THE GALLANT LITTLE LADY
“I hopeyou are using all your influence to prevent the marriage?” said Clyde, in the impersonal tone that he always adopted when speaking to his wife of her only daughter.
“Why, Charles? They’re madly in love.”
“That is why,” said Sir Charles.
“What do you mean?”
Lady Clyde had not the slightest desire to know what her husband meant, and had already made up her mind that she disagreed with it root and branch, so she said, “What do you mean?” in a tone of indignation, and not one of enquiry, and gave him no time to answer.
“Richard is a gentleman, he’s earning a very good salary, and he adores Rita. The only possible objection is their having to live in the East, but everyone says the Malay States are quite healthy, and she’s very strong, thank heaven. If she’s plucky enough to face it, I don’t see howwecan object.”
“My objection has nothing to do with their living in the Malay States. It is simply concerned with the fact that they will have nothing whatever to depend upon except Richard Lambourne’s salary. He is a young man, he has saved nothing, and he has no expectations from anybody.”
“Rita has her own small income.”
“It might keep them from starvation, certainly, but it wouldn’t be enough for a family.”
“No one expects it to be. Richard will save if he has a wife, naturally, and he hopes to become a part owner of the rubber estate, later on. After all, it’s very creditable for a man of his age to have been made general manager already.”
“Very.”
“Then what have you against him?”
“Nothing at all,” said Sir Charles mildly.
“A minute ago you were telling me how you hoped I should use my influence to prevent this marriage. If you have nothing against him, why shouldn’t they marry?”
“Perhaps I have ‘something against’ Rita, as you express it.”
“Rita is only your step-daughter, Charles, and I know very well that your own children——”
“Ourown children——”
“That they come first, and always have. But I have an unprejudiced eye,” said Lady Clyde warmly, “and I don’t pretend that Rita isn’t a greater deal cleverer, prettier, and more attractive than all the others put together. And as for talking of having anything against her, it’s the sheerest nonsense, as even you must know.”
Sir Charles looked at his wife with an expression which she had long ago summed up, not inaptly, as “Charles looking as though he couldn’t decide if one were worth explaining the alphabet to or not.” On this occasion, Sir Charles appeared to decide in favour of the modicum of intelligence required.
“My case is simply this, Catherine. If Richard Lambourne and Rita marry now, they are entirely dependent upon Richard’s job. Say he loses it, or loses his health—which amounts to the same thing—or falls off his horse and breaks his neck, Rita may be left with a child, or children, and nothing whatever to live on except a yearly sum which she has hitherto spent upon her clothes, largely supplemented by presents from you.”
“As though Rita wouldn’t always have a welcome from me, and as though I wouldn’t share my last crust with her!”
“On the contrary, I should expect you to divide your last crust into equal parts between Rita and your four other children,” said Sir Charles with coldness. “But apart fromlast crusts, which is a rhetorical way of speaking, you had better understand once and for all, my dear Catherine, that my sons and daughter are not to be sacrificed to Rita. If she marries this man, he must keep her. This house is her home, and has been so for twenty years or so, but once she is married, it ceases to be her home. I am sorry if I hurt your feelings, but if Rita is to take the risk of marriage with a man who has nothing to depend on but what he can earn for himself, she had better understand exactly what she is doing. Personally, I consider her entirely unfitted to take such a risk.”
“She is more than ready to take any risk. You are perfectly incapable of understanding Rita, Charles, and what a generous, ardent nature she has. And she is very, very much in love, for the first time in her life. You know as well as I do that plenty of people have wanted to marry Rita, and I think it’s wonderful that she should have refused so many offers, to give herself to a man who isn’t rich, simply because she loves him.”
“You look upon it as being decided, then?”
“Of course I do. She is absolutely determined to marry him and go out with him at once. I can’t refuse my consent—and I shan’t—and they’re not dependent upon yours, Charles.”
She looked at him with a rather nervous defiance, but Sir Charles said with great calm:
“Certainly they’re not. I shall therefore consider the subject closed, so far as my objections go.”
He kept his word, as he invariably did.
The wedding of Rita and Richard took place six weeks later.
Rita was little and very pretty, with big dark eyes, a pathetic baby face, and, in rather quaint contrast, a very erect little figure and a decided bearing.
Unlike her stepfather, the majority of her friends and relations fully realised the beautiful recklessness of Rita’s love-match.
“A very gallant little lady!” said an old friend of Lady Clyde’s, and she reversed an opinion which she had hitherto held as to his senility. He used the same phrase, which had evidently caught his ancient fancy, when the bride wasmaking her farewells, and it oddly suited her appearance, in a velvet dress and a three-cornered hat with a long plume, vaguely recalling pictures of cavalier heroines.
“So she’s marrying all for love, and going eight thousand miles away from home!” said Rita’s aged admirer. “None of your mercenary, modern, ideas there. A gallant little lady, I call her.”
The same phrase was repeated, and by many people, when Rita and Richard Lambourne came home again, three years later. The great rubber slump had come, and Richard had lost his job. He said that he hoped to find something to do in England.
“Professional men of all classes are hoping exactly the same thing at the present moment, all over the country,” said Sir Charles Clyde.
The Lambournes stayed with the Clydes for a little while, then they and their baby and their nurse moved into a tiny house on the outskirts of a large neighbouring town, and then it was that such a number of people took to making use of the apt descriptive phrase first employed when Rita married.
Many of them had known her in her girlhood, the spoilt and favoured child of Lady Clyde, at home in her stepfather’s house.
They could fully appreciate the contrast with her present position.
Richard could not find any work, although he answered advertisements and wrote to influential friends. He was not a strong man, and very soon showed signs of great discouragement and anxiety.
Rita, on the contrary, was always cheerful, and discussed the situation very frankly, laughing merrily at her own struggle with unaccustomed privations.
“It’s so lucky I’ve got a little money that my own father left me. By managing very, very carefully, we’re living on that. Poor Richard hadn’t a penny beyond his salary, and now of course that’s all gone—poor darling!”
She was drolly confidential with her numerous friends.
“It’s so funny to have to think before I take a second helping of pudding, even, and yet I suppose I really ought to. But I don’t think I’ve got a very large appetite, have I, Richard?”
“No, you haven’t.”
“What a good thing!” She laughed as she spoke, but Richard remained unsmiling and miserable, and gradually it became evident to Rita’s friends that one of Rita’s trials was her husband’s inability to face their position with a gallant laugh, as she did.
As time went on, and there appeared to be no hope of a salary for Richard, she sent away the little girl’s nurse.
“I think I ought to be able to manage. Lots of poor women have to, only it’s a great pity I was brought up to play the piano, and dance, and play tennis, instead of learning to cook. One somehow never thought of it’s being necessary.”
“It oughtn’t to be necessary now,” said Richard violently, “if you’d married a fellow with money, or brains enough to make some.”
“Why, I might have been a millionairess, if I’d married the first man that ever proposed to me,” she said brightly. “Doesn’t it seem odd?”
He made no answer.
“D’you know, darling, I saw a really lovely jumper in Colson’s window to-day. It was real old rose, the colour that suits me. It was one of the sale things and marked down to half a guinea. I had a frightful struggle—it is such ages since I had anything new. I wouldn’t even let myself go into the shop, though I had to get some things for baby. I went somewhere else. I felt I couldn’t bear to come out of Colson’s without that jumper. It was so lovely—and really marvellously cheap. It’s been haunting me ever since.”
“Surely we can find half a guinea,” said Richard, his face flushing.
“Richard!” She gave a little laughing scream. “Why, I work out every penny of my income on paper before I spend it, and do you know what’s left over for my clothes,when I’ve paid the wages and the rent, and rates and taxes, and the housekeeping books? Just—exactly—five pounds a year!”
She held up five fingers, laughing.
“I know.”
“I can’t believe that I once spent five pounds a year, or thereabouts, on gloves, but I suppose I did. I don’t really know how I could manage now, if mummie didn’t still give me so many presents.”
She looked at him with her head on one side, rather like a very pretty squirrel.
“I do manage rather well, don’t I, dear? I have to work pretty hard, you know.”
“Of course you manage well,” he said ungraciously. He hardly ever encouraged her with praise nowadays, although she was doing wonders. He only gave way to violent outbreaks of despair and self-reproach, when she assured him that she could do without things that she had had all her life, and that she wasn’t really soverytired after two bad nights with the baby.
“Isn’t it lucky I’m so strong?” she sometimes asked her friends. “I do a lot of the housework myself, you know, because we can only afford one servant, of course, and she’s a rough sort of girl. It was so funny at first, I couldn’t understand that class of servant at all. At home, of course, the maids were all quite different. Ellen means very well, really, though I’ve had to learn cooking, so as to do a certain amount myself. Will you forgive me now, if I run to see that Richard’s supper is all right—not burning?”
She tripped away, still laughing, in spite of the tired lines that were beginning to show beneath her sparkling dark eyes.
“Rita is too wonderful, poor darling!” said Lady Clyde. “As she says herself, she’s never in her life been used to poverty. And look at the way she makes the best of things! You know they’re living on her tiny little income, that she manages too wonderfully for words. You can’t saynow, Charles, as I remember you once did, that Rita, of all people, wasn’t fitted to take the risk of poverty.”
Whether Sir Charles could, or could not, have repeatedhis axiom, was not destined to be made clear, for he said nothing at all.
He did, however, make many attempts to find a job for Richard, and went to see the originator of the phrase that described Richard’s wife so well—“a gallant little lady”—who was connected with some highly-remunerative business.
The old man shook his head.
“I’m on the point of retiring, Sir Charles. Times are bad, though I’ve made my pile, but it was done by hard work at one job all my life. I’ll see if there’s anything for your—stepson, is it?”
“He is no relation of mine,” said Sir Charles very distinctly. “He married my wife’s only daughter by her first husband. He is now obliged to live upon her—very small—fortune.”
“I’ve heard something of that. Poor little lady—she’s doing wonders, I hear. Well, well, I’ll see if they’ve anything to offer the lad, but we don’t want men without experience these days, you know. But I’d like to do something, for the sake of that gallant little lady.”
“Richard dear, Iwouldlike to ask mummie and Sir Charles to dinner—supper, I mean—one night. I’ve got a little cash in hand, so I shouldn’t feel too extravagant. You know I got rather more than I expected, for the sale of that old bracelet of mine.”
Richard did know, because Rita had told him this already, quite gleefully, although admitting that the bracelet had been a legacy from a specially beloved grandmother, and that it cost her a pang to let it go.
“I loathe your selling your jewellery. It makes me feel such a cad for having got you into this mess, though God knows I never foresaw anything like this. Rita,mustyou do these things?”
She looked at him with a face of piteous, childlike surprise. “Oh, aren’t youat allpleased that we’ve got an extra pound or two, Richard? I’m sure you’ve no idea what a difference it makes.”
He groaned impatiently.
“Of course, if you think I’ve no right to suggest entertaininganybody, even on a tiny scale, now we’re so poor, I won’t do it. It was silly of me, I daresay, but I haven’t really properly got used not to having an occasional little party, I suppose. It’s all right, Richard darling. Never mind.”
She smiled bravely.
“Rita, I shall go mad if I can’t find a job, and take you out of this sort of thing,” said Richard, and he began to pace up and down the little room.
When Lady Clyde and her husband did come to dinner, Rita told her mother privately that poor darling Richard was becoming almost hysterical sometimes. It did make things so much, much harder when one was doing all one could to keep up under the strain, and be always bright and ready to make the best of it.
“No one can say you’re not doing that, my dearest child,” said her mother.
Tears of mingled admiration and compassion rose to her eyes when Rita apologised gaily for the poverty of the fare, when she corrected herself every time that she mentioned the word dinner instead of supper, and when she laughingly excused herself for having to run away and help with the washing-up, because the servant now was only a daily one, and went home early.
“It seemed so funny at first, mummy, and I was always ringing the bell and expecting it to be answered, like when I used to ring for Cooper or Ellis or Mary, at home. I really can’t believe that I had a maid all for myself, just to do my hair and keep my clothes tidy, not so very long ago.”
“What a plucky little thing she is!” said her mother in a choked voice.
She glanced resentfully at Richard, who sat silent, moody and haggard, without endorsing her tribute to his wife in any way.
He looked very ill, but Lady Clyde at the moment could only realise to what straits he had brought Rita, and with what surly unresponsiveness he seemed to confront her courageous acceptance of poverty.
Lady Clyde asked her husband that night if he could not, as man to man, give Richard Lambourne a hint that his ungracious attitude to his wife, whilst living on her money, was the final crown of the wrongs that he had done her.
“I was going to suggest, personally, that you should give Rita a hint,” said Sir Charles.
“Rita! Why, when I think of that poor child’s gallantry——”
“Exactly. My own impression is that a very little more of it will drive Lambourne into a mad-house, or worse.”
Sir Charles spoke in his usual level accents, and Lady Clyde did not attempt to attach any meaning to his words. Neither did they recur to her when Richard Lambourne disproved her assertion that he had placed the crown upon the wrongs done to his wife, by the final ignominy of suicide.
“Coward, coward!” sobbed Lady Clyde. “Can you deny that he was a coward, Charles?”
“No. Richard was a coward,” said Sir Charles gravely.
“After all that poor little Rita had done!”
“And said,” added Sir Charles, not flippantly, and half under his breath.
The old magnate who had admired Rita at her wedding made use of almost the same words as Lady Clyde.
“After all that his wife had done, and was doing, to quit like that, and leave her to face the life he’d brought her to! What abrute!”
A little while afterwards he proposed to Rita, diffident, in spite of his wealth, because of the great difference in their ages.
She accepted him, and this time it was Sir Charles, looking at the bridegroom’s bald head and infirm gait beside the pretty bride at the quiet wedding, who repeated to himself the old man’s catchword, with an ironical emphasis of his own:
“Averygallant little lady.”