CHAPTER XIII.
Before the company Annie had joined started on a tour, she had heard more tidings to distress her about the Braithwaite family. It was Aubrey Cooke who brought them this time. He was telling her that he had met their late companion, Gerald Gibson, at Mrs. Falconer’s the day before.
“Oh! Do you know her too?”
“Yes; I have known her much longer than Gibson has. He and I have long arguments about her.”
“I can guess which side you take.”
“I always take the part of a beautiful woman. And Gibson really does her cruel injustice. She might sit for the portrait of the favorite handsome panther-woman of the lady novelists.”
“I expected something more complimentary than that. I don’t call that high praise.”
“Don’t you? Well, I don’t know any pretty woman who would not feel flattered at being called a panther; most of them only get as far as to be like cats.”
“Now you are absolutely libelous! I know you will go on to say that panthers are as cruel as they are graceful, that they delight in human victims, and you might add, if you dared, that the pursuit of them was an exciting sport. And then you will ask if the parallel does not hold good.”
“Indeed, I shall say nothing so commonplace, Miss Langton. I always maintain, to begin with, that beautiful women are not cruel. It is not their fault if we crowd round them in such numbers that they mix us up a little, and hurt our feelings by forgetting us. I have a great advantage over most of my rivals in one respect—my appearance. I heard a lady call me the other day the nice, quiet young man who looks so stupid. She was asking a man named Colonel Richardson who I was.”
“Colonel Richardson?”
“Yes. He is a gentleman whom I always meet at Mrs. Falconer’s, a very old friend of the family, I believe.”
Now Aubrey Cooke had noted well, without appearing to remark it, the expression of pain and anxiety which passed over Annie’s face as he mentioned that Colonel Richardson was always at Mrs. Falconer’s. But not having the least suspicion that she herself knew the popular beauty, he misunderstood the cause of her distress, and connected it with the fact of the meeting he and Gibson had seen a little way from the stage-door some nights before; and he wondered whether she knew that Colonel Richardson was married, and whether she had heard certain old scandals connected with his name.
For the first few weeks of the tour Aubrey saw very little of Miss Langton. She had taken his advice and drawn back, as civilly as she could, from the proposal of living with Miss West, whom she soon found out to be a coarse woman of not too reputable life, whose beauty and a certain rough good-humor made her dangerous to many men. She saw through the motive of Annie’s shyness at once, and said, with a laugh:
“I suppose I am not good enough for you, little Puritan?”
But she showed neither anger nor bitterness about it, and was consistently kind, after her fashion, all the time the tour lasted, to the quiet little girl to whom she had taken a capricious liking. So that Annie could not help a sneaking liking for her, especially as Miss West showed, in parts requiring dramatic power, a rough force which in some scenes kept Annie spell-bound in the wings watching her, and asking herself if this were not genius. And then Miss West would destroy the illusion by coming off at the side, scolding the prompter for not being at his post, and calling for stout or for brandy and water.
Annie, therefore, chose to live alone, the only girl of her own standing in the company being the amateur chambermaid, who was so ostentatiously poor and aggressively economical that Miss Langton felt that life with her would be a sort of voluntary martyrdom.
She had some trials with lazy landladies, extortionate landladies, maids-of-all-work who did not give her enough attention, and others who gave her too much. They had been traveling some weeks, when, in a certain town which is one of the oldest in England, she got into some lodgings where the landlady was always out, and, being a lone widow who kept no servant, sometimes left her lodgers to wait upon themselves more than was meet.
Aubrey Cooke had rooms above Annie’s in this house, and, on reaching the door, tired, hot, and hungry after a long rehearsal of a piece which had just been added to their repertory, Annie found her fellow-lodger kicking the paint viciously off the inhospitable portal.
“It is of no use, Mr. Cooke,” said Annie, resignedly. “The stupid old woman has gone to market, and we shall have to wait till she comes back, unless we go and hunt her up where she is making her bargains in stale cabbages.”
“But it is abominable to make her lodgers stand kicking their heels in the blazing sun, while she is haggling over a penn’orth of onions!” said he, with another lunge at the door.
Annie meanwhile had been prowling about.
“Do you think you could open the kitchen window, Mr. Cooke?” she asked, dubiously. “We might get in there. It isn’t far from the ground.”
It was a small window, just low enough for him to reach the fastening easily with his pocket-knife. In a few minutes he had pushed the fastening aside, scrambled up on to the sill, opened the window, and got in amid the crash of timber.
“What have you done?” asked Annie, anxiously, as he appeared again, disguised in flour and paste.
“I’ve fallen into a lot of things, it seems,” said he, “and I believe I’ve sprained my ankle.”
“Oh, my roly-poly pudding!” cried Annie, not heeding his ailments in the unhappy discovery.
“I’m afraid it is done for now,” answered Mr. Cooke, as he removed the body of the uncooked pudding from his sleeve. “It will do for a poultice for me, however,” he said, cheerfully; “and Mrs. Briggs will put it down in both our bills, so it won’t be wasted. Wait, I’ll give you a chair to help you up.”
She got in; and they both began to look about for something to make dinner of. Annie went to the cupboard, while Mr. Cooke opened a door and fell down two steps into the back kitchen with a cry of joy. He had knocked his head against a skinny-looking bird, already plucked, which was hanging down from the ceiling. But Annie shook her head contemptuously when she saw it.
“It is one of Mrs. Briggs’ prehistoric chickens, and it would want a lot of preparation before we could cook it. Besides, I don’t know how, and the fire is out.”
So they hunted again, and, not finding anything but bones and Mr. Cooke’s cheese, Aubrey went out to buy chops, having said doubtfully that he thought he could cook a chop, but wasn’t sure, while Miss Langton set to work to make a fire. When she came back, after a rather long absence, they were both radiant; for Annie, as she let him in, told him in great delight that she had made a lovely fire, and found where the plates, and knives, and forks were kept, and he pulled out of his pockets a number of small parcels and a gridiron, and produced from under his arm a huge cookery book, which he laid triumphantly down upon a bag containing cheese-cakes.
“The baker’s wife lent me this; so now we can have fifteen courses if we like. This will tell us how to make avol-au-vent à lafinancière, or africandeau de veauwithsauce piquante, or——”
“But it won’t tell us how to cook a chop without burning it to a cinder, or how to boil a potato when I can’t find where they are kept,” said Annie, taking up the gridiron and turned it over thoughtfully.
“Why, I can show you what to do with that!” said he, with superiority.
And at last, after a great deal of unnecessary trouble and excitement, and after having burned their hands and scorched their faces and gone through a sort of purgatory on a hot early September afternoon, they did succeed in cooking the chops; and then Aubrey danced round them in affectionate pride, while Annie suggested that they should dine in her sitting-room, which was only on the other side of the passage.
“Oh, no,” said Aubrey; “let us have it in here, and then we can do some more cooking!”
So they pulled the kitchen-table out of range of the fire, and put bits of firewood and paper under the rickety legs, and laid the cloth and arranged the knives and forks with elaborate carefulness, and Aubrey rushed to the tap and filled a jug which they then discovered to have contained milk; and, the mania of cooking being still strong upon him, he insisted on putting the battered cheese-cakes into the oven “to revive them,” and then made buttered toast “for dessert,” to work off his culinary energy. And Annie laughed at him, and enjoyed herself very much. And then she suggested boiling some water for coffee, which she knew how to make, she said.
“Yes, because it doesn’t require any making. Everything that demands a little science falls to me,” said Aubrey, decisively, putting the kettle on the fire so that it immediately fell over on its side with a loud hiss.
However, the coffee was made at last, and of course Aubrey said it was the only time he had tasted good coffee out of Paris; and, the landlady not having yet returned, though the afternoon was drawing to a close, Annie was rising to put away some of the things, when Aubrey stopped her.
“Don’t be so wrong-headed as to save that unprincipled old lady trouble,” said he. “Besides, I dare say she will stay away till about nine o’clock, and we shall want the things again for tea.”
Annie made a grimace.
“Then we shall have to wash them up.”
“That is very simple. Put them all in the sinkand turn the tap on.”
He was suiting the action to the word when Annie stopped him.
“Well, don’t let us go away then, because the fire might go out, and then poor Mrs. Briggs might find it cold when she comes back,” said he, with unexpected solicitude.
He did not want to break up thistête-à-tête, in which Annie, for the first time, had been in her most charming, happiest mood with him.
“Do stay,” he said coaxingly. “Let us tell each other stories by the firelight. I’ll begin; I’ll tell you a beauty that I made up myself, all about ogres and a good little girl and a bad little girl.”
He was patting Mrs. Briggs’ rocking-chair persuasively, and at last Annie allowed herself to fall into it, while Aubrey went on in a chirping tone:
“There was once a very dreadful ogre as bad as he was ugly—he had a mouth as big as mine—and he had for his play-fellows and companions all the bad little boys and girls in the neighborhood; but of course the good boys and girls ran away as soon as they saw him, especially one little girl who felt quite sure that he would eat her up if she spoke civilly to him. So she was always as distant as she could be, and sometimes made the poor ogre quite uncomfortable, which of course was quite right and proper; until one day she met the poor ogre when somebody had stolen his dinner—and hers too, by the way—and instead of eating her up as she expected, he did his best to make himself as agreeable as circumstances would permit; and——What are you laughing at, Miss Langton?”
“I was laughing at something I was thinking about, Mr. Cooke. You can’t expect me to keep my attention fixed on your idiotic nursery stories.”
“Oh! And so at last the good little girl got quite saucy; and—I really must beg you to restrain your mirth at your own private thoughts, Miss Langton. It is not courteous when a gentleman is doing his best to be entertaining—and instructive as well. To resume. And so the ogre wondered to himself whether the good little girl would feel quite sure for the future that he didn’t want to eat her up, and whether she would think he was not such a bad fellow after all and not half a bad cook at a pinch. That is all, Miss Langton, unless you would like the moral.”
“Let us have the moral, by all means, if you can find one in all that tissue of nonsense.”
“I pass over your impertinent comments in silence. The moral is——What have I done to make you dislike me so much, Miss Langton?”
“I don’t understand you, Mr. Cooke. If I disliked you, should I have devoted all my energies, as I have done this afternoon, to preparing your dinner and being to you all that Mrs. Briggs ever was and more—for she never gives you coffee after dinner?”
“Your civility to me to-day has been dictated by the purest selfishness. If it had not been for me you would have had to go out and buy your own dinner, and you would not have known which side of the gridiron to hold. I repeat, without me you would have been a forlorn, dinner-less woman. Look here—there is no making a bargain with a lady, because she can always cry off when she likes. But if you would only believe that nothing would give me so much pleasure as to be able to render you any service at any time, and that your reserve really does hurt sometimes, I should be so glad of having had this chance of telling you so.”
He got shy against the end of this speech; and Annie turned toward him a face which looked very sweet as well as pretty in the fire light.
“I do believe it,” she said, simply. “And I promise you that for the future you shall not only not have to complain of my reserve, but you may think yourself lucky if you do not have to check my forwardness.”
“Madam, my innate dignity will awe you sufficiently,” said Aubrey haughtily.
But he looked as much pleased as his inexpressive face ever allowed him to look. And when Mrs. Briggs came in just in time to get tea ready, affecting great surprise at their being home before her, and protesting that she had understood both of them to say they would dine out, they were both still chatting amicably by the kitchen fire. Aubrey was in such high spirits that he seized the occasion to thunder forth a long harangue at the frightened and apologetic old woman.
“Is this the way to treat two members of a profession which numbers in its ranks the fairest of England’s women and the noblest of her men? Woman, do you take us for amateurs? Your four hours of trifling and foolish chattering in the market-place—a thing which Bunyan condemns as most reprehensible—have been gained at the expense of an afternoon of unspeakable suffering and wretchedness to two of the most pecuniarily desirable inmates who have ever condescended to take up a temporary residence under your inhospitable roof!”
Mrs. Briggs was overwhelmed.
“I am sure, sir, I am very sorry. But you looked pretty comfortable sitting there by the fire together.”
“Comfortable! This woman says we looked comfortable,” said Aubrey, turning in amazement to Annie, who hastened to say:
“And so we were, Mrs. Briggs—at least, I was. As for Mr. Cooke, some people are never contented, you know.”
And she ran away laughing to her sitting-room, while Aubrey went up-stairs to his, singing Siebel’s song in “Faust” in a very loud but very melancholy voice.
After that afternoon in Mrs. Briggs’ kitchen, Miss Langton and Mr. Cooke were very good friends. Annie found in him just the same boyish high spirits which had made William such a delightful companion, while the fact of his being well-educated and witty gave him a charm in which the Braithwaites were one and all sadly deficient. So that it gradually came to be a matter of course that he should find out what was worth seeing about each town which the company visited, and that he should then take her to see it, and that, if they were in sentimental mood, they should unite in conjuring up pictures of the olden time in the ruined abbeys and crumbling walls they inspected; while, if they felt inclined to scoff at antiquity, they laughed together. The half-tender tone of deference which gradually grew up in his manner to her did not cause Annie the least uneasiness. She looked upon him as a universal lover, who could not keep sentiment quite out of his intercourse with any woman, and, if any one had told her that Aubrey Cooke was growing seriously in love with her, and that her friendly manner was encouragement, she would have been very much amused at the suggestion.
But Aubrey had in truth grown quite conscious of the fact that this capricious little woman, with her alternate fits of cold shyness and madly high spirits, who could parry his nonsense with nonsense just as wild one moment, and the next hold her own in a serious discussion, had a charm for him which made all other women seem insipid in his eyes. She was lovely to him; even when her little brown face looked colorless and unattractive to others, it was full of pathetic interest to him; when she was looking her best, when the wind had brought the bright hue of health to her cheeks and her eyes were sparkling with fun or easily roused excitement, he could not take his own vacuous light-blue eyes off her face. If his face had been more expressive, she could not have failed to discover that his interest in her was deeper than was safe for his own peace of mind; but unluckily Aubrey’s features were the most perfect mask ever worn by a man whose feelings were in reality as keen as his intellect.
Time after time he had made up his mind that he would propose to her at such a time, at such a place. For it had come to this, that he felt he must make her promise to be his wife, if she would, before this tour was over. But, whenever the moment came which he had looked upon as propitious for the plunge, his heart failed him, or she would be in the wrong mood, too friendly or too satirical, and the question had to be put off. After all, there was no need to hurry matters; there were some weeks of the tour to run yet, and in the meantime their intercourse was delightful, and in the awful possibility of her saying “No” there would be an end of even that.
And there was a burden on his mind which he was anxious to find an opportunity of removing. It concerned Colonel Richardson and the interest Miss Langton took in that handsome Lovelace. He made himself an opportunity rather clumsily. They were reading an epitaph of the usual order on some man who seemed to have had all the virtues, to have been beloved and respected by everybody, and to have made a blank in the universe by his death.
“He was too perfect,” said Aubrey. “I suppose his widow put up this as a salve to her conscience after worrying her husband to death.”
“Well, perhaps she really thought it.”
“Perhaps. In that case he must have been a handsome scamp, a sort of Colonel Richardson,” he hazarded, watching her.
“You should not take it for granted that all women like scamps.”
“All women seem to like Colonel Richardson.”
“Well, he is nice! He knows just how to treat them, to be interesting and amusing without making love to them.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon! I should not have been so rash as to sneer at him if I had known he was so lucky as to have such a strong advocate in you,” said Aubrey, out of temper.
“Advocate? What nonsense! He has plenty without me.”
“That is why I am surprised to find you worshiping at such a general shrine.”
“Worshiping! Really, Mr. Cooke, you are quite rude.”
“I did not mean to be, I assure you. I only envy him his luck.”
And Aubrey stalked off over the old tombstones and began digging out bits of moss from a wall with the end of his cane, too angry to trust himself to say any more.
“Good-bye, Mr. Cooke; I am going home!” sung out Annie; and, before he had made up his mind whether his dignity would allow him to follow her, she had left the churchyard and disappeared from his sight behind the wall.
That decided him, and in a few strides he was out of the gate and crying humbly from behind her.
“Miss Langton, aren’t you coming to have another of those tarts you liked so much, as we arranged?”
“Not if you are going to stalk off to the other side of the road if I happen to say something you don’t agree with.”
“I beg your pardon. I am in a bad temper this morning, I suppose. I will agree with everything you say. I think Colonel Richardson is the nicest man I know.”
“Then there we sha’n’t agree,” said Annie, smiling; “for, although I think his manner is good, I don’t much care about him.”
“Don’t you?” interrogated Aubrey, delightedly! “I’m so glad! Do you know, I didn’t think he was the kind of man you would like much. Then you said what you did only to tease me?”
“Did I?” said Annie, surprised that he should make such a fuss about a trifle. “I don’t think I did. I say, shall we stay here next week, as we are not going to York?”
“No; we are going out of our route a little. The governor has got us a week at Beckham.”
“Beckham!” cried Annie, while all the color fled from her face.
“Yes. Why, what is the matter?”
“Nothing,” said she, in her usual voice, but the color did not come back to her cheeks.
Now, Aubrey knew very well that “nothing” would not affect Miss Langton as that mere mention of a place had done; but he saw, too, that she did not intend to give him a truer answer. It was not difficult to come to the conclusion that there were unpleasant associations connected in her mind with the place to which they were going; and, after long deliberation, he made up his mind definitely that Beckham should be the place where he would at last screw up his courage to the point of asking her to be his wife.
“If she likes me—and I think—I almost think she does”—he reflected that night—“why, my proposal will be the very best thing to drive any unhappy recollections of the place out of her head. If she won’t have me—well, there is a river at Beckham!”
With which dark suggestion Aubrey blew out his candle and went to sleep.