XI
As Lady Rossiter proceeded on her way downstairs, leaving Iris to the completion of her lesson, she was waylaid by young Cooper.
"I've been waiting for you, in the hope that you would spare me one moment, Lady Rossiter. There was a little matter about which the staff wanted me to consult you."
Such a reference appealed to Edna at any time, and came as balm to the present state of her spirit, at the moment so seriously discomposed that she had been obliged to repeat to herself more than once, as she went downstairs:
"Still lovingly to bear a fool,Nor speak till wrath has time to cool,And thus live out my golden rule."
"Still lovingly to bear a fool,Nor speak till wrath has time to cool,And thus live out my golden rule."
"Still lovingly to bear a fool,Nor speak till wrath has time to cool,And thus live out my golden rule."
"Still lovingly to bear a fool,
Nor speak till wrath has time to cool,
And thus live out my golden rule."
"I always have time for the business of the College, as you know," she responded graciously. "What is it?"
"Why, the staff thought—the idea, as a matter of fact, originated with me, and they have all taken it up quite enthusiastically—we thought that we should very much like, in view of our long connection with Mr. Mark Easter, to make a little presentation to Miss Iris Easter, in honour of her wedding. Just a small affair, you know—subscribed for by the staff of the College."
"But how charming of you all! Only—no one must be put to serious expense. I am sure Miss Easter would be dreadfully distressed ifthathappened."
Cooper looked rather offended.
"Certainly not, Lady Rossiter. I think you may rely upon my judgment not to make excessive demands. But, of course, if you think anyone else had better collect the money, I shall resign the job into other hands with the very greatest pleasure."
Edna hastily uttered the necessary disclaimers.
"It was suggested," said Cooper, still with reserve in his voice, "that you would be so very kind as to assist at the presentation, which might perhaps be made the occasion for some small gathering such as we had last year at Christmas. I find that the members of the staff are quite anxious for it."
Lady Rossiter remembered, without much enthusiasm, a New Year party at which the staff of the Commercial and Technical College had entertained their directors, pupils and acquaintances, in a large classroom decorated with bunting for the occasion.
"That is a most excellent idea," she said slowly, partly because it sounded sympathetic and partly in order to gain time. "But perhaps Miss Easter might feel rather shy in the presence of so many people who would be strange to her. What about a little informal tea-party? But, of course, all that can be settled later. What are you thinking of giving her?"
"Nothing has been actually decided upon, thoughIshould suggest some little thing in silver. The ladies always like silver. I remember selecting a wedding-present for a lady friend," said Cooper, looking slightly sentimental, "that proved highly acceptable. A silver serviette-ring it was, with her initials—hernewinitials—engraved upon it."
"I'm sure it was delightful, and Miss Easter is certain to like anything that you all choose."
"We all know her, and she's been here quite a lot lately, and of course Mr. Mark Easter does a great deal for the staff, and we're all very fond of him," added Cooper, with a sudden outburst of naturalness.
Edna, in common with quite a number of other people, always underwent, more or less unconsciously, a slight stirring of resentment at any spontaneous tribute to someone else's popularity.
It was perhaps this which moved her to a rather thin and repressive smile.
"It will gratify Mr. Easter very much indeed, I know. And after all, it's the thought that is of real value—not the offering. Do tell the staff how very much I hope they will let me hear any further ideas."
"Thanks very much, Lady Rossiter," said Cooper, rather stiffly.
Edna, dissatisfied, reflected for a moment.
"Couldn't you all come out to Culmhayes and talk it over with me?" she enquired, as by an inspiration. "We might form a little committee, and go into ways and means, and perhaps I could find out some trifle that would please Miss Easter, and let you know. How would that be?"
"It's very kind of you. I myself always prefer to have these things on a business footing," said Cooper, looking cheered. "I am essentially a business man."
"Then what about Sunday afternoon? Perhaps you and Miss Farmer—and what about Mr. Fuller?"
If young Cooper could have answered all too certainly, "what about Fuller," he refrained from any such disastrous candour. But he gave his grateful pledge of coming to Culmhayes on the following Sunday with as many of the staff as were considered necessary to form a small committee. Cooper was insistent upon the necessity for such.
"You notice that I like things done in order?" said he.
"Yes, indeed," murmured Edna. "Here is Miss Easter coming downstairs, so I suppose the lesson is over, and we must be going. Good-bye, Mr. Cooper—I shan't forget."
"Let me see you down. Hark!" said Cooper, with an expression of animated interest.
Iris and Lady Rossiter both paused.
"Did you hear my knee-joint crack just now? That was my knee. I put it out at football, months ago, and since then it cracks, like that."
And with this addition to the sum total of their general information, Edna and Miss Easter drove away from the College.
"Poor young man!" said Lady Rossiter leniently.
"Oh, the dear College! I wish my lessons hadn't come to an end, but of course I shan't have time now. Miss Marchrose is going to come and stay with us, later on—when——"
"When you're married?"
Iris put her head on one side.
"It is nice and generous of you to have taken a fancy to poor Miss Marchrose," said Lady Rossiter, who seldom divested the Lady Superintendent of the adjective. "But after all, there are one or two things to be considered. Your husband may not take a very great fancy to her."
Edna's warning would have tallied much more with her very real distrust of the proposed scheme had she omitted the word "not" in the last sentence.
Iris, however, answered confidently, "Oh, but Douglas will always like my friends, and I shall always like his. We have every single thing in common, you know."
Leaving Iris to her delusion, that wreathed her pretty, silly little face in dreamy smiles, Lady Rossiter leant back and indulged in reflections of her own. She was more tired than was usual with her, and her habitual serenity of mind was invaded by a certain discontent of which she did not seek to analyse the cause.
She looked at the hoar-frost, sparkling on the hedges, and at the chill blue of the sky, and perfunctorily told herself, as often before, "God's in His Heaven—all's right with the world"; recalled, in a vague and disjointed manner, fragments of R. L. Stevenson that she had often thought to be peculiarly applicable to herself, and remembered that two of her particular friends were a humble little dressmaker and a quaint old seafarer; she humorously adjured herself to "t'ink ob de blessings, children, t'ink ob de blessings." But all was of no avail. She felt saddened, inexplicably depressed.
For many years Edna Rossiter had believed that her strong suit, so to speak, was Love. She "gave out."
As a young girl, she had perhaps fancied, as young girls are prone to fancy, that only as the heroine of agrande passioncould she fulfil herself. Her first love had disappointed her. A cheerful, beauty-loving young architect, he had failed to return adequate replies to the letters, pulsating with quotations from Laurence Hope, in which Edna had poured forth her soul during a temporary absence.
She began to doubt, to read the verses of Arthur Symons, and to think that only by suffering could she find herself. Even the breaking-off of her engagement, however, failed immediately to terminate the quest successfully.
"I have tried not to be bitter," was the keynote of Edna's twenties.
By the time she had reached the stage of quoting:
"How many loved your moments of glad graceAnd loved your beauty with love false or true,But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,And loved the sorrows in your changing face——"
"How many loved your moments of glad graceAnd loved your beauty with love false or true,But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,And loved the sorrows in your changing face——"
"How many loved your moments of glad graceAnd loved your beauty with love false or true,But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,And loved the sorrows in your changing face——"
"How many loved your moments of glad grace
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows in your changing face——"
—lines which the majority of women read with such a singular sense of applicability to their own needs—Edna had met Sir Julian Rossiter.
She was a great deal more beautiful at nine-and-twenty than at nineteen, and she had, moreover, learnt to smile. Tragedy, in which she really excelled, had proved strangely unprovocative of interest in anyone but herself, and she had therefore been obliged to cultivate the large, grave serenity that forgets itself in the thought of others.
It was not this, however, which had caused Sir Julian to ask her to marry him.
Edna disliked the memory of the scene that had led to his proposal, although time and her own industry had draped the situation with much that it had lacked at the moment. She had met him on board ship, and her mother, a slightly vulgar woman who had always rather disliked the only one of her daughters whom she had not married off in early girlhood, had speedily discovered that the owner of Culmhayes was in need of a wife. Edna, who had so long and so vainly visualised herself as the ideal Héloïse to an as yet-unfound Abēlard, had had time to become heartily sick of such barren dreams, and was by now prepared to relinquish them in favour of mere emancipation from spinsterhood and a restricted life.
For three of the endless days of a sea-voyage Sir Julian had appeared to be attracted by her, and on the fourth he had devoted himself to a blue-eyed widow, travelling second-class. The voyage was nearly over before the first-class passengers saw him again in their midst. Edna could remember still the evening before Dover was reached, when her mother, exasperated, had uttered the short, sudden gibe that had put into words the humiliating truth never before spoken between them.
She remembered still the despairing resentment that had seized upon her, at her realisation that such taunts, once uttered, may speedily become common, between people in constant proximity and without mutual respect.
Her rare tears had shaken her, and it was Sir Julian who had found her, crying in a solitary corner of the deck. Edna could remember—though never in her life did she willingly recall—that anger and misery together had made her give him, in reply to his urgent enquiry, something that very nearly approached to the raw, crude truth. And that night she had said to herself:
"Thank Heaven, I shall never see him again!"
The next morning he had asked her to marry him, making no protestations of passion such as she had once thought herself fated to evoke, but suggesting a mutual companionship, likely to prove of solace to both, and to release her from a situation which had become intolerable to her.
Julian's candour had humiliated her bitterly, for her one moment of envisaging the truth in all its bitterness had passed from her.
But she had accepted him.
She would not have believed it, had she been told that the evening of that self-betrayal, of which she thrust the memory away thenceforward, had witnessed the truest, most intimate relationship in which she and her husband were destined ever to stand towards one another.
The prosperous chatelaine of Culmhayes had had many years in which to forget the mortifications and disappointments of her pre-marriage days. She ruled an admirable household admirably, she "gave out," she discovered Nature, and she opposed a perpetual exhalation of large-hearted tolerance to the small shafts of rather indifferent satire that more and more formed the basis of Sir Julian's conjugal intercourse.
Edna indulged in no bitterness of resentment against her husband, except on the rare occasions when she, always unwillingly, remembered that chivalry and not love had prompted his offer of marriage to her. His frequent captiousness, his small verbal incivilities, his absence of any sympathy with her ideals, even his systematic reticence as to his personal thoughts and feelings, roused nothing in her beyond an appreciation of the opportunity that they provided for breadths of sunny-hearted charity. She was not an unhappy woman, and never made the mistake of calling herself one. Even the absence of children she regretted more for their own sakes than for hers, since she believed that her maternal instinct had become diverted into more universal and more spacious channels than could have been the case had it been exercised solely upon sons or daughters of her own.
That Sir Julian was "difficult" she never disguised from herself. He had, in fact, become rather more "difficult" year by year, and Edna had long since given up her early attempts to probe into his point of view. She came to the conclusion that Julian was inarticulate because he was unenlightened, that he liked "Jorrocks," and that he was permanently discontented because he had not enough to do and refused to envisage the deeper issues of life.
She reflected complacently sometimes that they had never had a quarrel—and remained unaware that the fact admirably measured the extent of their estrangement.
Lady Rossiter sighed at the end of her retrospect.
"Don't you like Miss Marchrose?" enquired Iris quite suddenly.
"But I wasn't thinking about her! What makes you ask?"
"I don't know," said Iris vaguely. "I've sometimes thought you didn't like her awfully much."
Lady Rossiter reflected before making any reply. She held the theory that the expression of an opinion should always be a well-considered matter, and was apt to say that words were like thistledown and might blow to unsuspected distances and in unforeseen directions.
There was, however, nothing of the airy quality of thistledown in her deliberately given answer.
"Miss Marchrose does not strike me as attractive," she said carefully, "but a young woman earning her own living is hardly to be judged by the rules that we should apply to one ofnous autres. I never care to say that I dislike anyone—it seems to me so trivial, so short-sighted, to dislike the little that one can know of any fellow-creature. The Divine Spark is always lurking somewhere—although I admit that sometimes, in the less advanced, it is difficult really to hold fast to that belief."
"Oh, but you always do!No oneis like you," said Miss Easter, in all good faith. "I don't believe I've ever heard you say an unkind word of anybody."
Lady Rossiter smiled.
"The great thing," she observed gently, "is never to say anything, unless one can say something kind. And it is very strange, Iris dear, how one can nearly always find something that is nice and yet true, to say of everyone."
"Youcan, I'm sure."
Iris was always complaisant, besides being young and happy and therefore disposed to be uncritical, and she had long entertained a simple and quite unreasoning admiration for Lady Rossiter.
Her enthusiasm for Miss Marchrose was a recent impulse only, and did not prevent her from a further endeavour to obtain light upon Lady Rossiter's views.
"She's quite too nice to me, always, and I do think she must have been pretty. In fact, she is now, in a sort of way."
"Quite," agreed Lady Rossiter serenely.
"Sometimes I wonder if she has foreign blood in her."
"Why?"
"I'm not sure," said Miss Easter impressively, "that I should quite, absolutely, always trust her."
Lady Rossiter's common-sense did not altogether admit of her accepting so remarkable a reason for assuming untrustworthiness, but she was entirely in accord with the result of Miss Easter's logic, however defective the means by which that result was obtained.
"It's curious that you should say that," she remarked slowly. "Instinct is a strange thing, Iris."
"Yes, isn't it? They always say a woman's instinct is never wrong," glibly returned Miss Easter. "But I don't mean anything unkind about Miss Marchrose, truly I don't; there's only one thing I don't like about her."
Lady Rossiter made a sound expressive of enquiry.
"I never can bear people who try to be sarcastic," murmured Iris, voicing unaware the fundamental distrust which governs the whole of the British middle classes.
"Satire is a very cheap, unworthy weapon," said Lady Rossiter, not without inward reminiscences of Sir Julian as she spoke. "But to be quite fair, I don't think I've ever heard poor Miss Marchrose try to be satirical or anything of that sort. She's generally rather tongue-tied and awkward when I'm there. You see, Iris, I'm afraid she knows that I have heard a good deal about her, one way and another."
Lady Rossiter hesitated, remembered Mark, and decided to go on.
"I am afraid there is not much doubt that Miss Marchrose once did a very, very heartless action, and I am afraid that heartlessness and meanness are only too terribly apt to go together. There is something about the hard lines of her mouth—but after all, how can I cast the first stone? I had rather let the facts speak for themselves."
Followed the narrative of Captain Isbister, his engagement to a girl not of his own class, his accident, his offer to release the girl, and her prompt acceptance of it, culminating in the unbridled display of anguish witnessed in the nursing-home by Captain Isbister's attendant, which climax was received by Iris far otherwise than it had once been received by Sir Julian Rossiter.
"Oh, oh, poor dear thing! How too terrible! I am sure Douglas would go on exactly like that if I ever threw him over. But of course I never could. It's the most dreadful thing I ever heard of—how anyone could be so heartless!"
"How indeed!" sadly ejaculated Lady Rossiter. "And you know, Iris, by some miracle of science, he actually did recover, and can walk as well as you or I. So if she had been steadfast, they would have been married by this time, and she would have been in a very different position now."
"It's like a book," said Iris, awe-stricken. "But she couldn't have cared for him really."
"Indeed, no! I thank God from the bottom of my heart that poor Clarence found out in time what a mistake he had made. He was younger than she, poor boy, and it was all thoroughly unsuitable. He has found his ideal since then."
Iris looked a shade disappointed.
"Ah, my dear, you are thinking that nothing is like first love—and in a way it's true. But there's another kind of love, too, that comes later, when one has outgrown the personal part of it all—the divine selfishness that is so sweet and natural and inevitable in youth. And that is the love, the great universal tenderness, that comes to one later on, and that seeks a widening circle, and a bigger outlet, in order to spend itself on others. But you know nothing about that yet, childie dear. How should you, indeed?"
Very few people like to be told that there is anything in the gamut of the emotions of which they know nothing, and Iris looked with rather an unresponsive eye at her dear Lady Rossiter.
"After all," said that lady, rendering her usual smiling acknowledgment to the Deity, "after all, there are many compensations for growing old, in God's world."
The aphorism admitted not at all of contradiction, and hardly of agreement, and Iris accordingly relapsed into silence.
"I will let you know about my little tea-party for the staff," was Lady Rossiter's last remark. "They will like to see your bright face and pretty frock, dear. Their lives are very drab."
The bright face and pretty frock of Iris Easter, however, were not allowed to shed illumination upon the drab lives of Lady Rossiter's guests on Sunday until the wedding-present question had been inadequately discussed.
Mr. Cooper was mounted upon verbal stilts, and adorned his discourse with many tags of commercial phraseology; Miss Farmer would only say that she was sure Miss Easter would be pleased whatever they settled; and Miss Sandiloe giggled and looked meaningly at Mr. Cooper. Needless to say, Mr. Fairfax Fuller put in no appearance.
Edna was by turns kindly, practical, helpful and sympathetic, but still no decision could be reached.
"What is the amount subscribed?"
"Just over two pounds, so far, but there are a few more responses to come in."
"It isn't theamount, Lady Rossiter, is it?" wearily enquired Miss Farmer.
"Certainly not. The thought is everything."
It almost appeared as though the thought was indeed to be everything.
"Have you decided what you wish to give?"
The three members of the staff exchanged glances.
"So many people thought of a pair of silver vases."
"Or a little travelling-clock, Lady Rossiter."
"A good many voted for a small paper-knife, as being individual, like," said Cooper.
"Charming," warmly said Lady Rossiter, appearing to address all her threevis-à-visat once.
The discussion continued at a similar rate of progress for the remainder of the afternoon.
Edna began to feel considerably taxed at the inordinate extent to which she was required to "give out," in her own favourite phrase. There were limits to the life-giving forces that could be radiated for the benefit of three discursive and unbusinesslike fellow-creatures on a cold afternoon in winter. True to her principles, she reflected, with a humorousness that remained strictly tender, that she must definitely take the responsibility for which they all appeared so inadequate onto her own shoulders.
She prepared to intimate her decision by a leading question.
"And about the actual presentation? Perhaps it would prevent little jealousies, little follies of that sort—after all, human nature is human nature—if it were presented by someone not quite of the College personnel? Of course, in the name of you all, by someone who would be able to make a little speech. Oh, nothing formal, of course, only a few words, but one wants those to be therightwords! I don't know if——"
She paused.
"It was proposed," said Cooper—"and I may add carried unanimously—that the presentation and a few words of good wishes from us all——"
"——Being a good speaker," interpolated Miss Sandiloe.
"——And in an official position, so to speak—and a friend of Miss Easter's," said Miss Farmer, also in parentheses.
Cooper shot a repressive glance left and right. "I am just telling Lady Rossiter. The obvious person, of course, Lady Rossiter, has been approached. Miss Marchrose has kindly agreed to make the presentation on behalf of the staff."