VII
Ellenspent her days learning more about the quaint art of cookery than she ever dreamed there was to know, and discovering the ways of rich people which were strange indeed.
One of the first things that impressed her was the unvarying quiet. Never was a voice raised that could be heard beyond the room in which it was spoken, and this applied even to the young masters, who, if they ever made a regular boy-racket, must have done so behind the closed doors of the nursery. Compared to the shouting up and down stairs, the banging of pianos and doors, the general uproar of the Meadowburn household, this was like living in a church. The stately high ceilings and big stained glass windows intensified the illusion.
And the armies of tradesmen who came! She had been accustomed to dealing with one butcher, one grocer, one baker. Here there were dozens who handled a farrago of specialties. There were three or four different dessert-makers, a pork butcher, a beef butcher, a poultry butcher, and a fish monger of high degree; there were a plain grocer, a grocer-importer, a wine-dealer, a liquor agent, coffee merchants and tea merchants,purveyors of spices and sweet-meats, apothecaries and fruiterers, dealers in milk, eggs and butter, and a score of others whose business did not happen to be with Ellen. All day they came and went. She had thought that supplying a kitchen was a matter of taking in a certain fixed number of staples and making the most of them. But here she found herself in the midst of an immense variety of esoteric materials whose names suggested the index of a geography. The kitchen with its vast conveniences for housing all these things in their appointed places was not unlike a large shop itself.
Formal dinner parties there were, but they were rare during those days, because of the sick woman in the house. And it was well they were! thought she, judging by the lavishness of those she helped to prepare. Mrs. Seymour, however, gave many luncheons to her friends, and for these Ellen delighted to outdo herself, since Aunt Mathilda was not ungenerous with compliments when they were deserved.
These refinements of luxury affected her unconsciously. She was soon trying to acquire the atmosphere of the house, to train her manners after her mistress, to soften her voice and even to alter the accent of her speech, which had always, though she knew it not, been more agreeable than the average.
This instinct of imitation led her to listen, whenevershe could, to the conversations of Blaydon and his sister. She understood very little of what they said that did not concern the surface news of the family. Often they talked of books, and books were a strange world to Ellen. But one day the thought struck her that Moira, living her childhood in such a house would certainly acquire some of its cultivation, even though no one deliberately undertook to teach her.
But would Moira’s mother be worthy of such a companion? Ought she not to make an effort to improve her mind, so that Moira would be a little less ashamed of her in that rosy time ahead when they would understand each other? To Ellen the difficulties of reading were almost insurmountable. Nothing terrified her so much as twenty pages of print. However, once the thought of her unworthiness in Moira’s eyes occurred to her, she did not hesitate a moment. From one of the upstairs book-cases she selected the largest volume she could find. It proved to be “Les Misérables,” and there was something she liked about the title. That night she began bravely to read.
Hard as it was to make headway in it, she had chosen the only amusement possible to her. When she was not busy in the kitchen, mastering the problems of the stove and the mixing bowl, she sat beside her daughter. There was no chance to think of more exciting pleasures, for which, oftenenough, the youth in her still yearned. Yet these duties were only confining, never exhausting. From the sheer drudgery of hard manual labour, to which she once thought herself condemned until she dropped, a miracle had suddenly delivered her. And that miracle was a little child, unlawfully born. Life held many mysteries for Ellen, but none of them was as incomprehensible as this.
The first inkling that they were ever likely to move from the Trezevant place came to her through one of those overheard talks between Sterling Blaydon and his sister. They were sitting one morning in the brick-walled garden just off the rear drawing room, a lovely place, as Ellen knew, to dream and idle in, if it was deserted and she could have Moira tumbling about on the rugs at her feet. There were rows of green boxed plants along the top of the high walls, a striped awning and the clear sky spread between, like another mysterious ceiling farther away. There was comfort and security and the sense of distance too. It was like many other of the civilized refinements which Ellen discovered at the Blaydons’, suggestive of an almost incredible degree of foresight, of attention to the details of luxury, which the fortunate of the world had been developing illimitably since the first man was carried on the backs of other men. Mr. Blaydon and his sister often breakfasted in this inner garden on finemornings, and Ellen sometimes served them herself in the absence of Marie.
She believed Sterling Blaydon the most romantic personage she had ever seen. His hair was almost white, but he was young in body and in years. His lean, brown face, which she thought had a tired expression when in repose or when he was reading, lighted up marvellously when he smiled. His tall, solid form would have made two of Aunt Mathilda’s. Ellen loved to peep through the butler’s pantry doors and see him decant the special brandy for his friends after dinner, languid and big-handed and jovial through the smoky fog.
This morning while he sat in the garden in the softest of grey tweeds, with his outstretched legs crossed and resting upon the tiles, she heard his drawling voice as she placed the coffee service fastidiously on the big silver tray in the pantry. Ellen liked to fondle the Blaydon china and silver. It was spoiling her; she would never want to touch anything less valuable.
“I dare say it sounds like blasphemy to you,” Mr. Blaydon was saying, “but I’m sick of this place after all. I used to think I never should be.”
“It’s partly Jennie’s long illness. Poor boy, you’ve had a good deal to contend with.”
“I? Nonsense! But I ought to get her away from here. She could pull together faster in thecountry. That is to say, if she ever has strength enough to be moved. And there are the boys. I’m beginning to think this is no locality for them to grow up in. If I toss a pebble over the wall there it will land square in the melting pot—perhaps on some anarchist’s head who will throw a bomb at me one of these days.”
“It’s extraordinary how well Trezevant has held its own. There seems to be a spirit in the place that won’t allow it to be tainted.”
“Tainted enough by coal smoke!” he retorted. “Spirits won’t stop that. I’d really like to get out, way out. Not just to follow the crowd, as they say, but we’ve never had a satisfactory country place, and I’ve come to think you can’t unless you make it a life accomplishment.”
“A life is hardly enough, my dear brother,” replied Mrs. Seymour. “Trezevant is the accomplishment of three generations.”
“Bah!” he replied, good-humouredly, “we’re not the slow coaches we used to be. You can get twice as much done these days in a third of the time.”
“Well, at any rate, it’s unpractical now,” she replied, and he recognized the finality of her tone.
Blaydon smoked his cigar in silence, while she finished her second black coffee and leaned back in her chair swinging a tiny foot of which she was proud. In the shimmering, palpable light, shot with many colours, Mathilda’s face and hair werestill amazingly pretty. There were many who would have accepted the kind of slavery that marriage with her would have entailed, and some among them who had no need for her money. But she was not thinking of that. The arts of vanity had ceased to be a conscious lure; they were the essentials of well-bred self-cultivation. She had accepted her widowhood as the final failure of man, so far as she was concerned. It had been a romantic love match, ecstatic but unhappy, the kind that she fancied exhausted the capacity for passion; and now her thoughts ran upon the future of her brother’s household. For if Blaydon entertained any illusions about the possibility of his wife’s recovery, Mathilda did not.
She had long held certain opinions regarding Jennie, which were not shared by the outside world. One of them was that her brother had never loved her, that he had found this out almost immediately after marrying, and determined to live the thing through because of his old-fashioned loyalty. Mathilda had quite certain knowledge that in the midst of the honeymoon he had rushed away and stayed several days. She knew it had been his hour of terrible trial, his angry realization of having made the first major mistake of his life, and made it in full maturity. His sister was proud of him for remaining a tree of marriage in a clearing of divorce stumps—for such their social world was rapidly becoming.
But her theory was that Jennie had never forgiven him, never in a sense recovered from it. She had welcomed her children in order the more to seal up the truth from others; but she had borne them late, and the birth of the second son, Robert, had doomed her to physical helplessness.
This theory explained to Mathilda every peculiarity of Mrs. Blaydon’s character, every inexplicable episode which had occurred in the house since she had joined them. Jennie had never liked her; perhaps suspected that she knew her secret. Part of Jennie’s satisfaction in having the children was that they would help her to dominate her sister-in-law and the household, in the rôle of mother. As adversaries they had a healthy respect for each other. But Jennie’s sustained firmness of will was less effective than Mathilda’s, because it was less charming and less hidden. Luck was simply against Jennie. It was Mathilda who would win and then (though Blaydon did not know she had thought much about it) they would go to the country. Naturally this would be their first move. It was inevitable because it was the thing that people of their sort were doing, and because automobiles had made it feasible.
As though she felt that she might hint some of this that was in her mind, she broke the silence.
“Speaking of the country, I’ve had my eye fora long time on those tracts in the Errant River hills, where the McNutts have bought.”
Sterling Blaydon slowly took his cigar from his mouth and smiled. Like all men of means he liked to have opportunities to display his foresight presented to him without going out of his way to invite them.
“Well then, you’ve had your eye on what will in all probability be your future home. I’ve been picking up that land right along. I’ve got about three hundred acres of it. Moreover, though the Country Club site committee hasn’t decided officially yet, I know for a fact they are going to take the contiguous property. It’s cheap enough just now, and the club isn’t lavish.”
He was fully satisfied with the glance of admiration Mathilda gave him.
“Why, Sterling,” she said, “how long have you been at that?”
“Since a little while after Hal was born. I got to thinking then this wouldn’t do.”
“Well, it never occurred to me until this year.”
He rose, stretching to his full height to shake the indolence from his body.
“I’ve even got an architect to work. But I dare say you’re right and we can’t think about it yet. I certainly can’t drag Jennie through a radical change like that, and I haven’t even told her for fear it would fret her. But the moment she’s better—Youdon’t say whether you would really like it or not, Mathilda.”
“Certainly I shall like it, dear boy.”
He went off humming to his wife’s room, before going out. He was, Mathilda thought, more attentive to her than many an enamoured husband, and she admired him for it.
The idea of moving to the country at first frightened Ellen, with that pitiful fear which all dependents have of impending change. What will become of them, they ask themselves, in the general forgetfulness?—and a hundred misgivings and imagined instances of dissatisfaction on the part of their masters throng their minds.
But had she felt secure it would have pleased her. The old house was too formal, too heavy with the fragrances and lingering stiffness of a past day. She could never quite grow to like the eternal quiet. A hearty clattering now and then would have relieved her pent-up vitality. She would have liked, just once in a long, long while to listen to one of Tom Meadowburn’s stories, or hear Bennet shouting in the back yard.