CHAPTER VI.
THE SECOND MRS. PIPER.
Bellawas reigning at the Park in all the glory of new-fledged royalty, her husband fascinated and subservient, her step-children all packed off to school, the sober old Georgian barrack transformed by new furniture and improvements of all kinds. At his wife’s urgent desire Mr. Piper had bought the estate from Sir Philip Dulcimer, who, never having liked it, was very glad to turn it into money, which, carefully invested in railway shares, might bring him in five or six per cent., instead of the scanty two and a half which his paternal acres had yielded. Mr. Piper was therefore now Mr. Dulcimer’s patron, as Bella reflected with a thrill of pride. She had ascended a good many steps above poor Mrs. Dulcimer, who had been so patronizingly good-natured to her in the days of her poverty.
For the brief three months of his wedded life Ebenezer Piper had been living in a state of chronic astonishment. ‘This little woman,’ as he called his wife, absolutely took his breath away. Her coolness, her self-assurance, her air of having been used to the possession of unlimited wealth from her babyhood, her insolence to people of higher rank—Lady Jane Gowry, for instance, and the Pynsents, and all the notabilities of Little Yafford—these things filled him with admiring surprise. She was not at all the kind of wife he had expected to find her. He had chosen her for her softness and pliability, and he found her hard and bright as some sparkling gem. He had expected to rule and govern her as easily as a little child, and behold! she was ruling and governing him. He was too much under the spell of her fascination to complain yet awhile; but this kind of thing was not at all what he had intended. He held himself in reserve.
Never was there such a change in any household. A butler in solemn black, with a powdered footman for his assistant, took the place of thedecent parlourmaid, in her starched cap and apron.
The first Mrs. Piper had never consented to have indoor men-servants.
‘My dear, why don’t you keep a man?’ Mr. Piper had sometimes inquired. ‘He’d do much better than these girls of yours, who never quite know their business.’
‘Piper,’ his wife had answered solemnly, ‘I am not going to bring you to ruin. The girls are bad enough, what with their extravagance and their followers, but a man would eat us out of house and home before we knew where we were.’
‘Please yourself, my dear,’ returned Mr. Piper, ‘and you’ll please me.’
Thus it was that the Piper establishment had been conducted upon a strictly middle-class footing.
Now everything was on an aristocratic level. The present Mrs. Piper had a Frenchwoman for her own maid. She had a groom in top boots to sit behind her pony carriage. When she drove in her barouche the groom sat beside the coachman,and the two pairs of top-boots had a dazzling effect. Mr. Piper was rather astonished at the bootmaker’s bill.
‘My pet, here’s no end of money to pay for top-boots,’ he remarked. ‘I can’t say I see the use of ’em. Poor Moggie got on very well without top-boots.’
‘I hope you don’t expect me to go out with a coachman in trousers,’ exclaimed Bella. ‘I might as well have a fly from the “Crown” at once.’
‘My love, I should have thought that any kind of conveyance would have been a novelty to you, and that you’d hardly have been so particular about the livery,’ suggested Mr. Piper.
‘I could have gone on foot all my life,’ said Bella, ‘but if I am to have a carriage I must have it decently appointed. I don’t want to hang between heaven and earth, like Mahomet’s coffin.’
Mahomet’s coffin extinguished Mr. Piper. It had been flung at his head a good many times upon his venturing to object to his young wife’s extravagance.
‘And after all I am proud to see how wellshe does it,’ he said to himself, smiling an uxorious smile. ‘She’s a regular little duchess.’
And henceforward in familiar conversation Mr. Piper was apt to speak of his wife as the ‘Duchess.’
The house—which had now become his freehold—was made so fine that Mr. Piper hardly knew himself in it. Persian carpets of vivid and various hues were spread on the black and white marble of the hall, brocaded satin curtains, violet lined with amber, veiled the doors between hall and conservatory. The drawing-room was pale blue and gold, rich in easy chairs and tall gilded stands supporting Sèvres vases filled with flowers.
The chief bedroom was apple-green. Everything was radiant and smiling, dazzling with gold and colour.
‘My word! it’s like living in a bower,’ said Mr. Piper, and he hummed a song that was then not quite forgotten—
‘There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s stream.’
‘There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s stream.’
‘There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s stream.’
‘There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s stream.’
Having made her house beautiful, Mrs. Piper’s next desire naturally was to exhibit her splendour to the envious eyes of people with inferior houses.She therefore began to issue invitations on as large a scale as the neighbourhood allowed. These were not all responded to as cordially as she would have wished. Lady Jane Gowry had honoured Bella with a condescending call, but she flatly declined Mr. and Mrs. Piper’s invitation to dinner, on the ground that at her age she could not afford to extend the circle of her visiting acquaintance.
‘The people I dine with are people I have known for half a century,’ she wrote to Mrs. Piper. ‘I am too old to go out often, so I only go to very old friends. But if you and Mr. Piper like to come and take a cup of tea with me any Tuesday evening I shall be very happy to see you.’
‘After all, Lady Jane’s chestnut wig and violet-powdered complexion are not much loss,’ said Bella.
‘No, they ain’t, but I should like to have taken the old woman to dinner upon my arm, before the Porkmans and the Wigzells,’ remarked Mr. Piper. ‘I don’t believe they ever sat down to dinner with a title in the whole course of their natural lives. Wouldn’t old Timperley have stared! Earls’ daughters don’t come his way often, I reckon.’
Bella found that she would have to content herself in a great measure with the society of the Timperleys, the Porkmans, the Wigzells, and all the ramifications of those family trees. Everybody in this set was rich, and the chief struggle of everybody’s life seemed to be to spend more money upon display than his or her neighbour. The men boasted of their cellars, and vied with each other in giving high prices for their wines. A few loftier spirits bought pictures, and talked patronizingly of their favourite Royal Academicians. They seemed to think that Frith and Millais had been created for them, like Holbein for Henry the Eighth, or Vandyke for Charles the First. They all lived in brand-new houses within a few miles of Great Yafford, houses built by themselves, all spick and span and fresh from the builder’s hand, with not so much as an elderly apple-tree on the premises.
The county people had been condescendingly civil to the new Mrs. Piper; but that was all. They called upon her, and contemplated her curiously, as if she had been something to wonder at, like theonly living gorilla. She was asked to three large dinners, at which she felt herself less than nobody—though she wore laces and jewels enough for a dowager of ancient lineage. Bella, clever as she was, found that these people’s thoughts were not her thoughts, nor their ways her ways—and that all the distance between the east and west was not wider than the gulf between her and the county families. But this was a surmountable difficulty, she told herself. She was quick at learning languages, and would learn the jargon of the county families as easily as she had learned Italian. These scraps of social slang, these continual allusions to people she did not know, and pleasures she had never shared, could hardly be so difficult as Dante.
Mr. Piper looked on and admired, while his young wife wasted his money, laughed at his friends, and made light of his opinions; but he was not altogether satisfied or easy in his mind. It would not be always so, he thought. There would come a day! The Duchess was carrying things with a high hand. It was perhaps just as well to let her have her fling. She was so unaccustomedto the command of money, poor little woman, that she might be forgiven for spending it somewhat recklessly. And, after all, this increased expenditure was pleasanter than poor Moggie’s carefulness and perpetual lamentations about butcher’s bills and pounds of butter. Mr. Piper liked his new butler, and was even in his heart of hearts not displeased with the powdered footman or the top-booted groom, though he affected to despise those follies. He felt himself on a level with the Timperleys in their scarlet Tudor mansion, with its jutting windows and leaden lattices, its deep porch and iron-studded door, its gilded vane and many gables, at once intensely old and dazzlingly new. He was living as became his wealth and social status, living like the Porkmans and the Wigzells, and the rest of his purse-proud acquaintance. The first Mrs. Piper had hung upon him like a log on a hobbled donkey, and had deprived him of all freedom, with her ever-lasting economical scruples. He had been afraid to give a dinner party, knowing that for a month after there would be ceaseless wailings about the expense of the feast.
‘Piper, have you any idea what grouse were when you asked Mr. Timperley to dinner last August?’ Mrs. Piper would demand.
‘I know the brace we had were uncommonly tough, and precious badly cooked,’ Mr. Piper would retort.
‘They were twelve shillings a brace, Piper. Here’s the poulterer’s bill to prove it to you. I call it sinful to eat game at such a price. You knowyouordered them, Piper. I should have inquired what they were to cost—but you never do.’
‘I wanted to give Timperley a decent dinner,’ Mr. Piper would reply. ‘Hang it, Moggie! when I go to Timperley’s he feeds me on the fat of the land. Besides, we can afford it.’
‘Nobody can afford wanton extravagance,’ Mrs. Piper would groan; and this kind of conversation would occur daily.
Thus it was a new thing to Mr. Piper to have his domestic life administered with liberal-handed luxury, to hear no complaints about the misconduct of servants or the price of provisions, not tobe awakened abruptly from his after-dinner nap to be told that bread had gone up a halfpenny, or that Scrogfield was charging thirteen-pence for fillet of veal.
‘Upon my word, little woman,’ he exclaimed one day, delighted with his wife’s cleverness, ‘you have made the house a paradise.’
It was still more a paradise after Christmas, for the second Mrs. Piper, having found out that her step-daughters were sadly in want of dancing and calisthenics, which they could not be taught properly at home, and would be much benefited by being transplanted to Miss Turk’s boarding school, on the outskirts of Great Yafford, the school at which Mrs. Dulcimer and all the best people in the neighbourhood had been educated, under the aunts and predecessors of the reigning Miss Turk.
Mr. Piper was rather disappointed, just at first, by this idea of Bella’s. He had hoped to have his daughters always at home. They were troublesome, rude, and noisy, but still Mr. Piper loved them, as the gladiator loved his young barbarians.
‘I thought you would have gone on teachingthe girls, little woman,’ he said, with a chap-fallen air.
‘My dear Mr. Piper, what time should I have for society, or for you, if I did that? Quite impossible. Besides, the girls will be a great deal better at a first-rate school. They are too high-spirited to obey me, and now I am their mamma they would laugh at my attempts to teach them.’
Mr. Piper sighed and submitted. The boys went to school, as a matter of course. He had no objection to that. But he had hoped that his daughters would stay at home, and cheer his breakfast-table with their chubby common-place faces and small second-hand jokes, and thump their pianoforte duets of an evening for his delectation.
One evil which Mr. Piper had feared in taking Bella for his wife had not befallen him. He had fancied that the Park would be overrun with Scratchells, that Bella, as an affectionate member of a large family, would want to make his house a free warren for her father and mother, brothers and sisters.
But this apprehension of Mr. Piper’s was in no manner realized. Bella sent her family ceremoniousinvitations to her second best parties, and made a duty call upon her mother after church every Sunday, a time at which Mrs. Scratchell was less distracted by thoughts about the kettle or the kitchen generally than at other periods of her existence; for the Scratchells always had a cold dinner on the Sabbath, not so much from piety as from a conviction of Mrs. Scratchell’s that cold meat went further than hot.
This kind of intercourse was not what the Scratchells—especially Clementina and Flora—had expected; but they were fain to be thankful for the favours they received, and never carried their murmurs further than the sacred home circle, where, sitting round the winter fire, they discoursed at their ease upon Bella’s worldliness and want of natural feeling.
‘I was so glad when Lady Jane refused to go to her dinner party,’ said Clementina. ‘We weren’t asked to that party. Oh no. We were not good enough to meet Lady Jane—nor the Timperleys either. And Lady Jane wrote and told Bella that she only went out to dine with old friends. Wasn’t that splendid?’
‘Did Bella tell you?’ asked Mr. Scratchell.
‘Catch her! She’s too proud to tell me she’s been snubbed. Lady Jane told Mrs. Dulcimer, and Mrs. Dulcimer told me, and I’ve no doubt everybody in the village knows all about it by this time.’
‘No doubt,’ sighed Mrs. Scratchell, in her doleful way. ‘It was a pity Bella put herself so forward.’