened it in her bedroom. Another moment, and Irma’s placid childhood would have been destroyed forever.
Lilia received a brief note from Harriet, again forbidding direct communication between mother and daughter, and concluding with formal condolences. It nearly drove her mad.
“Gently! gently!” said her husband. They were sitting together on the loggia when the letter arrived. He often sat with her now, watching her for hours, puzzled and anxious, but not contrite.
“It’s nothing.” She went in and tore it up, and then began to write—a very short letter, whose gist was “Come and save me.”
It is not good to see your wife crying when she writes—especially if you are conscious that, on the whole, your treatment of her has been reasonable and kind. It is not good, when you accidentally look over her shoulder, to see that she is writing to a man. Nor should she shake her fist at you when she leaves the room, under the impression that you are engaged in lighting a cigar and cannot see her.
Lilia went to the post herself. But in Italy so many things can be arranged. The postman was a friend of Gino’s, and Mr. Kingcroft never got his letter.
So she gave up hope, became ill, and all through the autumn lay in bed. Gino was distracted. She knew why; he wanted a son. He could talk and think of nothing else. His one desire was to become the father of a man like himself, and it held him with a grip he only partially understood, for it was the first great desire, the first great passion of his life. Falling in love was a mere physical triviality, like warm sun or cool water, beside this divine hope of immortality: “I continue.” He gave candles to Santa Deodata, for he was always religious at a crisis, and sometimes he went to her himself and prayed the crude uncouth demands of the simple. Impetuously he summoned all his relatives back to bear him company in his time of need, and Lilia saw strange faces flitting past her in the darkened room.
“My love!” he would say, “my dearest Lilia! Be calm. I have never loved anyone but you.”
She, knowing everything, would only smile gently, too broken by suffering to make sarcastic repartees.
Before the child was born he gave her a kiss, and said, “I have prayed all night for a boy.”
Some strangely tender impulse moved her, and she said faintly, “You are a boy yourself, Gino.”
He answered, “Then we shall be brothers.”
He lay outside the room with his head against the door like a dog. When they came to tell him the glad news they found him half-unconscious, and his face was wet with tears.
As for Lilia, someone said to her, “It is a beautiful boy!” But she had died in giving birth to him.
V
At the time of Lilia’s death Philip Herriton was just twenty-four years of age—indeed the news reached Sawston on his birthday. He was a tall, weakly built young man, whose clothes had to be judiciously padded on the shoulders in order to make him pass muster. His face was plain rather than not, and there was a curious mixture in it of good and bad. He had a fine forehead and a good large nose, and both observation and sympathy were in his eyes. But below the nose and eyes all was confusion, and those people who believe that destiny resides in the mouth and chin shook their heads when they looked at him.
Philip himself, as a boy, had been keenly conscious of these defects. Sometimes when he had been bullied or hustled about at school he would retire to his cubicle and examine his features in a looking glass, and he would sigh and say, “It is a weak face. I shall never carve a place for myself in the world.” But as years went on he became either less self-conscious or more self-satisfied. The world, he found, made a niche for him as it did for everyone. Decision of character might come later—or he might have it without knowing. At all events he had got a sense of beauty and a sense of humour, two most desirable gifts. The sense of beauty developed first. It caused him at the age of twenty to wear particoloured ties and a squashy hat, to be late for dinner on account of the sunset, and to catch art from Burne-Jones to Praxiteles. At twenty-two he went to Italy with some cousins, and there he absorbed into one aesthetic whole olive trees, blue sky, frescoes, country inns, saints, peasants, mosaics, statues, beggars. He came back with the air of a prophet who would either remodel Sawston or reject it. All the energies and enthusiasms of a rather
