Sinister Street Compton Mackenzie (good novels to read in english .TXT) 📖

hidden her personality from Michael and Stella, dropped it very swiftly again. Only the greatest emotion could have given her the courage to make that avowal of her life. During the days that elapsed between the revelation and the reading of Lord Saxby’s last letter, she had lived very much apart from her children, so that the spectacle of her solitary grief had been deeply impressed upon their sensibility.

Michael was reminded by her attitude of those long vigils formerly sustained by ladies of noble birth before they departed into a convent to pray, eternally remote from the world. He himself became endowed with a strange courage by the contemplation of his mother’s tragical immobility. He found in her the expression of those most voiceless ideals of austere conduct that until this vision of resignation had always seemed doomed to sink broken-winged to earth. The thought of Lily in this mood became an intrusion, and he told himself that, even if it were possible to seek the sweet unrest of her presence, beneath the sombre spell of this more classic sorrow he would have shunned that lovely and romantic girl. Michael’s own realization of the circumstances of his birth occupied a very small part of his thoughts. His mind was fixed upon the aspect of his mother mute and heavy-lidded from the remembrance of that soldier dead in Africa. Michael felt no outrage of fate in these events. He was glad that death should have brought to his father the contentment of his country’s honour, that in the grace of reconciliation he should be healed of his thwarted life. Nor could Michael resent that news of death which could ennoble his mother with this placidity of comprehension, this staid and haughty mien of sorrow. And he was grateful, too, that death should upon his own brow dry the fever dew of passion.

But when she had read that last letter, Mrs. Fane strangely resumed her ordinary self. She was always so finely invested with dignity, so exquisitely sheathed, in her repose, Michael scarcely realized that now, after she had read the letter, the vision of her grief was once more veiled against him by that faintly discouraging, tenderly deliberate withdrawal of her personality, and that she was still as seclusive as when from his childhood she had concealed the sight of her love, living in her own rose-misted and impenetrable privacy.

It was Stella who by a sudden request first roused Michael to the realization that his mother was herself again.

“Mother,” she said, “what about my first concert? The season is getting late.”

“Dearest Stella,” Mrs. Fane replied, “I think you can scarcely make your appearance so soon after your father’s death.”

“But, mother, I’m sure he wouldn’t have minded. And after all very few people would know,” Stella persisted.

“But I should prefer that you waited for a while,” said Mrs. Fane, gently reproachful. “You forget that we are in mourning.”

For Michael somehow the conventional expression seemed to disturb the divinity of his mother’s carven woe. The world suddenly intervened.

“Well, I don’t think I ought to wait forever,” said Stella.

“Darling child, I wonder why you should think it necessary to exaggerate so foolishly,” said Mrs. Fane.

“But I’m so longing to begin,” Stella went on.

“I don’t know that anybody has ever suggested you shouldn’t begin,” Mrs. Fane observed. “But there is a difference between your recklessness and my more carefully considered plans.”

“Mother, will you agree to a definite date?” Stella demanded.

“By all means, dear child, if you will try to be a little less boisterous and impetuous. For one thing, I never knew you were ready to begin at once like this.”

“Oh, mother, after all these years and years of practising!” Stella protested.

“But are you ready?” Mrs. Fane enquired in soft surprise. “Really ready? Then why not this autumn? Why not October?”

“Before I go up to Oxford,” said Michael quickly.

Stella was immediately and vividly alert with plans for her concert.

“I don’t think any of the smaller halls. Couldn’t I appear first at one of the big orchestral concerts at King’s Hall? I would like to play a Concerto⁠ ⁠… Chopin, I think, and nothing else. Then later on I could have a concert all to myself, and play Schumann, and perhaps some Brahms.”

So in the end it was settled after numberless interviews, letters, fixtures, cancellations, and all the fuming impediments of art’s first presentation at the court of the world.

The affairs and arrangements connected with Stella’s career seemed to Michael the proper distraction for his mother and sister during his last two or three weeks of school, before they could leave London. Mrs. Fane had suggested they should go to Switzerland in August, staying at Lucerne, so that Stella would not be hindered in her steady practice.

Michael’s last week at school was a curiously unreal experience. As fast as he marshalled the correct sentiments with which to approach the last hours of a routine that had continued for ten years, so fast did they break up in futile disorder. He had really passed beyond the domain of school some time ago when he was always with Lily. It was impossible after that gradual secession, all the more final because it had been so gradual, to gather together now a crowd of associations for the sole purpose of effecting a violent and summary wrench. Indeed, the one action that gave him the expected pang of sentiment was when he went to surrender across the counter of the book-room the key of his locker. The number was seventy-five. In very early days Michael had been proud of possessing, through a happy accident, a locker on the ground-floor very close to the entrance-hall. His junior contemporaries were usually banished to remote corridors in the six-hundreds, waiting eagerly to inherit from departed seniors the more convenient lockers downstairs. But Michael from the day he first heard by the cast of the Laocoön the shuffle of quick feet along the corridor had owned the most convenient locker in all the school. At the last moment Michael thought he