III
Edna Rossiter, in common with the majority of her sex, supposed herself to be a religious woman because she had, from early girlhood, indulged nightly in five minutes spent on her knees beside her bed, her face pressed against the satin quilt, while she thought about herself.
Very soon after her marriage she formed the habit of prolonging the five minutes into ten, or even fifteen, while she consecrated a few vindictively earnest thoughts of forgiveness to her husband.
Within the last ten years, all the forbearance which she was capable of displaying being apparently without any effect upon Sir Julian, Lady Rossiter had rather disgustedly transferred her allegiance from the Almighty,in propria persona, to God as He is found in Nature.
Nature, primarily, meant out-of-doors generally, in warm weather, and the sound of the sea two miles off, audible from beside the boudoir fire, in the colder seasons.
Lately, however, Nature had also embraced such of humanity as had its place rather lower than that of the Rossiters in the social scale.
Edna sought for the Divine Spark in her fellow-creatures, and frequently discovered it, with renewed satisfaction to herself and to its possessor.
As she often said, smiling a little:
"There's so much bad in the best of us,There's so much good in the worst of us——"
"There's so much bad in the best of us,There's so much good in the worst of us——"
"There's so much bad in the best of us,There's so much good in the worst of us——"
"There's so much bad in the best of us,
There's so much good in the worst of us——"
She never finished the quotation, except by the smile, because she knew it to be at all times easy to trip over its inversions and repetitions, and thus risk the transition from the sublime to the ridiculous.
One of the most recent manifestations of what Julian had once designated in his wife's hearing as the "Hunting of the Spark," was her wholesale invitation to the staff of teachers at the College to spend Sunday afternoon at Culmhayes.
A few stray and tentative young women had availed themselves of it once, showing a marked disposition towards wandering arm-in-arm round the gardens, avoiding their hostess as much as possible, and Cooper had twice walked over from Culmouth and made nervously easy conversation to Lady Rossiter, which had dwindled into a sort of alert silence when her husband came in.
"Mind you bring themallnext week," had been Lady Rossiter's farewell injunction, to which Cooper had replied with great confidence and assurance.
Preparing for her guests on Sunday afternoon, therefore, Lady Rossiter gazed smilingly out of her window at a cloudless day of August. Evidently Nature was in league with her votary.
Lady Rossiter told her maid to bring the black-and-whitemousseline de soie. No other colours suited her fairness so admirably, and she always wore the combination when embarking upon any enterprise of particular benevolence. The thick pallor of her complexion could afford to defy the sun, and she seldom wore a hat in the garden. A black-and-white-striped sunshade made quite as effective a background for her mass of auburn hair and black eyebrows and lashes.
Before going downstairs she thoughtfully slipped the rings from her long white fingers, and bade her maid substitute a small crystal cross on a velvet ribbon for her pearl necklace.
The maid had not been with her very long, and obeyed the mandate with such wooden matter-of-factness that Lady Rossiter added gently:
"One doesn't want anyone to feel the least little—difference—in any way. We have all grown to have such false ideas of values...."
"Yes, m'lady," said Mason, looking so thoroughly bewildered that Lady Rossiter resolved to read extracts from Ruskin aloud to her while her hair was being brushed at nights.
She went downstairs slowly, to find Julian reading in the hall.
"Jorrocks?" she enquired playfully, but with a meaning that she knew would not be lost upon her husband.
Ever since she had wrung from a monosyllabic Julian the admission that neither Ruskin, Pater, nor Stevenson "meant" to him that which they meant to her, Edna had assumed, by almost imperceptible degrees, that her husband's only literature consisted of Jorrocks and the volumes of the Badminton series.
Dickens she had unwillingly conceded to him, since Dickens made no appeal to her personally, but she was more apt to dwell upon his liking for the "Pickwick Papers" and "Nicholas Nickleby" than for "Great Expectations" or "David Copperfield."
At her enquiry Julian closed his book.
"Jorrocks, of course," he assented expressionlessly, putting down Huysman's "En Route," and not troubling to display the title.
"Did Mr. Fuller tell you how many of my staff meant to come this afternoon?"
"No. I don't suppose, in any case, that they would have told him."
"That's so curious to me, Julian. To work together all the week, and yet know nothing of one another'sreallife—nothing of what goes on in the free time, or the one holiday of the week."
"What generally goes on, I imagine, is that the girls have their hair waved on Saturday afternoons, stay in bed on Sunday mornings, and go out with their young men on Sunday evenings. I doubt if the procedure ever varies."
"And that with God's own blue sea less than a mile away!" ejaculated Lady Rossiter under her breath, but nevertheless quite audibly.
"Cooper generally goes for a walk on Saturday afternoon," said Sir Julian consolingly; "and Fuller, and I imagine a good many of the other fellows as well, to a football or cricket match."
"Can you wonder that we long to win them to clearer, wider ideals?" his wife enquired.
She waited for no reply, aware of old that Julian invariably professed a supreme indifference to the outlook of the College staff when outside their College walls, but trailed into the wide, cool drawing-room containing little furniture and an abundance of roses and heliotrope.
Lady Rossiter arranged the flowers herself, and did so exquisitely. She often said that flowers were literally a necessity to her—an opinion frequently held by those whose financial situation has never compelled them to regard flowers as an alternative to, let us say, butter for breakfast, in which case the relative value of the commodities in question is apt to undergo alteration.
Poised over her bowls of pink roses, Lady Rossiter was taken by surprise when her guests eventually arrived.
Sir Julian strongly suspected that had the drawing-room window given on to the drive, instead of on to the green bowling-alley, his wife would herself have met her visitors at the hospitably opened hall door, thus sparing the dignity of Horber, undemocratic as only a butler can be, from the announcement which he stiffly made out of the extreme corners of his mouth.
"Miss Farmer, Miss Sandiloe, and Mr. Cooper, m'lady."
Miss Farmer, in a green linen which accorded singularly ill with a sallow complexion; Miss Sandiloe, girlish, pretty and full of giggles that threatened disaster to a tightly-fitting and transparent white muslin; and Mr. Cooper, obviously in the toils of Miss Sandiloe, came one by one into the drawing-room, where Lady Rossiter, in point of fact, had never intended them to penetrate at all.
Sir Julian, watching the entry in an angle of the hall window-seat which he trusted to be invisible from the drawing-room, could not forbear the tribute of an unwilling admiration to his wife's handling of the rather embarrassed trio.
"Ah, but how nice! Miss Farmer, of course we've met before; and Mr. Cooper"—a shake of the hand to each. "And——?" A pause, with pleasantly uplifted eyebrows, in front of Miss Sandiloe.
"Miss Sandiloe," Miss Farmer supplied, and added rather haltingly, obviously unsure of the etiquette governing the position:
"The junior teacher of shorthand, Lady Rossiter."
"I'm so glad to see you," said the lady, with an additional graciousness designed, Julian imagined, to set the youthful stranger at her ease.
The unexpectedly high-pitched note, however, upon which Miss Sandiloe off-handedly replied, "Oh, thanks!" did not indicate shyness.
Julian viewed it as an example of the law of cause and effect that his wife's next observation was made in tones that savoured less of kindly welcome and more of rather distant patronage.
"I am always anxious to get to know all the members of the College staff, and have them out here if I possibly can. I take a great interest in the College. In fact, I'm on the committee of management."
"Are you?" said Miss Sandiloe indifferently. "What topping flowers those are!"
She thrust her face into the fragrant mass which Lady Rossiter had just left.
"You must all come into the garden, when it's a little cooler."
Lady Rossiter addressed herself to Miss Farmer.
"Meanwhile it's too bad of me to keep you standing in this hot room. Come into the morning-room."
Julian fancied that Miss Farmer, heated and wearied, and with dusty patent-leather shoes that creaked as she walked, and bore a large crack across each, as though they were too tight, cast a rather wistful look at the large, beautifully-shaded room of which they had penetrated no further than the threshold.
But she obediently followed her hostess, and Miss Sandiloe, giggling slightly, tripped behind her with Cooper in tow.
From sheer curiosity, Julian went into the morning-room twenty minutes later.
His wife, looking unusually harassed, was seated near the window, Miss Farmer, Miss Sandiloe and Mr. Cooper having unconsciously placed themselves in a semi-circle in front of her, each seated upon the edge of an upright chair.
"Why," Lady Rossiter was exclaiming in her brightest voice, "one of my greatest friends is a dear little dressmaker who lives in Culmouth, and another is the quaint old man who looks after the lifeboat-house down in our Duckpool Cove."
Edna must be hard put to it, Julian reflected, to have made use of both her dear little dressmaker and her quaint old man within one sentence. Both, he knew, were frequently in requisition for the dissipation of any sense of awkwardness which she suspected might be assailing her visitors, but one was generally held in reserve to supplement the effect of the other if necessary.
"Here you are!" Edna exclaimed, almost with relief in her voice, as he entered, thereby, Julian told himself, depriving young Cooper of a remark which he would certainly have made his own.
Young Cooper, however, was not to be defeated.
"We've accepted Lady Rossiter's kind invitation, you see, Sir Julian," he observed.
"How are you, Cooper? How d'y'e do?" He shook hands with the shorthand teachers. "Were you the only people energetic enough to walk over in this heat?"
"Why, yes. The new Lady Superintendent spoke of coming since Lady Rossiter was so kind, but she didn't turn up, so we've come without her."
"Tell me about the new Superintendent," said Edna quickly. "Miss Marchrose, isn't she?"
"Most pleasant and energetic," said Cooper rapidly. "The sort of young ladyIcall capable."
"She's got into the way of things very quickly," Miss Farmer supplemented.
"I wonder if she is connected with a Miss Marchrose whom I used to hear about, some years ago——" said Lady Rossiter thoughtfully.
"Here's Easter!" exclaimed her husband, looking from the window and feeling thankful for any interruption to Edna's possible intention of recapitulating the scandal attaching to the unfortunately uncommon name of the new Superintendent.
Young Cooper sprang up.
"Let me make rather more room. I'll move to this chair, if I may, Lady Rossiter."
Mark Easter's arrival improved matters greatly, even though he was accompanied by the preposterous Ruthie, adopting a sudden pose of extreme shyness, and concealing her face on her left shoulder, after the manner of a timid infant of two years old. The members of the staff knew Mark, had laughed at his jokes in and out of office hours, had experienced his pleasant, courteously-abrupt authority in work-time, and knew him for a fellow-worker who spared himself less than he did them.
Miss Sandiloe launched into the shrill fire of giggling repartee which was her nearest approach to naturalness. Miss Farmer's frown of strained attention relaxed, and she leant back, as though for the first time able to look at her surroundings, and Cooper ceased to fix bulging and attentive eyes upon his hostess.
Julian marvelled, not at all for the first time, at the invariable effect upon his surroundings of Mark Easter's elementary witticisms and gay, indefinable charm of manner.
He knew that his wife liked Mark, if only because he was always ready to let her talk to him in low-voiced, womanly sympathy of the otherwise unmentioned Mrs. Easter. Lady Rossiter often said that, but for her, the tragedy of Mark's life would have been left to corrode in silent bitterness.
Perhaps it was true.
Julian knew that to his wife was it frequently given to rush in where others might not only hesitate, but positively refuse, to tread, and he knew that Mark's simple gratitude for her interest in him was as genuine as it was outspoken.
He wondered, sometimes, at that very simplicity, in a man of acute sympathies and unfailing intuition such as Mark again and again proved himself to possess in almost every relation into which he entered. There were even times when he asked himself, in utter perplexity, whether Mark could himself be as sensitive as his quickness of perception for sensitiveness in others appeared to denote.
He thought that he had seldom seen Edna look more relieved than at the dissipation of the constraint amongst her tea-party, caused by Mark's entrance.
"Will you ring for tea, Mark?" she asked smilingly. She had the trick, not uncommon to a certain type of woman, of assuming a more proprietary tone and manner when speaking to a man not her husband.
Julian's restless and observant mind almost automatically registered the subconscious irritation instantly produced in the other two women.
Miss Farmer, turning to young Cooper, asked him if he would be so very kind as to reach her little bag, which contained a handkerchief.
Miss Sandiloe, more actively resentful, as well as far more self-confident in the youthful security of possessing good looks and an evident admirer in the shape of Cooper, was bolder.
"Oh, Mr. Easter, I'm awfully glad you're here. I mean, really I am. I've got some killing things to tell you, about the Coll. We've got some freaks there now, really we have."
"What have you done with the young gentleman who wanted to learn enough shorthand to get him a post in a newspaper office in six lessons?" enquired Mark, as usual full of interest.
"Oh, him! It wasn't him I was thinking of so much, really, though he certainly is a caution. I mean, really he is. But he's come off the six lessons stunt, all the same."
"Well done! Have you persuaded him to take a course?"
"I don't know whatI've got to do with it, I'm sure," Miss Sandiloe said, with a self-conscious laugh. "But I'm taking him for private tuition now, three times a week, as well as him going to the usual classes, and he'll be in the Speed in no time."
Miss Farmer, looking more animated than when making impersonal and agonised conversation with her hostess, joined in.
"Miss Marchrose is taking the High Speed room now, Mr. Easter. She's got a beautiful pronounciation—so clear, it is."
Lady Rossiter smiled—a kind, faint smile, that, to her husband's perceptions, admirably succeeded in underlining her determination to avoid noticing Miss Farmer's slip.
"It's so wonderful of you, I think, to be so devoted to your work," she said. "That is one reason why I love the society of workers. They are always so eager about their work, and I think it is so wonderful of them."
Edna did not generally repeat herself, but the curious hostility vibrant in the air surrounding her philanthropic enterprise was making her nervous.
"I've always been keen on my job," said Cooper complacently, "but I ought to have been an engineer. I should have liked that."
"But then—why not have followed your vocation?" Edna enquired, with tilted eyebrows.
Cooper shook his head.
"It's an expensive training, Lady Rossiter. If I'd had the capital, I should have liked it, though."
"I understand," gently said Edna, with a whole world of implication in her tone, at which Cooper looked rather astonished, and Miss Sandiloe decidedly resentful.
"Daddy!" said a sudden voice.
Everybody looked at the forgotten Ruthie, who stood on one leg beside her father's chair.
"Daddy, I'm afraid I shall forget my piece, if I don't say it soon," said Ruthie in an excessively audible aside, and with the evident determination of displaying her histrionic attainments to the assembly.
Mark laughed, with the injudicious tolerance that he was all too apt to accord to the ill-timed demonstrations of his offspring.
"Not now, Ruthie. Perhaps Lady Rossiter doesn't want you to say your piece at all."
Few suggestions could have been better founded upon fact, and Lady Rossiter made no attempt to contradict Ruthie's father.
Julian wondered if it was altogether undesignedly that Miss Sandiloe instantly exclaimed:
"Are you going to recite to us, dear?"
"Yes, I am," said Miss Easter in loud, confident tones. "I always recite when I go out to tea."
The relentless inevitability of the proposed entertainment deprived even Miss Sandiloe of further utterance for the moment.
"You will not be asked again if you give yourself such a bad character," said Mark in a rather hopeless voice.
"Oh, yes, I shall. Lady Rossiter always likes me and Peekaboo to come; she said so! We can come whenever we like."
Sir Julian's regard for Mark Easter alone prevented him from disclaiming aloud any share in the unlimited hospitality so rashly proclaimed by his wife in the days of Ruthie's and Ambrose's comparatively innocuous babyhood, and so unscrupulously worked to death by them ever since.
"Is Peekaboo a pet?" asked Miss Farmer kindly.
"Not always," Ruthie replied literally. "Sometimes he's a very naughty boy. Sarah has locked him up in the boot-cupboard this afternoon, because——"
"Hush, hush," hastily said Mark, "we don't tell tales out of school."
Julian wondered grimly what story of misdoing the exhortation to fraternal charity might cover. The unforeseeable and disastrous ingenuity of Ambrose's misdeeds was only to be compared to the skill with which his partner and instigator in crime invariably managed to extricate herself at the eleventh hour from complicity and leave him the solitary victim of blame and punishment.
Tea and cakes, arriving opportunely, staved off Ruthie's recitation, and brought the relief of movement.
Lady Rossiter crumbled a very small sponge-cake behind the silver-kettle, and said in a general sort of way that she hoped everyone would make a very good tea and eat a great deal. She herself always thought of Sunday tea as one of the principal meals of the day, as it would only be followed by cold supper in the evening.
Whether cold supper was to be the portion of her guests or not, however, the piled plates of buns and the large cakes, bearing a certain superficial resemblance to preparations for a school-treat, were better patronised by Ruthie than by the members of the College staff.
"We mustn't leave it too late to be starting back," Miss Farmer said nervously. "I mean, it's quite a longish walk."
Julian gauged the measure of Edna's discouragement by her omission to insist graciously upon an expedition first round the garden.
"You must come again one Sunday," she said, not, however, making precise mention of any date. "I should like you to see my view of the sea. There is a beautiful little glimpse to be had from a corner of the garden.... You must so need a draught of blue distance after working inside four walls all the week."
"Thank you, Lady Rossiter," said Miss Farmer meekly, turning a pale brick-colour.
"Thanks," said Miss Sandiloe, her nose in the air and her voice aggressive; "but really I can get all the view I want of the sea from Culmouth. My window looks right over the bay—that's why I took the apartments I did. Are you ready, Horace?"
"Ready," said Mr. Cooper, with an alacrity that might be partly attributable to the unprecedented use of his Christian name—Miss Sandiloe's not too subtle retaliation for Lady Rossiter's frequent "Mark."
"Come along, Ruthie," said Mark Easter. "We'll walk with you part of the way if we may, Miss Farmer."
The teacher looked pleased, and they followed Miss Sandiloe and her admirer, Mark adjusting his long, easy stride to the very obvious limitations of Miss Farmer's patent-leather shoes.
Edna looked after them, wearing a rather exhausted expression.
"I am very tired, Julian. I shall go to the boudoir and enjoy the silence till it's time to dress. Nothing is so restful as complete silence, after all."
Julian honoured the assertion by making no reply to it whatever.
"I have been told," said Edna, with gentle solemnity, "that my spirit is burning itself away. I know you don't sympathise with that necessity for pouring out, Julian—this afternoon, for instance, has taken a great deal out of me—but I noticed that you gave out nothing at all—not one spark. Isn't it rather a pity? One can do so little, materially, but the things of the spirit.... Ah, well, I grudge none of it."
She went upstairs, however, very slowly, and leaning heavily upon the banisters.
Julian's gaze did not follow her.