Was it, I wonder, a mother who first evolved the proverb: “Where ignorance is bliss ’twere folly to be wise”?
Was it, I wonder, a mother who first evolved the proverb: “Where ignorance is bliss ’twere folly to be wise”?
It cannot be said that as a family the inhabitants of Ye Dene were a success at Northampton Park. I have already said that they made friends slowly, and in saying so I was of course speaking of Mr. and Mrs. Whittaker and not of the children. The children, on the contrary, made friends very quickly and as quickly got through them. I doubt indeed if two more unpopular children had ever attended the Northampton Park High School. Fortunately for them, I mean for their peace of mind as the time went by, Mrs. Whittaker was not aware of the real reason for this state of affairs.
“I hear,” she remarked one day to long-legged Maud, who had been for a couple of years advanced to the dignity of a pigtail, “I hear that Gwendoline Hammond had a party yesterday.”
Maudie went very red and looked extremely uncomfortable. “I—I—did hear something about it,” she stammered.
“How was it that you were not asked?” inquiredRegina, with an air very much like that of a porcupine suddenly shooting its quills into evidence.
“Oh, Gwendoline Hammond is a mean little sneak!” burst out Julia, who was much the bolder of the sisters.
“A sneak? How a sneak? What had she to sneak about?” demanded Regina.
“Well, it was like this, mother. Gwendoline is an awful bully, you know, and poor little Tuppenny was being frightfully bullied by her one day, and she’s a dear little thing, she can’t take care of herself—somebody’s got to stand up for her—and Maudie punched her head.”
“Punched her head! And what was she doing?”
“Well, she was twisting poor little Tuppenny’s arm around.”
“What! That mere child? And Gwendoline head and shoulders taller than she?”
“Yes.”
“And you say Maudie—punched her head?”
“Yes, and she punched it hard, too. And then Gwendoline went blubbering home, and Mrs. Hammond came to Miss Drummond, and—” Well, really, my reader, I hesitate to say what happened next, but as this is a true chronicle I had better make the plunge and get it over and done with—“and then,” said Julia, solemnly, “there was the devil to pay!”
“You had better not put it in that way,” said Regina, hurriedly. I must confess that she had the greatest difficulty to choke down a laugh. “You had better not put it in that way. ‘The devil to pay’ is next door to swearing itself, to say nothing of beingwhat a great many people would call excessively vulgar; and if you were heard to say such a thing at school, you would get yourselves into dreadful trouble, and me too. I shall be obliged, Julia, if you will not use that expression again.”
“Very well, mother,” said Julia, with an air of great meekness, which, I may say in passing, she was far from feeling.
“With regard,” went on Regina in her most magnificent manner, “with regard to Gwendoline Hammond and her miserable party, I consider it distinctly a feather in your cap, Maudie, that you were left uninvited. If it were told to me, as I presume it was told to Mrs. Hammond, that one of you had been brutally cruel to a child many sizes smaller than yourself and incapable of self-defence, I should mete out the severest punishment that it was possible for me to give you. You have never been punished, because it has never been necessary. Some mothers,” she continued, “would punish you for using such a term as ‘the devil to pay.’ I regard that as a venial offence which your own common-sense will teach you is inexpedient as a phrase for everyday conversation. But brutal cowardice is a matter which I should find it very difficult to forgive, and I am extremely proud that you should have taken the part of a poor little child who was not able to do it for herself. I shall tell your father when he comes home, and I shall ask him to reward you in a suitable manner; and meantime, when I see Miss Drummond—”
“If you please, mother,” broke in Julia, who was, as I have said, the dominant one of the two sisters,“if you please, mother, just drop it about Miss Drummond. We are quite able to fight our own battles at school—we don’t want Miss Drummond, or anybody else, to think that we come peaching to you telling you everything. We tell you because we are fond of you and you ask, and—and—we don’t like to lie to you.” She stammered a little, because on occasion no one could tell a prettier lie than Julia Whittaker. “In fact,” ended Julia, “our lives wouldn’t be worth living if it was known that we came peaching home.”
“It is your duty to tell me everything,” said Regina.
“Well, you might say the same about Gwendoline Hammond,” remarked Julia, with a matter-of-fact air.
“You are within your right,” said Mrs. Whittaker; “you are within your right. I apologize.”
“Oh, please don’t do that,” said Julia, magnanimously; “it isn’t at all necessary. But you please won’t say anything to Miss Drummond about it—not unless she should speak to you, which she won’t. She was very indignant with Gwendoline when she found the whole truth out, and I believe she—at least I did hear that she paid a special visit to Mrs. Hammond and made things extremely unpleasant for Gwendoline. I don’t wonder she didn’t ask Maudie to her party, because her father happened to be there, and he was very angry about it. He almost stopped her having her party altogether, only Mrs. Hammond had asked some people and she did not like to go back upon her word and disgrace Gwendoline before everybody.So you understand, mother, not a word, please, to Miss Drummond.”
“My dear child,” said Regina, “my dear original, splendid child!”
Julia coughed. She would have liked to have taken the praise to herself, but with Maudie standing open-mouthed at her side it was not altogether feasible. She coughed again. “You—you forget Maudie,” she remarked mildly.
“My dear, noble, generous child! I forget nothing—and I will forget nothing for either of you. Here,” she went on, in ringing accents which would have brought down the house if Regina had been speaking at any public meeting, “is a small recognition from your mother, and at dinner-time to-night your father shall speak to you.”
“I think,” remarked Julia, ten minutes later, when she and her sister were on the safe ground of that part of the garden which belonged exclusively to them, “I think we got out of that uncommonly well, Maudie, don’t you?”
“Yes, but it was skating on thin ice,” said Maudie. “I don’t know how you dared, Ju. You told mother you didn’t like telling lies!”
“Well,” said Julia, “it is to be hoped it will never come out, for if it does there will be the devil to pay and no mistake about it.”
It was as well for Regina’s peace of mind that the thin ice never broke, and that the actual truth never came to light. You know what the poet says—“A lie that is half a lie is ever the hardest to fight.” Well, the same idea holds good for a truth that is half atruth. I don’t say that Julia’s account of the difference between themselves and Gwendoline Hammond was wholly a lie, but it was certainly not wholly the truth; indeed, it was such a garbled account that nobody concerned therein but would have found it difficult to recognize it.
“Wasn’t mother’s little sermon about the devil to pay lovely?” said Julia, swinging idly to and fro while Maudie stood contemplating her gravely.
“Yes,” said Maudie, “but she was quite right. That’s the best of mother—she’s always so full of sound common-sense.”
“Except when she calls you her brave, noble child!” rejoined the sharp wit.
“I don’t know,” said Maudie, reflectively, “that that was altogether mother’s fault.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t. It will be just as well for you and for both of us as far as that goes, if mother doesn’t happen to just mention the matter to Tuppenny’s mother. I think I was a fool not to have safeguarded that point.”
“There’s time enough,” said Maudie. “You can lead up to it when you go in, because, you know, Ju, if they ever do find out—”
“Yes, therewillbe the devil to pay,” put in Julia. “You are quite right.”
It was astonishing how sweet a morsel the phrase seemed to be to the child.
“You’ll get saying it to Miss Drummond,” said Maudie, warningly.
“Well, if I do,” retorted Julia, “I shall have had the pleasure of saying it—that will be something.”
Now this was but one of many similar instances which occurred during the childhood of Regina’s two girls. They were so sharp—at least Julia was—and as she was devoted to Maudie, she always put her wits at the service of her sister, and the other children whom they knew not unnaturally resented the fact that they were invariably to be found in the wrong box in any discussion in which the Whittaker children had a share. So they became more and more isolated as the years went by.
“Why don’t we like the Whittakers?” said a girl to her mother, who had met Mrs. Whittaker and thought her a very remarkable woman. “Well, because we don’t.”
“Yes, but why?”
“Oh, well, we don’t exactly know why—but we don’t. They’re queer.”
Have you noticed, dear reader, how frequent it is to set down those who are too sharp for you as “queer?” Well, it was just so at Northampton Park, and what the girl didn’t choose to put into plain words, she stigmatized as queer.
“And what do you mean by queer?” the mother asked.
“Well, theyarequeer. I think their mother must be queer, too, because their dress is so funny.”
“Is it?”
“Oh, awfully. They always wear brown.”
“What are they like?”
“Well, Maudie is fairish and Julia is darkish. Maudie has quite a straight nose and Julia’s turns up—oh, it isn’t an ugly turn-up nose, I didn’t meanthat. But they are such guys, and what is worse, they don’t care a bit.”
“Really? What sort of guys?” asked the mother, who was immensely amused.
“Well, they never have anything like anybody else. They’ve got long, pokey frocks made of tough brown stuff, like—er—like—er—pictures of Dutch children. And over them they wear long holland pinafores.”
“It sounds very sensible,” remarked the mother. “And when they come out of school?”
“In the winter they’ve got long brown coats, with little bits here—you know.”
“You mean a yoke?”
“I don’t know what you call it, mother—little bits, and skirts from it, and poke bonnets, and brown wool gloves; brown stockings and brown shoes, and little brown muffs. Oh, they really are awfully queer!”
“And in the summer?”
“In the summer? Well, in the summer they wear brown holland things. They’re queer, mother, I can’t tell you any more—they’re queer.”
“I see,” said the mother. “But in themselves,” she persisted, “what are they like in themselves?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Nobody likes them much.”
“Poor children! I wish you would be a little kind to them.”
“Do you?” said the girl, rather wistfully. “Well, I will if you like, but it would be an awful bore, and they wouldn’t thank us.”
“I see,” said the mother. But she was wrong; she only thought she saw.
So time sped on, and these two children grew more and more long-legged, more and more definite in character, and as they progressed towards what Mrs. Whittaker fondly believed to be originality and unconventionalism, so did her mother’s heart bound and yearn within her.
“I am amply satisfied with the result of our scheme of education,” she was wont to say. “No, it is not easy—it is much easier to bring up children in the conventional way. But the result—oh, my dear lady, the result, when you feel a thrill of pride that your children are different to others, is worth the sacrifice.”
“Now I wonder what,” said the lady in question in the bosom of her family, “did that foolish woman particularly have to sacrifice? The general feeling in the Park seems to be that the Whittakers are horrid children—disagreeable, ill-bred, sententious, and altogether ridiculous; too sharp in one way, too stupid for words in another. And yet she talks about sacrifice!”
“Oh, Maudie isn’t sharp—at least, not particularly so,” said her own girl, who, being a couple of years older than Maudie Whittaker, knew fairly well the lie of the land. “Julia’s sharp—a needle isn’t in it. It’s Julia who backs Maudie up in everything, and Julia is a horrid little beast whom everybody hates and loathes. She tried it on with me once when I was at school, but I soon put the young lady in her right place with a good setting down, and she never tried it on any more. They’d have been all right ifthey had been properly brought up, which they weren’t.”
“You think not?”
“Oh no, mother. You have no idea how intensely silly Mrs. Whittaker is.”
“Is she? I thought she was such a brilliant woman.”
“I believe she calls herself so; nobody else agrees with her.”
“Do you know what I heard about Mrs. Whittaker only yesterday?” said the mother, with a sudden gleam of remembrance. “She has gone in for public speaking. They say it’s too killing for words.”
“Speaking on what?” asked the girl.
“On the improvement of the condition of women.”
“What! a political affair?”
“No, no; not political at all; a something quite disconnected with politics—quite above them. She has been chosen President of a new society which is to be called ‘The Society for the Regeneration of Women.’”
Why is it that women are so fond of founding societies both for the improvement of themselves and of each other? Is it a confession of weakness, or is it one of the signs of the coming of the millenium?
Why is it that women are so fond of founding societies both for the improvement of themselves and of each other? Is it a confession of weakness, or is it one of the signs of the coming of the millenium?
Mrs. Whittaker was a woman who never did things by halves. She distinctly prided herself thereupon.
“If a thing, my dear, is worth doing,” I heard her say about the time of which I am writing, “it is worth doingwell. I have great faith—although I have gone so far above the old-world thoughts of religion—in the verse which says: ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.’ It is a grand precept, one that I instil into my children—er—er—”
“For all you are worth,” remarked a flippant young woman who was listening.
“I—I shouldn’t have expressed it in that way,” stammered Regina, somewhat taken aback. “But—but—er—it’s what I mean.”
“And your children, are they the same?”
“Yes, I am proud to say that my children are very much like me in that respect. When they play, they play; when they work, they work; when they idlethey idle; and I am sure if ever they were naughty, that they would be naughty with all their might.”
Poor Regina! Well, to make the story somewhat shorter, I must tell you that when Regina Whittaker went into public life, she did so in no half-hearted manner.
“I am convinced,” she remarked to the lord of her bosom, “I am convinced that I am taking a step in the right direction. What do you think, Alfie?”
“My dear,” said Alfred Whittaker, somewhat sleepily, for he had had a hard day in the city and had eaten an extremely good dinner, “if it pleases you, it pleases me. You have such a clear, sensible head,” he went on, feeling that perhaps he had been a little too unsympathetic, “you have such a clear, sensible head, that I am sure you will take up no question that is not a good one—an advantageous one.”
“I thought you would see it in that light, dear Alfie,” said Mrs. Whittaker in tones which betokened much pleasure. “You are so generous and so just. Some men would hate to feel that their wives had any interest outside their own homes.”
“Oh, my dear heart and soul!” exclaimed Alfred Whittaker, looking up in a very wide-awake sort of way, “surely this is a land of liberty. I don’t want to tie you down to being no better than my slave. God knows you fag enough and slave enough for all of us. It would be hard if you couldn’t have a few opinions and a few interests of your own.”
“Yes, dear; but it isn’t quite that. It is not only of opinions that I am speaking, it is the encouragingway in which you consent to my entering on this somewhat pronounced question.”
“I have absolute faith in your judgment,” said Alfred Whittaker; and again he composed himself for his after-dinner nap.
Regina sat looking at him as he slumbered. Her heart was very full, for she was an affectionate woman, and, in spite of her little airs and pretensions, she was really a good woman at bottom. Her heart swelled with pride to think that this was her husband, this handsome, portly, dignified man with a presence, an air of being somebody, this man who was so good, so easy to live with, such a good husband and such an affectionate father. And to think that he was hers! As I have said already, her heart thrilled within her.
It was true that others might not have agreed with Regina in her estimate of her husband. The outer world might have thought him anything but handsome, might have thought that he had anything rather than a presence. What Regina called portly, a less tender critic might have described in an extremely unpleasant manner; but, you see, Regina looked at him with eyes of possession, and the eyes of possession are ever somewhat biassed.
So her thoughts ran pleasantly on. Yes, it was indeed sweet to be so blessed as she was in her home life. She had once believed that her life was a wasted one. Well, that was in the foolish days, before she had tried her wings. Not that she ever regarded her flights into the world of higher thought with the very smallest regret; that could never be. Enlightenment is always enlightenment, whether it isactually paying in a monetary sense or not. She firmly believed that an elaborate and somewhat masculine education had enabled her to become a better wife and mother than she would have been had she been contented with the genteel education which her parents had thought good enough, further than which indeed their minds had never attempted to fly. Perhaps, her thoughts ran, her mission in life was to bring enlightenment to the minds of other women, in a somewhat different way to that which she had hitherto accepted as the most reasonable. Be that as it may, Regina entered upon her duties as President of the S.R.W., armed with the full sanction of her husband’s permission and approval.
To all her friends she was an amazing and, at the same time, an amusing study about this epoch.
“I am perfectly certain,” remarked Mrs. M’Quade to the mother of the little girl who at school was called Tuppenny, “I am perfectly certain that Mrs. Whittaker has at last found hermetier. Are you going to join her scheme for the regeneration of women?”
“I don’t think so,” replied the lady who lived at Highthorn. “My husband is so very sneering when anything of the kind is mentioned. I shouldn’t mind for myself; I think it would be rather fun. They are going to have tea-parties andsoirées, and all sorts of amusements. But George would be so full of his fun, that I don’t feel somehow it would be good enough for me to go into. Besides, it’s three guineas a year. As far as I can tell,” she continued, “from what Mrs. Whittaker has told me, there won’t be any real regeneration of women in our day. It may come in theday of our grandchildren, but I don’t feel inclined to work for that.”
“That shows a great want of public spirit,” remarked the doctor’s wife, laughingly.
“Yes, I daresay it does, but I don’t believe women are public-spirited, except here and there—generally when they have made a failure of their own lives, as my old man always says.”
“But Mrs. Whittaker hasn’t made a failure of her life.”
“Well, she has and she hasn’t. She has failed to become anything very much out of the ordinary. She is very fond of calling herself an unconventional woman who never does anything like anybody else, but I fail to see very much in it excepting that she makes horrible guys of her girls.”
“Well, I am going to join the society,” said Mrs. M’Quade, with the air of one who is prepared to receive ridicule. “No, I don’t pretend for a moment that I want regenerating myself—or even that other women do—but Mrs. Whittaker has been a very good patient to the doctor one way and another, and she’s stuck to us, and I think the least I can do is to join her pet scheme—and, mind you, itisa pet scheme.”
“I call that absolutely Machiavellian,” said her friend.
“Oh, a doctor’s wife has to be Machiavellian, my dear, and a thousand other things,” said Mrs. M’Quade, easily. “I have been fifteen years in the Park, and I have kept in with everybody—never had a wrong word with a single one of Jack’s patients. Youmay call it Machiavellian, and doubtless you are right, but I call it ripping good management myself.”
“So it is, my dear, so it is. And you shall have the full credit of it,” said Tuppenny’s mother, who was a genial soul and loved a joke as well as most people.
And Regina meantime was taking life with considerable seriousness. She fell into a habit of speaking of the S.R.W. as of her life’s work; indeed, she became a very important woman. No sooner was it known that she was an excellent and dominant President of the S.R.W. than she came into request for other societies of a kindred nature—no, I don’t mean societies solely for the regeneration of women, not a bit of it. There was one for the sensible education of children between three and seven years old, whose committee she was asked to join not many weeks after the birth of the S.R.W.; and there was another society which bore the name of “The Robin Redbreast,” and provided the poor children of a south London district with dinners for a halfpenny a head, and a number of others that they provided with dinners for nothing at all. Then there was a Shakespeare Society, which had long existed in the Park, and which until Regina became a full-blown president had never thought of asking her to come on to its committee.
Now all this took Regina a good deal away from her home, and the result of her absence and of these wider interests in life was that the two girls at Ye Dene were enabled to shape their lives very much more in their own way than ever they had done before. Regina had, it is true, always aimed atinculcating a spirit of independence in her children. She required them to do certain things during the course of the day, to be punctual at meals, especially at breakfast, to report themselves when they were going to school and when they returned; but otherwise, she left them fairly free to spend the rest of their time as their own inclinations led them. They had their own sitting-room and their own tea-table, at which they could invite any children belonging to their school, or indeed, for the matter of that, any of the children living in the Park; and up to the advent of the S.R.W. it must be owned that this system worked as well as any system could have worked with children of such pronounced characters as the young Whittakers. But after their mother became a public woman, Maudie and Julia may be said to have run absolutely wild. No longer did they report themselves in the old way, because they had a very complete contempt for servants, and there was usually no one else to whom they could report themselves.
“Does your mother never want to know where you are?” asked a schoolfellow when Maudie was just sixteen.
“Well, yes, we always tell her at night what we have done during the day.”
“Oh, do you?”
“Yes,” returned Maudie. “Mother is most deeply interested in all our doings. Did you think she wasn’t? How funny of you! Isn’t your mother interested in what you do?”
“Oh yes, of course mine is. But then mine israther different to yours. Mine is not a public character.”
“Well, I don’t know that our mother is exactly a public character,” said Julia, who was keenly on the watch for a single word which would in any way pour ridicule or contempt upon her mother.
“Oh yes, she is. Father says she’s a philanthropist.”
“Oh, does he? Well, I don’t know I’m sure. Perhaps she is. I know she’s a jolly hard-worked woman, and if she wasn’t as clever as daylight she wouldn’t be able to keep going as she does. As for her being a philanthropist—well, after all, what is a philanthropist?”
“Well, I did ask father, and he explained it, but he didn’t make it very clear. It seems to be a sort of person who goes about doing good.”
“That’s mother all over,” said Maudie.
“Then who mends your stockings?” asked Evelyn Gage.
“Our stockings? Why, mother has never mended our stockings. Sewing is one of the things mother isn’t great on. You couldn’t expect it.”
“Why not? Mine does.”
“Oh, yes, but our mother is rather different. You see, she was educated like a man.”
“How funny!” giggled Evelyn.
“I think,” said Maudie to Julia, half an hour later, when Evelyn Gage had gone home and the two were getting out their lesson-books for their home work, “I think it would be rather funny to have a mother like an ordinary woman, don’t you, Ju?”
“Well, I don’t know,” returned Julia. “Evelyn’s mother makes jam and pickles and pastry and lovely little rock cakes, and things that our mother never seems to think of.Sheis always too much taken up with great questions to bother herself with little etceteras, as old nurse always called such things.”
“Perhaps, though, we should find it rather a bore to have a mother who worried about our stockings and things, just an ordinary, average kind of mother. But anyway, we haven’t got a mother like that, so we must make the best of what we have got.”
A Parisian finishing school is for English girls like putting French polish on British oak.
Nothing of any importance happened in the household at Ye Dene for two years after this. Then it became time for Maudie to be introduced into society. With most girls this epoch in life is one eagerly looked forward to, tremulously entered upon, and very frequently looked back to with a certain amount of disappointment. Regina herself, I am bound to confess, thought with no small misgiving of the time when she should have to be a wallflower for her daughter’s sake.
“The child must have her chance like other girls,” she remarked to Alfred one night when they were sitting together in the drawing-room at Ye Dene. “She is very beautiful. She will not go empty-handed to her husband. She ought to make a brilliant marriage.”
“Yes, she is a nice-looking girl,” said Alfred Whittaker.
“My daughters,” said Regina, with an air of dignity which was very pardonable in a mother, “are both beautiful in different styles. Maudie is purelyGreek in type; Julia is purely Irish—or I might say French. I noticed when we were in Brittany, two years ago, how thoroughly Irish one type of the peasantry was.”
“Yes, she’s a good-looking girl. They’re both all right,” said Alfred Whittaker, with the easy indifference of an ordinary father. “I daresay you’ll have your hands full a little bit further on, old lady, when we get shoals of young men about Ye Dene, and you have to think out little dances and suppers and theatre parties, and other things of that kind, instead of giving up all your time to making other people happy.”
“Well, whatever I have to do, I hope I shall do it with all my might,” said Regina.
“I am sure you will,” said Alfred, tenderly; “I am sure you will, Queenie.”
For his peace of mind’s sake, it was just as well that Alfred Whittaker was at business during the greater part of each day, for he might have been upset, not to say scandalized, by the extremely independent, not to say free-and-easy, life which was led by his two daughters.
Regina herself was very strong on this point. “I like to hear everything that my girls tell me,” she said, in discussing the question about this time with the doctor’s wife, “but I don’t demand it as a right. Nobody would demand of a boy of nearly eighteen that he should tell his mother everything that he has said, done and thought during the twenty-four hours of the day. Why shouldn’t a girl be brought up on the same system?”
“It is not the custom, that’s all. I was amenable to my mother,” Mrs. M’Quade replied, “and I expect my daughter to be amenable to me. It is not a question of want of independence; the child is independent enough—but a girl’s mind and a boy’s mind are not the same, they’re different.”
“Only because men and foolish mothers have made them so,” persisted Regina.
“Ah, well, you and I agree to differ on those points,—don’t we, Mrs. Whittaker? Heaven forbid that I should make my girl less independent than I would wish to be myself, but to shut the mother out of her life is no particular sign of a girl’s independence—at least, that is the way in which I look at it. Then I suppose,” went on the doctor’s wife, “that you will, a little later on, allow your girls to have a latchkey?”
“Certainly, if they wish to have a latchkey. Why not?” Mrs. Whittaker demanded. “I should not expect them to come in at three o’clock in the morning because I gave them the privilege of a latchkey. If they misused the privilege, I should take it away from them.”
“You are beyond me,” the doctor’s wife cried. “With regard to my Georgie, all I can say is, that until she is married she will have to live just as I lived until I was married; that is to say, she will do what I tell her, she will wear what I advise her to wear, or what I give her to wear; she will have a very good time, but she will not have a separate existence from mine until she goes into a home of her own, or until I am carried out to my last long resting-place.”
“We are good friends,” said Regina, with an air of superb tolerance, “we are good friends, Mrs. M’Quade, and I hope we shall always continue so; but in some of our ideas we are diametrically opposed to each other, and we must agree to differ.”
But to go back to the question of the entrance of Maud Whittaker into society, not a little to her parents’ surprise, Maud absolutely declined to do anything of the kind.
“Come out—go into society!” she echoed. “Oh, there will be time enough for that when Ju is ready.”
“Julia? Why, she is two years younger than you,” Mrs. Whittaker exclaimed.
“Yes, dearest, I know it; but I am young for my age and Julia is old for hers. If she comes out in another year, I can wait until she is ready.”
“But why? I never heard of such a thing!”
“I am not very great on society,” said Maud. “I would rather wait until Ju is fully fledged.”
“And you will stay at school?”
“Yes, I’d just as soon, only when one comes to think of it, I’ve learnt all they can teach me, as far as I know. We are both of us much too big to be at that school—it’s a perfect farce. Why don’t you take us away and give us a course of lessons? That is the proper thing to do—like they do in Paris. Or why don’t you send us to Paris for a year? Then we may contrive to speak French that is French, and not Park polyglot.”
“Maudie!” cried Regina.
“Yes, I know, dearest. You may say ‘Maudie!’but facts are facts. The other day, being, or being supposed to be, the best French speaker in the school, I was put up to talk to a French lady who was staying at the Vicarage. You know Mrs. Charlton speaks French like a native—indeed, I think she has French relations, and I think this was an old schoolfellow. Anyway, I was put up to talk to her as being the show girl at French conversation.”
“Well?” Regina’s tone was as the sniff of a war-horse who scents the battle from afar.
“I couldn’t make head or tail of her,” said Maudie. “Ju did—at least, in a kind of way she did. All the same she had to repeat everything she said three times over, and then whatever-her-name-was had to make shots at her meaning.”
“But, my dear children,” exclaimed Regina, aghast. “I hear you talking French to each other every day!”
“Yes, I know,” said Ju; “but you hear us talking something that isn’t French.”
“My education,” said Regina, “did not include many modern subjects. That was one reason why I was so very anxious that you two should learn French and German.”
“Then you had better send us to Paris—because French is just what we cannot speak. When we want to talk without the servants knowing, we speak what we call the Park polyglot, but it doesn’t go down with French people. I could see that that friend of Mrs. Charlton’s caught a word here and there, and her native wit supplied the rest.”
“Perhaps she was not a person of position, and didnot speak good French,” said Regina, who was loath to admit that a child of hers could do anything badly.
“Oh, not a bit of it! Mrs. Charlton kept calling her Comtesse. She was all right.”
“And how did Miss Drummond come off?”
“Oh, well, Miss Drummond speaks a little honest English-French, which has no pretense of being the real thing.”
It is not surprising that after this, Regina’s two girls were withdrawn from the school at Northampton Park, and were, as she particularly told everybody, by their own request sent to a school kept by a French lady on the outskirts of Paris, to be particular in that off-shoot of Paris which Regina called “Nully.”
During the year that followed, Regina worked harder than ever; indeed, even her complacent husband now and again uttered a mild protest that his wife should be absolutely absorbed by work which brought him neither comfort nor emolument.
“I had a wife, once,” he said in joke to the doctor, one night when the M’Quades were dining at Ye Dene; “but now I often think I’ve only got a Chairman of Committee.”
Nevertheless, he said it with an air of pride, and later, when Regina asked him seriously whether he would prefer that she should give up her public duties and once more merge her identity into his, he exclaimed, “God forbid! What makes you happy, my dear, makes me happy, as long as you still regard me as the linch-pin of your existence.”
“I do, my dear Alfie, I do,” she cried. “IndeedI’m the same Queenie that you married all those years ago. My heart has never altered or changed in the very least. No other man has ever crossed its threshold since you first took possession of it.”
“As long as you feel that, my dear girl,” he returned, putting his arm about her ample waist and looking at her with fond eyes of loving, if somewhat sleepy, devotion, “as long as you feel like that, you can do what work you like and have what interests you like. And good luck go with you, for I am sure you must be a great comfort to a good many people.”
And Regina did work, like the traditional negro slave. Still, she never neglected her home duties. Regularly every week she wrote to her girls, and sometimes when she was dog-tired and found her eyes closing over the sheet on which she was writing, she shook herself quite fiercely, and reminded herself of her duty; then blamed herself passionately that her letters to her girls, her own girls, who thought of her, loved her, trusted her, made her the recipient of their hopes, doubts and fears, joys and pleasures, and even such simple sorrows as had as yet entered into their lives, should ever have come to be a duty—a mere duty.
Poor Regina! I will not pretend that the two girls never wished to hear from their mother, or that they would not have been bitterly disappointed had she wholly and totally neglected them; but they were happy in their school life, and they did not spend their time watching for the arrival of thefacteur de poste, as Regina fondly believed of them. No, they quietly accepted their mother’s letters when they received them, read them, discussed them, and then put them on one side to think about them no more.
So time went on until the Christmas holidays arrived. The two girls did not come home to the Park for their vacation, but their father and mother made a little break in their respective callings and went to Paris, where the girls joined them at a modest but comfortable boarding-house.
Now the boarding-house had been recommended by the lady of the school at which the sisters were being educated. It was one kept by a French lady, to which but few English people were in the habit of going. Of the charming language of our neighbors across the Channel, Alfred Whittaker did not know one word beyond a form of salutation which he calledbong jour!and an equally useful word which he was pleased to callmessy. These two old people were therefore absolutely at the mercy of their young daughters; and the young daughters themselves thanked Heaven many times, during the three weeks which they passed together in Paris, that French had not been included in the curriculum of either their father’s or mother’s education. Oh, they meant no harm, don’t think it for a moment. There was no harm in either the one or the other. They were modern, human girls, into whom a life of independence had been instilled as a religion. Independent their mother wished them to be, and independent they were to an abnormal and an aggressive degree.They were as sharp as needles, exactly as their old schoolfellow had said years before; they had acquired a knowledge of Paris which was simply extraordinary considering that they had been immured in apensionnatfor demoiselles. They knew all the great emporiums quite intimately, and having extracted some money from their father on the score that it was no use their mother coming to Paris without buying clothes, and also that their own wardrobes required renewing, they whisked their mother from theLouvre, to theBon Marché, from theBon Marchéto theMimosa, and even got wind of that wonderful old market down in the Temple, where the Jews hold high revel between the hours of nine o’clock in the morning and noon.
What a time it was. “My girls,” said Regina to an elderly English lady with whom she foregathered in one of the pretty little whitecrêmeriesin the Rue de la Paix, “speak French like natives. I was educated in all sorts of ways—I have taken degrees and done all sorts of things that most women don’t do—but when you put me down in Paris, I am utterly undone. I never realized before what a terrible thing want of education is.”
“And yet you have taken degrees,” said the lady, admiringly.
“Yes, but they are not much good when you come to Paris. But my daughters,” she added, with pride, “speak French like Parisians.”
It was a little wide of the mark. The girls did speak French with considerable fluency, and they had the advantage of not being shy, and of never allowingwant of knowledge to keep them back from communicating with their fellow-beings. And as they gabbled on, as Alfred Whittaker frequently declared, nineteen to the dozen, Regina stood by and admired.