CHAPTER XI.
CAPTAIN STANDISH.
Whetherit was that Mr. Piper’s plain speaking had its effect, or that Bella grew wise by experience, is an open question; but soon after the particular Thursday upon which Mr. Chumney appeared as an unwelcome guest, the second Mrs. Piper changed her tactics altogether. She left off besieging the county people in their impregnable fortresses, surrounded with the moat of exclusiveness, and shut in with the portcullis of pride. She dropped a good many of those ultra-genteel professional people against whose impertinence Mr. Piper had protested, and she opened her house freely to her husband’s commercial allies of the past—the Wigzells, the Porkmans, the Timperleys, and a good many more of the same class.
When she had made these people understand that her Thursday afternoon reception meant somethinglively and sociable she was no longer without visitors. The midsummer weather suggested a tent on the lawn, where tea and claret cup, and strawberries and cream, might be taken amidst the perfume of roses and warbling of blackbirds. Archery was introduced on the long stretch of grass on the other side of the ha-ha. Mr. Piper insisted on having American bowls for himself and his particular friends, in an old-fashioned garden on one side of the big square mansion, comfortably shut in by a dense holly hedge, a retreat where a man might smoke a clay pipe and be vulgar at his ease.
The Wigzells and their compeers all came in handsome carriages, and, if the men were somewhat given to eccentricity in their hats and collars, the women all dressed in the latest fashion. But their highest claim to Bella’s favour was the fact that they brought very pleasant people in their train; officers in the regiment stationed at Great Yafford, clever young barristers, lawyers of higher standing than the starched solicitors who had retired to cultivate their roses and air their self-importance in the pastoral seclusion of Little Yafford. Bellaperceived with delight that even these manufacturing people could be useful to her.
By midsummer, Mrs. Piper’s Thursday afternoons, which had at first been such dire failures as to provoke the sarcasms of Miss Coyle and her set, had become so successful that Miss Coyle now found herself a neglected atom in the crowd, and sat apart with one of her chosen friends, breathing condemnations of this new phase of worldliness and frivolity. Miss Coyle liked the strong tea, and unlimited pound cake, the claret cup, and strawberries and cream, and better still did she like the large opportunity for scandal which these gatherings afforded her.
‘Poor dear Mrs. Piper,’ she sighed, meaning the lady reposing under the sumptuous monument of many-coloured marbles. ‘If she could only come back to earth for an afternoon, and look upon this scene! If!’
‘Ah!’ echoed Miss Coyle’s friend, Mrs. Namby, the doctor’s wife, ‘if indeed! She would be surprised, poor dear, wouldn’t she?’
‘To think of the waste going on in the servants’hall, now, my dear!’ continued Miss Coyle, with the tone of a Hebrew prophet bewailing the follies of his misguided nation. ‘It was bad enough in the first Mrs. Piper’s time, though there never was a more careful housekeeper. I’ve heard her lament it many a day.Whatmust it beNOW?’
Miss Coyle opened her eyes very wide as she uttered this awful question, and poor little Mrs. Namby, who always agreed with everybody, but wished harm to nobody, opened hers in sympathy.
‘Ah!’ she sighed. ‘She’s very young, isn’t she? You can’t expect much carefulness from such a pretty young thing as that.’
‘Pretty young thing, indeed,’ cried Miss Coyle, contemptuously. ‘We’ve all been pretty young things in our day.’ This was an assertion which, taken in conjunction with Miss Coyle’s present physiognomy, was rather difficult to believe. ‘But did that absolve us from doing our duty? Would that have excused us if we’d been given over to dress, and dissipation, and——’ here Miss Coyle made a long and solemn pause——‘FLIRTATION?’
‘Oh,’ cried poor Mrs. Namby, almost jumping offher garden chair, ‘pray don’t say that. I hope Mrs. Piper has too much respect for herself as a young married woman to be guilty of flirtation.’
‘I say nothing,’ replied Miss Coyle. ‘Look at that, and judge for yourself, Mrs. Namby.’
‘That’ was as pretty a living picture of light-hearted youth as a painter of modern manners need have cared to paint. Against the green background of beech boughs, bright with their midsummer shoots, upon a carpet of velvet sward, stood two figures apart from the rest of the revellers—a man in gray, tall, well made, good-looking; a woman in an archery dress of Lincoln green, setting off a form slight and delicate enough for one of Diana’s nymphs, a hat and feather,à laRosalind, poised lightly on her burnished auburn hair, neat little hands in tan gauntlets, and a tall bow that became her as a fan becomes an Andalusian.
The man in gray was Captain Standish, the crack captain in the crack regiment then stationed at Great Yafford. The regiment considered itself a great deal too good for Great Yafford, and the captain considered himself too good for the regiment. He wasa man of good family; he had large means, a handsome face, and a fine figure; he had come off first in all athletic exercises at school and college; he had not learnt anything else in particular—or in his own words he had not ‘gone in for’ anything else; he left it to be inferred that he could have taken honours had he so chosen.
The lady in Lincoln green was Mrs. Piper the second. She had instituted these archery meetings for her own pleasure as well as that of her friends, but she had not yet learned to hit the gold. The three tall Miss Porkmans had been beating her ignominiously in this afternoon’s contest. Captain Standish had taken her in hand, and was giving her a lesson in the management of her bow.
‘Well, really now I can’t see any harm,’ said Mrs. Namby. ‘He’s giving her a lesson, don’t you see? She’s a poor hand with a bow and arrows.’
Miss Coyle gave a prolonged sniff.
‘Mr. Piper may approve of such goings on,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I should, if I were in his place. Look at him bending down to speak to her, and look at her, giggling and blushing like a silly school girl.If you don’t callthatflirting the word must have a different meaning from what it had inmytime.’
The jerk of Miss Coyle’s bonnet seemed to imply that she had done her share of flirting in the days that were no more, and was an acute judge of such matters.
Mrs. Namby looked at her with awe, marvelling what valiant knight of an extinct chivalry could ever have had the courage to flirt with Miss Coyle.
‘You really must let me ride over some morning and give you a good long lesson. It excruciates me to see those three Porkman Gorgons getting the best of it in this way.’
That was what Captain Standish was bending down to say, with that air of grave reverence which from the distance looked tender. He was not brilliant in conversation. His talent had all gone into field sports and manly accomplishments, from foxhunting, hammer-throwing, cricket, billiards—down to skittles. He could give any man odds at all these. It was astonishing what respect he won from his fellow-men on account of this gift. Had he been a second Newton or Herschel, he could not havecarried things with a higher hand, or more keenly felt his superiority to the ruck of mankind.
Then, again, he had that calm sense of ascendency which distinguishes the man who has never been in want of money. You can see it in his looks. There is the tranquil arrogance of a being who has never shivered at the rap of a dun, or quailed at opening a lawyer’s letter, or been politely reminded by his banker that his account is overdrawn.
‘You must really allow me to teach you,’ pleaded Captain Standish. ‘I used to win prizes at this kind of thing when I was a lad.’
His words were humble enough, but his tone meant, ‘You ought to be intensely grateful for my condescension in offering you such a privilege.’
It was Captain Standish’s first appearance at Little Yafford Park, and Bella was fluttered by the triumph of getting him there—at last. His brother officers had come very often, from the blue-nosed colonel to the callow cornets, and had eaten and drunken and been jolly with Mr. Piper, and voted the whole establishment ‘capital fun.’ But Captain Standish was a different order of being, and neverwent anywhere till he had made people sensible of his importance and exclusiveness, by holding himself aloof. The Miss Porkmans and the Miss Wigzells were rarely seen without one of the callow cornets in their train. Mr. Porkman was on the most familiar terms with Colonel O’Shaughnessy, the blue-nosed commanding officer, who liked the Porkman cellar and the Porkman cook, and was not too refined to tolerate the Porkmans themselves. But Captain Standish was not to be had so easily. Cooks and cellars were indifferent to him. He affected a Spartan simplicity in his diet—drank only the driest champagne, and that seldom—dined on a slice of mutton and a tumbler of Vichy water, frankly avowed his abhorrence of provincial dinner parties, refused five invitations out of six, and, after accepting the sixth, disappointed his host at the eleventh hour. Can it be wondered that, in a society of newly rich provincials, Captain Standish was eminently popular?
His dog-cart, severely painted darkest olive, black harness, no plating, high-stepping brown horse, neat groom in olive livery, and unexceptionable boots,plain black hat and cockade, made a sensation whenever it appeared in the High Street, or flashed meteor-like past the broad plate glass windows of the villas on the London road.
Bella had heard of Captain Standish, both from his brother officers and from the outside world, until she knew his excellences and accomplishments by heart. She was inspired with the same desire to cultivate his acquaintance which agitated feminine society in the brand-new Granges, Moats, and Manors round Great Yafford. The Porkmans had met him at a fancy ball, where he had stood out from the tinselled King Charleses, and the spangled Black Princes, and the theatrical brigands and troubadours, in the actual dress of a Spanish bullfighter. He had once accepted an invitation to dine at the Porkmans’, had disappointed them at the last moment, and had called a week after. The Miss Porkmans had forgiven the ungracious disappointment on account of the gracious call.
‘He looks lovely in morning dress,’ said Blanche Porkman, who was youthful and enthusiastic. ‘If you knew him you would rave about him.’
‘I never rave about people,’ returned Bella, with dignity. ‘And I don’t in the least care about knowing this Captain Standish.’
‘This Captain Standish!’ echoed Blanche Porkman, indignantly. ‘You needn’t put a demonstrative pronoun before him, Mrs. Piper. There’s nobody else like him.’
In spite of her affected indifference, Bella was bent upon bringing Captain Standish to the Park. He had called upon the Porkmans. Was she—with her advanced ideas of elegance and her unlimited capacity for reading French novels—to be of less account than the Porkmans? Was that overgrown Blanche, with her drab hair and complexion, and goggle eyes, to boast of an acquaintance beyond Bella’s reach?
‘The next time you come, colonel, you must bring Captain Standish,’ said Mrs. Piper to the cordial O’Shaughnessy, after that gentleman had dined copiously at Mr. Piper’s expense, and told all his tiger stories, in which he was apt to lose the tiger in a jumble of irrelevant parentheses.
‘Madam, if I live and he lives till next Thursday, Standish shall do homage at the shrine ofbeauty and domestic excellence,’ protested the colonel, which was merely his way of saying that Captain Standish should come to see Mrs. Piper.
The following Thursday came, but no Standish. Another and another Thursday, and the colonel still appeared, apologetic and disgusted. That fellow Standish was perfectly incorrigible, he declared. But this was the fourth Thursday, and Captain Standish was here.
‘Madam,’ said the colonel, introducing his junior, ‘I have kept my promise. If this fellow had tried to put me off to-day I should have lugged him here by the hair of his head.’
‘And if I had known how charming—a place I was to see, I should have come ages ago without your interference, colonel,’ said the captain.
There was a break in the sentence, a look in the captain’s eyes that said in plainest language, ‘If I had known what a lovely woman I was to see, &c., &c.’ And Bella, having lately graduated in the novels of Charles de Bernard, thoroughly understood the look and tone.
Mr. Piper also was gratified by Captain Standish’svisit. His friend Timperley had bragged of his familiarity with the captain; his friend Porkman had boasted of the captain’s morning call. Mr. Piper did not wish to be behind those compeers of his. He had felt himself at a disadvantage when they were lauding the all-accomplished Standish.
‘Well, Beller, my love,’ he said, when the guests had all departed, and he sat down to atête-à-têtedinner with his wife, who was quite exhausted by the cares and triumphs of the afternoon. ‘I’m glad we’ve had Captain Standish at one of our Thursdays, since people round Great Yafford think such a lot about him; but I don’t see that he’s anything so wonderful. He’s very much like all the other military men I’ve seen—extra well got-up linen—a neat-cut boot—and hair cropped as close as a convick’s. That’s the general pattern, I take it.’
‘Oh, Mr Piper!’ cried Bella, horrified at this blasphemy. ‘Can’t you see Captain Standish’s superiority? There is a style—an air—aje ne sais quoi.’
‘I don’t know about thejunnysaker, but I’ll allow that his clothes are a good cut,’ said the unimpressionable Piper. ‘But why the dickens do thePorkmans and Timperleys think so much of him? I shouldn’t have thought he was old Timperley’s sort.’
‘My dear Mr. Piper, Captain Standish is the fashion.’
‘Oh, that’s it, is it?’ said Mr. Piper, meekly. ‘Well, I like to be in the fashion as well as my neighbours. Suppose we ask Captain Thingamy to dinner? He’s not the sort of chap that would want to borrow money of one, is he, by-the-bye? It’s a way they’ve got in the army.’
‘Captain Standish borrow money!’ cried Bella. ‘Why his mother is Lady Emmeline Standish——.’
‘That wouldn’t fill his pockets,’ interjected Mr. Piper.
‘And his father is a partner in a great bank. I forget which, but some enormously rich bank. The Porkmans know all about it.’
‘Oh, well, if his father is rich, he may come here as often as he likes. I’m not afraid of a rich man; but your needy fellows are always dangerous. They’re like the serpent that warms itself at your hearth, and then stings you. They eat your dinners, and wind up by getting you to put your name to an accommodation bill.’