XI
A dog may be a dog and something more;A man beside a dog may be a bore!
A dog may be a dog and something more;A man beside a dog may be a bore!
A dog may be a dog and something more;A man beside a dog may be a bore!
A dog may be a dog and something more;
A man beside a dog may be a bore!
Shan’thad gone back to her aunt. Diana was with her aunt and Marcus was alone. He felt the position to be an absurd one. Why should he be separated from two nieces because an aunt, on the other side, chose to behave in a jealous and absurd manner? It was quite possible, if he could see the aunt, that she might in talking tell him, quite unconsciously, if Diana were in love or not? It was ridiculous he shouldn’t know, if he wished to know—and if she knew. With all her faults the aunt, no doubt, was fond of the children. Why shouldn’t he go down and see her? So he got a Bradshaw and looked up trains—he would have gone by car, but he had told Diana that Tooke wasn’t—what had he said?—strong enough to do the distance? He forgot what he had said, he had been vexed at the time—and he found it was possible to get to the aunt by twelve o’clock on any morning, so why not to-morrow? He should write to say he was coming—no, he would take her by surprise; see her as she really was.
When a woman deliberately sets out to weed on a summer’s day she will know, if she has any imagination,that her face will be likely to redden under the exertion, be it wonted or unwonted; further, that she will not be looking her best if her niece’s uncle should chance to call upon her. Elsie Carston’s imagination might have gone so far as to expect a red face under given circumstances, but never a visit, under any, from Diana’s disagreeable uncle. Yet this thing happened. Her small parlour-maid came to tell her so. She whispered it, hoarse from suppressed excitement. She vowed he was standing looking “amazed-like” at the “blue vawse.”
“Tell him,” said Elsie, “he must wait till my face is less red”—never dreaming that Rebecca would be so silly; but Rebecca was. She went back to the drawing-room and she said, “Miss Carston is so red in the face, sir, will you please to wait?”
And Marcus, if not pleased, waited. He had kept people waiting himself, and never for a more excellent reason. He hated women with red faces. That was one of Diana’s greatest charms—the unvarying beauty of her complexion. Ah—Diana? Where was she—and Shan’t, too? Why didn’t the tiresome aunt come? A bumptious woman is not complete unless she has a red face—a danger signal; so she might just as well come as she was, as she always was, and would always be.
The moments crept on—still he waited. He paced up and down the room until he was giddy, and he felt for the bears in the Zoo as he had never felt before. He realized the daily round of their discomfort now. This, then, was where Diana lived: with this furniture? Well, it wasn’t bad—of its kind. It was rough, of course. The grandfather’s clock, that ticked so insistently, must have stood in a deaf cottager’s kitchen. The gate-legged table had been undoubtedly cursed by many a lusty farmer and his sons for the multitude and distribution of its legs.
The furniture was well kept. There was that to the aunt’s credit, or to her servants’. He wondered if she had any more like the absurd creature who had conveyed, with the utmost solemnity, that ridiculous message. There couldn’t be such another in the world.
Back to the blue vase. It seemed familiar. Ridiculous place to keep it—on a bracket—meaningless. The Staffordshire china? Rubbish. How easily women were taken in! So long as the piece was an imbecile lamb or an impossible cottage, she was satisfied. No doubt she had bought the lamb because it was a “duck,” and the cottage because it was a “lamb.” He could hear her. She had been wise to keep to white walls. If she had attempted colour she must have gone wrong. He liked thechintz. It was in keeping. Red flowers on a highly glazed surface.
Why didn’t she come? It was the worst form of discourtesy to keep any one waiting. Where had she got the mezzotints? Or rather how? Left to her by a relative who had bought them cheap years ago, anticipating their value. She would tell him so—tiresome! He didn’t care how she had got them. They were nice enough, though. First state, eh? Open letters? He walked from one to the other. Cut edges? Here was one with the margin nibbled by a mouse—just what he should have expected to happen to the print belonging to a red-faced woman. Needlework pictures? Quite amusing! Country-house sale, he suspected: and a Downman? People do get these things somehow or other. She had withstood the lure of the hand-coloured print. Books? What did the woman read? He was on all fours trying to discover when the door opened and to his intense astonishment he heard a woman’s voice say, “Lie down, Marcus!” He rose instead—anything rather than obey—and found himself face to face with Aunt Elsie. What had been the use of waiting? Her face was still red.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, “I forgot; do forgive me—Marcus is my dog.”
Grey eyes! They looked at him, and he remembered that years ago they had distinctly said:“Beaten!” They challenged him now—“Goth!” it was coming back to him; “Vandal!—nice, grey-eyed woman—ignorant woman!” he repeated to himself. “Your gloves,” he said involuntarily.
“You would think I never wore them,” she said, holding out her sunburnt, shapely hands for his inspection, “but I do.”
“You wore them then—and the wrong kind. That’s what I so disliked about you. You took that vase in gloved hands—dogskin-gloved hands—”
“Oh, it was you, was it?” said Elsie. “You looked so angry and I couldn’t explain—I knew it wasn’t a good vase—yes, I did—”
“Then why—”
“Forgive me one moment, there’s Dinah—”
“Oh,” said Marcus, “delightful—” thinking she had said Diana.
“No, Dinah—my dog—she’s got Marcus’s ball, she knows she mustn’t—please wait—if Peggy comes in, send her to her dinner, will you?”
“How? What shall I do?”
“Just say, ‘Marky’s got Peggy’s dinner’—and she’ll fly!”
Off went Aunt Elsie, leaving Marcus to deal with Peggy—another dog, he supposed. “Marky’s got Peggy’s dinner!” He was hanged if he would say it. A moment later the door opened and Rebeccalooked in: “You haven’t got Peggy, have you, sir?”
Marcus said he had not.
“She’s so excited at your coming, sir, she was tearing round the lawn like mad, just now—here she is!” Peggy tore into the room; tore round it two or three times, slipping, skidding on rugs, as she went. “Call her!” said Marcus.
“It’s no use, sir, not till she’s got accustomed to the excitement of you—”
“Tell her ‘Marky has got her lunch,’ or dinner; whatever meal you like to call it.”
“It wouldn’t be any use, sir, not when she’s wild over your coming like she is now.”
When Elsie came back, she had the grace to apologize, but it was evident she had no idea how badly she had behaved, or how impossible the dogs had been. Marcus thought that dogs must, at least, be obedient. Elsie said she was really very sorry, and as she spoke she marshalled the dogs and sent them off to their various dinners: then she came back, looked at him, and said he was exactly what she had always known he was.
“What is that?” he asked: it was rash of him to ask.
“Frightfully obstinate, for one thing.”
“And what else?”
“Heaps of things—but about this vase—anold lady I was very fond of sent me up to buy that vase for her—ifit had a mark upon it that she had made as a girl—a scratch. If it had not, I was not to buy it.”
Marcus said he was bewildered, he did not understand.
“You will if you listen,” said Elsie. “Her father had a collection of Chinese porcelain and he sold it. One piece, she told him, had been given to her, when she was a girl, by a young man with whom she was in love. Her father disputed her claim, and the vase was sold with the rest of the collection. She was middle-aged then. When she heard the collection was to be sold again—it was forty years since her father had parted with it, and she had grown to be a very old woman—she wanted to buy back that one piece.”
“Feminine persistence,” said Marcus.
“Yes, if you like to call it that—I suppose a man may call a woman’s faithfulness by any name he likes.”
“Did you find the mark?” asked Marcus meekly; he was always cowed by feminine firmness.
Elsie looked at him, and a doubt entered his mind. He asked if he might look at the vase—hold it in his hand?
She handed it to him. He looked at it, then at her. “You were to buy it, if there was a scratch upon it?”
Elsie nodded. He handed her back the vase.
“But—she—died happy,” Elsie said, perhaps pleading extenuating circumstances.
There was a silence while she replaced the vase on the bracket.
“You gave too much for it,” said Marcus, refusing to be beaten, or to be made to say wrong was right—or to be touched by the thought of the foolish old lady who had been taken in—so kindly.
“How do you know?” asked Elsie. “What, after all, was too much to pay for a thing she wanted, that would make her happy? She could afford to pay. Anyhow, she left the vase to me and I put it there.” She nodded to the bracket on the wall.
“A very bad place for it.”
“I like it there,” said Elsie, and Marcus knew he had been right; pig-headed and obstinate was Diana’s aunt.
“Where is Diana?” he asked.
“She’s reading aloud Mr. Watkins’s poems.”
“To whom?”
“To Mr. Watkins—she says he reads them in a family-prayer sort of a voice that lends them a fictitious value. She wants him to hear what they sound like read by an ordinary person.”
Of course, Marcus at once said Diana was not an ordinary person, and Elsie could only answer that she read poetry like a very ordinary person.
“This man is in love with her, I suppose?” asked Marcus gloomily.
“If she has read him his ‘Ode to Japonica,’ I should say not.”
“He was in love with her, then?” persisted the enquiring uncle.
“Of course.”
“Why of course?”
“Isn’t every man in love with her?”
“And she—is she in love with any man?”
“Ah, that is the question,” said Elsie. The relations between them, which had become surprisingly easier, were again strained. She was the aunt on the one side—he the uncle on the other. Rebecca announced luncheon.
“I suppose we must eat,” said Marcus.
Elsie didn’t suppose anything about it; as a matter of fact there was no necessity, but she led the way to the dining-room, and there at the table sat Diana.
“Dears!” she exclaimed, when she saw her uncle and aunt; “getting so heated talking about me—how do you like each other now you meet? Have I exaggerated the charm of either of you? You both think so? Well, darlings, sit down. No, Elsie, you must do the honours and I’ll do the laughing and the crying, if you like—but there must be no more fighting. Look at your faces.” And shehanded to each one a spoon. Elsie passed hers on to Marcus. He laid them both down beside his plate.
“Is my face red too?” he asked, turning to Diana.
“Is that quite how you meant to put it?” she asked; and he was obliged to answer, “Not quite.”
Shan’t was out; she had gone to spend the day with some children in the neighbourhood and she wouldn’t be back till after tea. After tea seemed a long way off to Marcus. Could he make Aunt Elsie and her garden and her ridiculous farm last till then? Diana was too distressed; she was engaged to play golf with Mr. Pease.
“Don’t bother about me,” said Marcus stiffly.
Diana had no intention of bothering about him. He had come to see Elsie, not her. It was so important they should make friends. If she stayed with them, they would both try, each one, to talk to her more than the other.
“And when are you coming back to me, Diana?” asked Marcus.
Diana looked from Marcus to Elsie and from Elsie to Marcus.
“You are such unselfish darlings, both of you,” she answered. “You must decide between you.”
Here was Elsie’s opportunity. “I think, perhaps,Diana,” she said, “you ought to go to your uncle—your mother left you with him.” And Elsie knew that, in the eyes of Diana, she must stand on the heights above Marcus—that Marcus must look up to her.
But Marcus despised her. He knew she had done it to impress Diana, and didn’t mean it.
“I wouldn’t ask you to come back to London at this time of year,” he said gently.
“You are both darlings,” said Diana, and she went and left them.
And Elsie talked calmly of the joys of the country—mentioning incidentally the heat of London pavements, and Marcus said nothing, but he thought the more. Elsie now looked quite cool: her complexion was fair, and that, in conjunction with her grey eyes, made her look younger than she ought to have looked, or than he had expected her to look.
He spun out his visit till tea-time, and after tea Elsie volunteered to walk to the station with him. “We may meet Shan’t,” she said.
They walked and they met Shan’t. She was being escorted home by a family of boys and girls, and was among those who filled a pony-cart to overflowing. She was rioting; no other word described the joy that possessed her. She was playing mad bulls with a boy a little smaller than herself.Elsie called her to stop: besought her to speak to her Uncle Marcus—but she couldn’t listen—she was laughing—how she laughed! Marcus had a train to catch—and the pony-cart passed on, Shan’t still fighting the small boy—and laughing—so happy and Uncle Marcus was so neglected.
“She didn’t realize it was you,” said Aunt Elsie. “Children so soon forget.”
She might have spared him that thrust which he had not the strength to parry. She might have known that no child who is playing mad bulls with a little boy, sufficiently mad, will stop to look at an elderly uncle—or to listen to an—elderlyaunt.
In the train Marcus comforted himself by picturing a scene in which he and Shan’t made it up. He said, “Why didn’t you stop and speak to your Uncle Marcus?”
And Shan’t said, “Well, you see, darlin’,”—her fingers popped in and out of the button-holes of his coat,—“I was so busy—I really didn’t—quite properly see it was you.”
“But you were glad to see me—what you did see of me?”
“Of course—I was—didn’t youthinkI was?”
Uncle Marcus hadn’t been sure.
“Let’s play at somethin’,” suggested Shan’t.
He felt comforted—a little. Two arms wereround his neck, and he felt as nearly comforted as it is possible to feel when the comforting arms are not real arms and the child is not a real child, and nothing is real but the hurt therealchild inflicted.