pg28948 [128]
"When I was a little girl, I had golden hair, something like Katie's. Then I used to have a wreath of little blue flowers, oh, so blue, that come when the snow is gone. Andrey, the coachman, used to bring me the very first."
They talked, and then Tilly brought the tea-tray, set for two. Ursula had a special green and gold cup kept for herself at the Marsh. There was thin bread and butter, and cress for tea. It was all special and wonderful. She ate very daintily, with little fastidious bites.
"Why do you have two wedding-rings, grandmother?—Must you?" asked the child, noticing her grandmother's ivory coloured hand with blue veins, above the tray.
"If I had two husbands, child."
Ursula pondered a moment.
"Then you must wear both rings together?"
"Yes."
"Which was my grandfather's ring?"
The woman hesitated.
"This grandfather whom you knew? This was his ring, the red one. The yellow one was your other grandfather's whom you never knew."
Ursula looked interestedly at the two rings on the proffered finger.
"Where did he buy it you?" she asked.
"This one? In Warsaw, I think."
"You didn't know my own grandfather then?"
"Not this grandfather."
Ursula pondered this fascinating intelligence.
"Did he have white whiskers as well?"
"No, his beard was dark. You have his brows, I think."
Ursula ceased and became self-conscious. She at once identified herself with her Polish grandfather.
"And did he have brown eyes?"
"Yes, dark eyes. He was a clever man, as quick as a lion. He was never still."
Lydia still resented Lensky. When she thought of him, she was always younger than he, she was always twenty, or twenty-five, and under his domination. He incorporated her in his ideas as if she were not a person herself, as if she were just his aide-de-camp, or part of his baggage, or one among his surgical appliances. She still resented it. And he was always only thirty: he had died when he was thirty-four. She did not feel sorry for him. He was older than she. Yet she still ached in the thought of those days.
"Did you like my first grandfather best?" asked Ursula.
"I liked them both," said the grandmother.
And, thinking, she became again Lensky's girl-bride. He was of good family, of better family even than her own, for she was half German. She was a young girl in a house of insecure fortune. And he, an intellectual, a clever surgeon and physician, had loved her. How she had looked up to him! She remembered her first transports when he talked to her, the important young man with the severe black beard. He had seemed so wonderful, such an authority. After her own lax household, his gravity and confident, hard authority seemed almost God-like to her. For she had never known it in her life, all her surroundings had been loose, lax, disordered, a welter.
"Miss Lydia, will you marry me?" he had said to her in German, in his grave, yet tremulous voice. She had been afraid of his dark eyes upon her. They did not see her, they were fixed upon her. And he was hard, confident. She thrilled with the excitement of it, and accepted. During the courtship, his kisses were a wonder to her. She always thought about them, and wondered over them. She never wanted to kiss him back. In her idea, the man kissed, and the woman examined in her soul the kisses she had received.
She had never quite recovered from her prostration of the first days, or nights, of marriage. He had taken her to Vienna, and she was utterly alone with him, utterly alone in another world, everything, everything foreign, even he foreign to her. Then came the real marriage, passion came to her, and she became his slave, he was her lord, her lord. She was the girl-bride, the slave, she kissed his feet, she had thought it an honour to touch his body, to unfasten his boots. For two years, she had gone on as his slave, crouching at his feet, embracing his knees.
Children had come, he had followed his ideas. She was there for him, just to keep him in condition. She was to him one of the baser or material conditions necessary for his welfare in prosecuting his ideas, of nationalism,