Many people look upon mental blindness as they do upon physical blindness—as a terrible affliction. Yet, when the mentally blind suddenly see, their condition is not usually improved thereby.
Many people look upon mental blindness as they do upon physical blindness—as a terrible affliction. Yet, when the mentally blind suddenly see, their condition is not usually improved thereby.
If the Whittaker girls had been unpopular as children, they certainly made up for it, so far as Northampton Park was concerned, when they became young women. The innovation of having an At Home day of their own, at which their mother made a point of not appearing, was so daring that every girl in the Park made it her duty to be present thereat, and when it was bruited abroad that it was really a girl’s At Home, with no overshadowing mothers and such like sober persons, that the girls had their own room and their own tea-things, and excellent provision in the way of cakes, and that cigarettes were allowed after six o’clock, then not only the girls, but also their brothers, soon came flocking into Ye Dene in considerable numbers. The whole winter did this state of things continue, until the At Home days at Ye Dene were no longer a nine days’ wonder but an established fact.
Then Maudie and Julia began to meet with othergirls further afield than their own immediate vicinity, girls who were connections or friends of the girls who lived in the Park, and invitations began to shower in upon Regina’s daughters. They were perfectly independent—Regina wished them to be so, and prided herself on the fact that they were so—and as their comings and goings did not interfere with the comfort of their father, Alfred Whittaker saw nothing to which he could frame any reasonable objection in his daughters’ mode of life.
It happened one afternoon that the two girls were having tea and muffins in their own sitting-room. It was just before Easter, that week when the tide of suburban entertaining lulls a little, and the two were sitting by a blazing fire in big wicker chairs drawn close up to the fender, the low Moorish tea-table conveniently placed between them.
“Maudie,” said Julia, suddenly, “I think we shall have to pull up.”
“Pull up! why?” Maudie’s tone was blank, for she herself had a particular reason for not wanting to pull up in any shape or form just then.
“We’re getting too cheap,” said Julia.
“Cheap! and we’ve spent nearly all our dress allowance!” Maudie exclaimed.
“I don’t mean cheap in that way. No, we’re getting cheap socially. Anybody thinks they can come to our days and bring anyone they like, and we do half the entertaining of the Park for people who do nothing for us.”
“It makes us popular,” said Maudie, helping herself to another piece of muffin.
“Yes, yes, but is such popularity worth it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are we going on right through the season?”
“Well, you know, Ju, the season doesn’t make much difference to us.”
“It’s going to,” said Julia.
“Is it going to this season?” Maudie demanded. “That’s the question—is it going to this season?”
“I don’t see why not. We’ve got any amount of invitations for next month, and not more than a third of them are in the Park. A third? A quarter, I should say. Now I’ll tell you what I propose doing.”
“Well?”
“I propose, as it is the regulation thing to do, to chuck our ‘day’ until next autumn.”
“Julia!” Maudie was so taken back that she was surprised into giving her sister her full name, the diminutive thereof not seeming to express sufficiently what was in her mind.
“You may say ‘Julia,’ but my head is screwed on the right way. I suppose I shall never get mother and the dad to move away from Ye Dene.”
“From the Park?”
“Yes. We have got too much of the Park about us. It’s all Park. Dad is very well off, mother has money of her own—why shouldn’t we go and live in Kensington? We could shunt all these Park people, excepting just the best—those we have been the most intimate with—and get into a real good set. What’s the use of having a well-off father and a very distinguished mother if we hide our light under a bushel in such a place as this?”
“The people that live here are just as good as we are.”
“Well, perhaps they are, and perhaps they’re not, Maudie,” Julia retorted sharply. “If we satisfy them, I’m quite sure they don’t satisfy me. I don’t believe myself in sitting on the bottom rung of the ladder when you can easily and comfortably climb up to the top.”
“But shall we ever get to the top?”
“No, never; that means strawberry leaves. But there are a dozen reasons for getting out of Ye Dene. In the first place, the dad has to get up at an ungodly hour in the morning so as to get to his office at the usual time. Mother spends half her life in the train, and you know neither of them are as young as they were. I went up to town with mother yesterday, and I’m sure it was pitiful to see her dragging herself up those steep station stairs. She ought to be able to get into a cab and go to her meetings, a woman of her substance.”
“Perhaps. But we shall never get a house like this—never, never, Ju. We shall have to do without our own sitting-room, or else have a little box somewhere at the back of the house, looking into a yard. We shall have to have clean curtains every fortnight like the Brookeses. We shall have to sleep up on the third or fourth story—and it will all be horrid, horrid, horrid!”
“Not at all. My dear, there are plenty of houses quite as good as this in Kensington.”
“They’ll be three times the rent.”
“Not a bit of it, not the least bit of it. Lookat that house where the Ponsonby-Piggots live; garden—charming garden, tea-house at the end, greenhouse, shrubs, lawn, three lovely sitting-rooms on the entrance floor, and only two stories above. We don’t want a castle with eight or nine bedrooms—what should we do with them?Why, the Ponsonby-Piggots keep fowls!”
“Oh, well, I suppose you’ll have your own way. You had better talk to mother about it.”
“I’ve learned a lot from the Ponsonby-Piggots,” Julia went on. “They don’t just trust to tea and cakes and cigarettes, and a song or two, to make them somebody. Each of those three plain girls—andthat’srather paying them a compliment—has got some special line of her own. Gwenny is engaged to the ugliest man in London, and she makes a parade of having his presentment everywhere—statuettes, photographs, pastels, miniatures, everything you can think of—to bring the man into prominence. And he hasn’t got twopence; and though he’s a gentleman, they probably won’t be able to marry for the next ten years. Theo collects Napoleon relics. Didn’t you notice that the end of their sitting-room is devoted to Napoleon?”
“Yes, I did, but I didn’t know why,” said Maudie in rather a wondering tone.
“Well, that’s why. And Stella, the little one with the curley red hair, she collects half-a-dozen things—postcards, autographs, souvenir teaspoons, and old lustre ware. These girls only have an allowance of forty pounds a year for their dresses—each, I mean,”she added hurriedly. “And if they want more they make it.”
“But how?”
“Oh, in various ways. Gwenny, I believe, is secretary to a big doctor up in town. She only has to attend from ten till five, and she gets a rousing good salary, and she’s putting it all away towards house furnishing. Then Theo, she does a bit of journalism, and Stella, well, she’s the most original of all. She’s a regular little Jew.”
“How do you mean—regular little Jew?”
“Oh, she’s always chopping and changing among her collections. She made a hundred and twenty pounds last year in selling things at a thoroughly good profit that she had picked up for nothing. If her mother would let her, she’d go into a flat with Theo and open a regular business. But Mrs. Ponsonby-Piggot says that the girls have plenty of money for their needs, and always will have.”
“Well, if so, why should they? You wouldn’t like to open a shop?”
“I’d do anything rather than stick in the mud,” said Julia, “anything in the wide world.”
“Stick in the mud!” echoed Maudie. “And this is all that has come of mother’s higher education!”
“Well, mother higher-educated herself. She made a huge mistake, and nobody knows it better than mother. She is up in all sorts of learned and abstruse subjects that she has never been able to turn to account in any shape or form, and the ordinary things that women ought to know she is perfectly ignorant of. Fancy setting mother to make a pie!”
“Fancy settingyouto make a pie,” retorted Maudie.
“Oh, well, I’ve been thinking it wouldn’t be half a bad idea if we were to enter at the Park Polytechnic and take a course of dressmaking, another of millinery, another of cooking, and, for the matter of that, we might take a fourth at housekeeping.”
“How should we get it all in?”
“Oh, well, that’s easy enough. You pay two guineas a year, and you can join any class you like. The classes are going on all day long, so Rita Mackenzie tells me, and you pay sixpence each as a sort of entrance fee.”
“Then we couldn’t do that if we left Ye Dene.”
“Ah, but we sha’n’t leave Ye Dene to-day, nor to-morrow—I never thought of that for a moment. But if we once graft into the dad’s head that it is possible we may one day want to leave Ye Dene, he’ll put himself in the right channel for getting good offers for it. Don’t make any mistake about the value of Ye Dene. It’s freehold, it is in the main road, and it is in the best position in the main road. It’s in perfect repair inside and out. I don’t believe, if the dad was to put it in the hands of two or three good agents, that we should be here two months.”
“What is Rita Mackenzie going in for?”
“House decoration. My dear, I went in to see her yesterday—I forgot to tell you; it was when you were over at the Marksbys’. You know there’s a studio to their house?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Well, her father has made it over to her. Shetook a course of lessons, and she’s decorated it herself. It’s a dream!” said Julia. “When I look round this room and think of Rita’s, it makes me feel sick.”
“What’s the matter with this room?”
“Oh, what’s the matter! Just this, Maudie, that since we evolved this room out of our own ignorant, vulgar minds, I’ve been getting educated.”
“My dear, I thought we had finished our education long ago,” said Maudie, somewhat taken aback.
“That’s where your limitations come in, Maudie. If ever you get married, you’ll find that you have everything to learn that will make life happy and comfortable to you, unless you enter yourself at the Polytechnic beforehand.”
“I might do worse,” said Maudie, looking round. She honestly couldn’t see, poor, prosaic girl that she was, that anything was amiss with their own especial sanctum. It was bright, cheerful, dainty, and scrupulously clean. There were evidences on all sides that it was a room in which people lived a great share of their lives. A great Persian cat lay on a blue velvet cushion on one side of the hearth, and a very presentable black spaniel was curled up in a padded basket on the other. “I’m sure,” she said, looking into the blazing depths of the fire, and then helping herself to another piece of muffin, “I’m sure there’s not a prettier room in the Park than ours.”
“Oh, my dear, don’t talk nonsense! It’s horrid. We’ve got a Louis Quinze paper, Louis Quinze chintz, and make-believe Japanese bead and reed curtains. We’ve got cheap bazaar rubbish all over the place, and not one scrap of furniture worth calling furniturein it. The carpet gets up and hits the walls, and the walls in their turn slap the screen, and the screen clashes with the chintz, and you and I clash with everything else. Oh, it’s dreadful, it’s horrible!”
“We’ve spent most of our dress allowance on it,” wailed Maudie.
“That’s the piano. You know, Maudie, you would have a good one. And by-the-bye,” she added, letting her remark fly into the air like a bombshell, “and by-the-bye, if either of us gets married before the piano is paid for, will the other poor wretch have to finish off the payments by herself?”
“Well, even if she does,” said Maudie, “the one that has to finish off the payments will have the piano.”
Possession to some natures seems always to demand value in what is possessed; to others it has exactly the opposite effect.
Possession to some natures seems always to demand value in what is possessed; to others it has exactly the opposite effect.
Julia duly implanted in her parents’ minds the preliminary idea that a change from Ye Dene might be desirable. But the Whittakers did not leave the Park just then, for it was only a few days after the conversation between the two girls on the subject of removal, that quiet, unoriginal Maudie cast a veritable bombshell into the family circle. For Maudie got engaged to be married.
I have spoken earlier in this story of a house in the immediate neighborhood of Ye Dene which was called Ingleside, and I have just mentioned a family of the name of Marksby. The Marksbys lived at Ingleside, and Ingleside was almost exactly opposite to Ye Dene; the Marksbys, indeed, were next-door neighbors of the M’Quades. They had not very long been in possession of that desirable residence, and, mind you, Ingleside was a most desirable residence, one of the best to be found in the length and breadth of thePark. The family consisted of the father and mother, two daughters and a son. Mr. Marksby, as far as the Park was concerned, was that mysterious “something in the city” which covers such a multitude of sins, or if not sins, at least of blemishes, social and otherwise. They did themselves and their neighbors extremely well, kept good-class servants, had the smartest window curtains and flower-boxes in the Park, went to church regularly, gave largely in charity and entertained freely. What wonder that, in their case, people did not too closely inquire into the exact definition of “something in the city.”
From the very first it had been Maudie rather than Julia who had caught on with the Marksbys. The Marksby girls were quiet and singularly unassuming, and as Maudie Whittaker grew older she was attracted, perhaps because of Julia’s excessive energy, by quietness rather than the reverse, and was indeed herself a girl of singularly few words. But if the Marksby girls were quiet, then young Harry Marksby did not share their nature. He was himself the gayest of the gay, one who, a century ago, would have been called an “agreeable rattle;” indeed he was a young man who prided himself on stirring things up. He by no means approved of the fact that his father and mother had turned their backs upon convenient Bayswater in favor of the more distant Park. He was a young man who worked hard when he worked, and who abandoned himself to amusement when he was not working. But he was a sensible young man and did not see the force of burning the candle at both ends, so that he stayed a great deal more at home in theevenings than many a young man of his age and general proclivities would have done; and thus it was that he came somehow to fall in love with Regina Whittaker’s eldest girl. And, as I said, the news fell upon the Whittaker family like a bombshell.
Not that they were displeased! Mr. and Mrs. Whittaker had been too happy in their own married life to grudge either of their girls entering upon the same joys. But they had not seen it coming. Parents are often like that, and so the news came upon them with startling suddenness.
“I am not surprised, though,” said Regina to her husband and Julia when the great news had been broached and Harry Marksby had gone to seek his lady-love in the seclusion of the girls’ own sitting-room, “I am not surprised. She is very beautiful.”
“Oh, mother, how can you stuff her up like that?” cried Julia. “Nobody thinks Maudie very beautiful but yourself—not even Harry. You shouldn’t do it, dear. It gives us such a wrong idea of ourselves, or it might do if we hadn’t got the sense to see what we see in our looking-glasses.”
“Your modesty,” said Regina, “is most becoming. I honor and admire you for it—”
“I’m off to my housekeeping class,” said Julia, whisking herself out of the room.
“That is the most wonderful thing about our girls,” said Regina to Alfred, when they found themselves alone, “that is the most wonderful thing about our girls—their utter absence of self-consciousness. Beauty has never been a bane to them, because theyhave never had a vain thought between them. It is a beautiful and wonderful thing.”
“They’re good-looking enough,” said Alfred, “but they’ll never, either of them, be a patch upon you, dearest.”
“Uponme?” She blushed rosy red in spite of her fifty and odd years. “Why, Alfie, looks were never my strong point. They get their looks from you.”
“Nobody but yourself ever thought so, Queenie,” said Alfred Whittaker, with an indulgent glance at his wife; “and everybody may not think of our girls just as you do.”
“And as you do, Alfie?”
“And as I do. All the same, I don’t know that I should call them beautiful myself. They’re good-looking, wholesome, straight, clean, desirable girls, as good as gold and as merry as grigs. By the way,” he added, “the Marksbys must be very well off.”
“Indeed! What makes you think so?”
“From what he told me of his circumstances.”
“But whatarethe Marksbys?” asked Regina.
“He’s in his father’s business.”
“But whatishis father’s business?”
Alfred Whittaker stretched out his hand and took hold of his wife’s. “Queenie,” he said, “we have never been very proud people, have we?”
“I hope we have always had proper pride, and no more,” said Regina.
“He is a nice young chap,” Alfred went on, as if he were following out a train of thought; “and Maudie seems to be very much taken with him—”
“Alfie,” said Regina in a tone of apprehension, “you are trying to break something to me.”
“Well, in one sense, I am,” he said, smiling; “and on the other hand I am not. Myself I believe in honest character and good solid comfort before all other considerations, and I feel that you will be sensible and do the same. Maudie has still to learn, as far as I know, the exact nature of the way in which the Marksbys’ money is made.”
“Go on,” said Regina, impatiently.
“Well, to go on,” said Mr. Whittaker, “is to let the blow fall without any further fuss.”
“Let it fall!” cried Regina in a tone of tragedy.
“Marksby,” returned Alfred, “is their private name. They trade under a different one.”
“Yes?”
“And Marksby,” went on Alfred, slowly, “is the Twopenny Dinner King.”
“The Twopenny Dinner King!” cried Regina. “You mean they sell twopenny dinners?”
“Yes, Queenie—twopenny dinners. I’m told they are excellent—indeed, young Harry told me so himself just now. He has invited me to go down and have lunch with him one day, and he promises he will give me the regular twopenny fare—not by way of entertaining me, but rather in order to show me that it really could be done at such a price.”
“And—and—does Harry wear an apron—and—andservetwopenny dinners?”
“No, no! The concern’s too big for that,” Mr. Whittaker replied. “He has never done anything ofthat kind. It’s a regular going concern—they employ hundreds of hands, make all their own sausages, make their own beef, mutton, veal, pork and ham pies, cook their own potatoes and green vegetables. They’ve got about thirty of these shops—Bundaby’s Eating Houses they are called. They must be coining money.”
“Mydaughter married to a sausage-maker!” said Regina in a bewildered tone.
“There’s nothing in that,” Alfred Whittaker rejoined; “there’s nothing in that, my dear girl, provided he makes his sausages good and wholesome and enough of ’em. But I was afraid it would be a bit of a blow to you.”
“My daughter—mydaughter married to a sausage-maker!” Regina repeated.
“Now, come, come, Queenie, you mustn’t—you mustn’t—hang it all, I don’t know what you mustn’t do! The girl fancies the boy, and he has plenty of money. He’s a nice, gentlemanly chap, and she’ll live in style. He’s going to have a motor car; she’ll live in far better style than we’ve ever done.”
“But you are not a sausage-maker,” said Regina. “Alfie, Alfie, I’m afraid I couldn’t have married you if you had been a sausage-maker.”
The word “sausage” seemed positively to stick in Regina’s throat.
“Queenie,” said Alfred, “you know perfectly well that what I was had nothing to do with your feelings towards me. If I had been a crossing-sweeper—”
“Alfie,” said she, interrupting him, “a duke might sweep a crossing and sweep it nobly, and remain a duke, unsullied and unsoiled; but a duke would never make sausages!”
“No, but sausages may make a duke,” said Alfred, promptly. “I know just how you feel, my dear girl—I felt a sort of a lump come in my throat myself when he told me—but he was frank and unashamed. I should hate one of my girls to marry a man who was ashamed of his calling, whatever it was.”
“My noble Alfred!” cried Regina.
“I don’t know that I’m particularly noble,” said Alfred. “I never feel it if I am. I’m afraid it’s only your eyes that see me in such a light. But I did feel a bit of a lump in my throat, a sort of extra big stone in my gizzard, don’t you know. And then it came over me that it is the girl’s own choice, and that it is not for me to damp it.”
“But Maudie doesn’t know.”
“In a way she does, and in another way she doesn’t. I asked young Harry if he had told her the exact nature of his business. He said no, he hadn’t. He had told her he was in business in the city, that they had a great many branches, but he had not told her the exact nature of it. ‘We never think about it,’ he said ‘excepting as the business; and if our friends don’t know that Bundaby’s Eating Houses belong to us, well, we don’t see why we should enlighten them.’”
“If nobody knows—” began Regina.
“Come, come, old lady, you’ll have to swallow it, and we shall have to break it tothe little girl, unless young Harry does it himself.”
It was eleven o’clock before they had any opportunity of speaking on the subject to Maudie; indeed, they were still talking the affair over when they heard the pair come into the hall, and Maudie opened the door of the room in which they were sitting.
“Yes, I must go now,” said Harry Marksby. “I’ve got to be up so fearfully early in the morning. To-morrow night I shall be able to stay a bit later.”
He came in, as he said, just to say good-night, and his way of saying good-night to Maudie’s mother did a good deal to wipe the word “sausage” off the slate of Regina’s impressionability.
“I’ve only come in for a minute, Mrs. Whittaker,” he said. “I must be off home, because I’ve got to be up awfully early in the morning. I made half-a-dozen business appointments for to-morrow ever so early, before I knew that Maudie and I would quite come to an understanding to-night. May I come to-morrow evening?”
“You may come whenever you like,” said Regina. “You had better begin, Harry, as you mean to go on. I have no son of my own, and the young men who take my girls away from me must not think they are going to rob me of my daughters—on the contrary, they must make me forget that I never had sons.”
“I shall be very willing to do that,” Harry Marksbyreturned. “I’ve always managed to get on with my own mother all right, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t get on with my mother-in-law. It won’t be my fault if I don’t.”
“I’m sure it won’t be mine,” said Regina.
“No, I’m sure it won’t,” said he heartily. “Well, good-night, Mrs. Whittaker.” He bent down and kissed her just as frankly as if she had been his own mother, and Regina choked a little as the boy and girl went out of the room together.
In a couple of minutes or so Maudie came back, came in with quite a rush for one of her quiet nature, and flung herself down at her mother’s feet.
“I am so happy, mother dear,” she said. “You have been happy in your married life, and you can understand what I feel. To-morrow will be a great day for me. I’m going to meet Harry in Bond Street at four o’clock, and we’re going to choose our ring together; and after that I’m going right down to the city with him, and I’m going to have my tea at one of the Bundaby shops. I always did think I should like to keep a shop mother,” she went on, “you have heard me say so lots of times, but I never thought that I should one day be at the head of at least thirty!”
The young rush along the pathway of life cheerfully surmounting or overturning every obstacle, while their more cautious elders look on aghast at their nerve.
The young rush along the pathway of life cheerfully surmounting or overturning every obstacle, while their more cautious elders look on aghast at their nerve.
When once Harry Marksby had taken the plunge and was accepted as a lover of Maudie’s, he was determined not to let the grass grow under his feet. May was then about three parts over, and Harry insisted that the wedding should be, as he called it, “pulled off” before the end of July.
“But why this hurry?” asked Regina, who, in spite of her modernity, still retained some traces of her aboriginal ways of thought.
“No hurry at all; but why waste time, Mrs. Whittaker?” said Harry. “What is there to wait for? We have plenty of money. I always go away for August, and, for an occasion like this, my father won’t think anything of it if I take a good share of September too. A man only gets married now and again, you know.”
“But why not leave it till the autumn?”
“Because I want to take Maudie for a good trip abroad. She wishes it—I wish it. What do yousay? Clothes? Oh, surely we needn’t consider a few clothes. Get as little as she can do with for a continental trip—lay the wedding gown up in lavender, and let Maudie buy the rest of her things in Paris as we come home.”
“There’s reason in it,” said Alfred Whittaker, from the depths of his big chair.
“I don’t like my daughter being married in such a hurry as this,” said Regina, half hesitatingly.
“But why? Hurried marriages are the fashion nowadays. Royalty pulls it off in a couple of months or so—long engagements are out of date. I knew a man once,” Harry went on—“I didn’t know him very well, but I met him—who had been engaged to a girl for thirteen years, and they somehow or other didn’t altogether hit it off when they did get married. There’s nothing to be gained by waiting. You don’t really get to know one another until the knot is actually tied. I know Maudie as well now as I should know her if I was engaged to her for seven years.”
“I don’t want you to wait seven years,” said Regina.
“Well, I should hope not,” replied Harry.
“But as many months—” began Regina, when Harry Marksby impetuously interrupted her.
“Oh no, Mrs. Whittaker,” he exclaimed. “Maudie would be worn to fiddlestrings long before seven months were over. The end of July, if you please. I can work all my business up to that point—then everything’s slack, it’s a sort of off-time, so to speak—and I can go away with a clear conscience andgive my wife a ripping honeymoon—get a ripping honeymoon myself, for the matter of that.”
“You have decided where you want to go?” Regina inquired.
“Yes, we’re going to Switzerland, taking the Rhine on our way and the Italian lakes as we come back; get a fortnight in Paris, or if we drive it too late for that, stay three or four days in Paris, and perhaps go back again for a few days in the early autumn—if Maudie wants clothes, that is to say.”
“I sha’n’t,” said Maudie. “I am not going to get my dresses in Paris. I’ve come to see now that we made fools of ourselves when we came home from school with everything Parisian. They were horrid, and were a full year in advance of the fashions here. I hate being a year ahead of the fashions—it’s quite as bad as being two years behind them. I would much rather not have all my things bought now, mother. I think Harry is quite right. A couple of good tailor-dresses, a few muslins, my wedding dress, and a tea-gown, and other things of that kind, are necessary, but I can get my further trousseau as I want it.”
“I call that a practical suggestion,” put in Alfred Whittaker.
“Most practical,” agreed Harry. “That was why I was fascinated in the first instance by Maudie—she is so practical.”
“Do you want a wife to be altogether practical?” demanded Julia, while Maudie looked up anxiously, as if her beloved Harry was about to find some flaw in her.
A most odd look flashed across the young man’skeen face. “You’ll understand one day,” he said, addressing Julia directly. “You’ll understand, and you’ll sympathize with me. A fellow likes a wife who knows how many beans make five. A fool has no charm for any man, except he’s too big a black-guard to want his wife to find him out. As regards frocks, and the spending of money, and the business side of life, a man does like his wife to be altogether practical.”
“That implies another side of the picture,” said Julia.
“Yes, it does. And the other side of the picture is me and those that may come after me; and if a man is a straight, clean wholesome man, he likes his wife to be altogether sentimental as regards him, and those that come after him. You will understand me some day, Julia, my dear.”
Maudie’s face dropped instantly, and something like the flash of diamonds came into her eyes. She heaved a great sigh, a tremulous sigh, not one of pain; and hearing it, Harry Marksby caught hold of her hand and tried to pull her ring off. And Maudie began to laugh with those tell-tale little twinkling drops bedewing her eyelashes, and Regina looked on, much as an elephant might regard her offspring at play, with a look which only required a little encouragement for her to put it into words. And if that look had been put into words, they would have been but three—“My noble boy!”
“Ah, well,” said Julia, now busy a few yards away, “you are not half good enough for our Maudie, Harry. You are taking away the biggest part ofmy life, and of course you are very cock o’ whoop about it; but if you’re not good to her, Harry, you will have to reckon withme.”
“All right, I’ll be there when you want me,” Harry replied. “Then we may take it, Mrs. Whittaker,” he continued, with a change of tone, “that the end of July will be the date to work to?”
“I suppose so,” said Regina, “if her father has no objection.”
“I detest long engagements myself,” said Alfred Whittaker. “I never could see the good of them. I was engaged much too long to you, my dear.”
“It was the happiest time of my life—” Regina began, somewhat wistfully.
“Oh, don’t say that,” her husband interrupted, “don’t say that. It might have been happier than any time that went before—I know it was for me—but at best it is only a foreshadowing, it’s only like water to wine, like moonlight to sunlight. There, there, children,” he said, flinging out his hands with a deprecating gesture, “there, there, your old dad doesn’t often get so sentimental as that. The end of July let it be, and after that we shall all go away and breathe freely.”
As a matter of fact, after that Ye Dene became like a seething whirlpool. Such a coming and going, such a dumping of parcels and patterns and presents, such sending out of invitations and receiving of congratulations there was, that more than once even Regina herself admitted that two months was quitelong enough for a young couple to be engaged in these modern days.
The Marksby family were frankly and undeniably delighted and overjoyed at the new state of affairs. They received Maudie with wide-open arms, lavished their love and admiration and gifts upon her. Papa Marksby came across to Ye Dene one evening, and was solemnly closeted with Alfred Whittaker for the space of a whole hour, during which time they smoked extremely long cigars, drank whisky-and-soda out of extremely long tumblers, and went solemnly, although in very friendly fashion, into extremely long figures.
And then Alfred Whittaker introduced his future son-in-law’s father into the circle in the drawing-room, and Papa Marksby informed Regina in a voice of much satisfaction and some oiliness, that he and his good friend and neighbor had settled all the little details of future ways and means for the young couple.
“Fifty thousand pounds, my dear Queenie,” said Alfred Whittaker, when he found himself once more alone with his wife.
“Fifty thousand pounds, Alfie? What do you mean?”
“Fifty thousand pounds, as our neighbor across the road puts it, ‘to be tied to Maudie’s tail!’”
“You mean to say he’s going to settle fifty thousand pounds upon her?”
“I do. Papa Marksby isn’t the man to do things by halves. He puts it very clearly and in a very business-like manner, that he has set aside the sumof a hundred and fifty thousand pounds to be divided equally, on their marriage, between his two daughters and his prospective daughter-in-law. He says he can well afford it, that it won’t affect the business the least little bit in the world, and, whatever happens, the three girls will always be safe, they and their children after them. It’s a wonderful thing,” he went on, “that two girls like Rachel and Emmeline Marksby, with fifty thousand pounds apiece to their fortune—to their immediate fortune, one may say—should remain unmarried, and our little Maudie, who hasn’t and never will have, more than a third of that sum, should snap up a big prize as she has done.”
“I knew they were well off,” said Regina, “I knew it in many ways as soon as they came here, but I am not surprised that Maudie has made this wealthy marriage. She is very beautiful—verybeautiful. What surprises me is that the Marksbys should turn out to have so much money. He gave over a hundred pounds for her engagement ring, and next week he’s going to buy her a diamond necklace. Think ofmydaughter with a diamond necklace.”
“That is as it should be,” said Alfred, complacently. “Even when it is made out of sausages.”
“Dear, dear, Alfie, how you do harp on those sausages!”
“My dear, I went and lunched on them the other day—excellent, excellent! Don’t know how they do it for the money. I saw the whole process—went over the factory. Everything as clean as a new pin; you could eat your dinner off the floor.”
“I—I—don’t know,” said Regina. “It seems alittle.—However, having put my hand to the plough, I am not one to look back. Once my daughter has married sausages, I will honor sausages!”
“You will certainly be able to honor a good deal that sausages will give her,” said Alfred Whittaker. “And now, Queenie, there’s a subject on which I have been trying to get a word with you for the last week or more. What are we going to give, Queenie, for our wedding present?”
But that was not a question to be answered off-hand. It was a matter requiring much consideration, consultation—divination, I might say. The major points of the coming ceremony were all arranged; the bride’s dress, the costumes of the maids, the favors for the men, and the wording of the invitations. It was the last and greatest, and perhaps the least easy to decide—what should be the present of the father and mother of the bride.
It is an accepted rule that a gift is enhanced if it comes in the nature of a surprise.
The great question was not settled exclusively by Mr. and Mrs. Whittaker.
“You must,” said Alfred to his wife in the sanctity of their sleeping apartment, “find out what Maudie would like to have for her wedding present from us. I wouldn’t buy her ‘a pig in a poke,’ she’ll have too many of such articles, and it is important that she should have something from us that she really wants.”
“The question is,” said Regina to her lord, “what your ideas are on the subject.”
“No, my dear Queenie, my ideas will not make the least difference,” he returned, as he carefully examined one side of his respectable face to see if he had scraped it sufficiently clean. “I can afford, my dear Queenie, to give you a free hand in this matter. I only stipulate that it shall be something that Maudie wants—really wants. A grand piano?”
“Not a grand piano,” said Regina. “Mr. Marksby’s rich aunt is giving them that.”
“Bless me! I didn’t know they had a rich aunt. I thought Mr. Marksby had made all the money in the family. Well, there are plenty of things to make a choice of, silver for the table, furniture for the drawing-room, a brougham—anything else that she likes and that you like.”
“Well, I will have a little chat with Julia,” said Regina, with that rapt air of contemplation which was all her own. “Julia is a girl with ideas, Julia is far removed from the commonplace, Julia is a genius.”
“Well,” said Alfred Whittaker, “I don’t know that it takes much genius to choose a wedding present.”
“In a sense, dear Alfie, in a sense. But there is one question, dearest, that you must decide. How much is our wedding present to cost?”
“Well,” said Alfred, as he gave his face a final rub with the towel, “thank God I am able to give a hundred pounds for my girl’s wedding present, to give her a decent trousseau and to give her a decent dot. What you like to add to that is your own affair. There, now,” he said, as he threw the towel on the rail by the washstand, “I can’t waste another moment, I must get my tub, charming as your conversation always is.”
He whisked out of the room, a quaint figure enough in his demi-toilette. But Regina saw nothing quaint about her lord and master. “A handsome man with a presence,” was her usual description of him. But there are moments when the state of being which we describe as “a presence” has its grotesque aspects, and surely the flight to the bathroom is one of them. Mrs. Whittaker might have been the little blind godherself for all she saw of the grotesque in her noble Alfred.
“A hundred pounds,” she murmured, stopping in the process of arranging her hair for the day in order to rest the end of her hair brush on the edge of the toilet-table, and gazing at herself fixedly in the glass. “A hundred pounds! And, thank goodness, I can if need be put a hundred pounds of my own to it; I have only two darlings. I must consult Julia.”
Mrs. Whittaker took the earliest opportunity of a chat with her younger flower. It was not many minutes after Alfred Whittaker had departed for his office that a maid-servant came running across from Ingleside with a message to the effect that three large parcels had come for the bride, as she was affectionately called on both sides of the road, and would Miss Maudie please come across and open them, as the young ladies were dying to know what they contained. So Maudie disappeared in the direction of Ingleside, and Mrs. Whittaker seized the opportunity of broaching the important subject that was uppermost in her mind to Julia.
“Don’t go away, Julia,” she said, almost nervously.
“Yes, mother darling, what is the matter?”
“Nothing is the matter. But I want to consult you.”
“Oh,” said Julia, with a little air of conscious pride, “and what do you want to consult me about?”
“It is about our present—your father’s and mine.”
“I should ask Maudie herself.”
“No, your father wants it to be a surprise, quite asurprise. I thought if you knew, or could find out something she really wants, I could go to town and meet your father and get it settled.”
“What is daddy’s idea?”
“Your father’s idea is a grand piano, but Mr. Marksby’s aunt is giving them that.”
“Well, they don’t want two,” said Julia, sensibly. “The employees are giving them table silver, and the directors are giving them three silver bowls. If I were you I should give Maudie diamond earrings.”
“You think she would like them?”
“Yes, dear mother; every woman who has had her ears pierced likes diamond earrings.”
“What sort of diamond earrings?”
“Oh,” said Julia, “there can be no doubt the sort. Have the biggest single stones that you can squeeze out of the money.”
So the great question was settled, and a day or two later Mrs. Whittaker and Julia went up to town and lunched with the noble Alfred. They lunched at a very cosy little restaurant not a thousand yards from Charing Cross. A spoonful of white soup, a scrap of salmon, a serve of chicken stewed in the French fashion in the pot, and some asparagus, washed down by some excellent white wine, and followed by a black coffee and a liqueur, made the trio very much inclined to look on the rosy side of life. Then they got into a hansom, Julia sitting bodkin-wise, and drove off to the jeweler’s at which Mrs. Whittaker had decided that they would buy Maudie’s earrings. Their choice fell upon a pair which the shopman described as “fit for an empress.” They were notvulgarly large, but they were of the purest water, and of the most dazzling brilliance.
“You think,” said Mrs. Whittaker to Julia, “you think that Maudie would like these better than the larger ones?”
“Oh yes, mother, there’s no comparison. The big ones don’t look better than paste; these are unmistakably the real thing.”
“It is a pleasure to sell diamonds to so good a judge,” said the gentleman who was attending to them.
“I should have thought,” said Alfred Whittaker, in his most prosaic manner, “that as long as you sold your goods it would not matter to whom you sold them.”
“Excuse me, sir, that is where you make a mistake. We have a lady customer—she is a duchess—who frequently brings her jewels to be cleaned. She says her maid is a child at jewel-cleaning. It is not our business to say to the contrary, but that lady kills every diamond in her possession.”
“How kills?” said Julia.
“I cannot say, madam. Something in her magnetism causes the stones to look dead and slatey. The stones that she has had in her possession and worn continually for the last twenty years are not now worth a twentieth part of what was originally paid for them—all the fire has gone out of them. Whether they would recover themselves by being worn by a magnetic wearer I do not know. We have a young lady here in our establishment of quite radiant magnetism. She does no work, but gets a good salary andsimply remains here and occupies herself as she likes and wears certain jewels a certain number of times. Sometimes when that particular lady—the duchess—is anxious to make a great appearance on some special occasion, we have her best stones for a month or even longer. This young lady of ours wears them all day long, and I can assure you it is an odd sight to see her with her two hands covered with rings, even her thumbs, her arms loaded with bracelets, one diamond necklace worn in the ordinary way, and another one worn over her shoulders.”
“And the diamonds recover their color?”
“Oh yes, madam, but these are only the stones that her Grace wears occasionally. I have been told,” he went on, “that their brilliance never lasts with her, and that long before the Drawing-room, or whatever the function may be, is over, they look as if they had been black-leaded. You can quite understand, sir,” he said, turning to Alfred Whittaker, “that it is positive pain to me to sell any of our best diamonds to such a wearer.”
“Well,” said Alfred, “the lady who is going to wear these earrings will never, I think, trouble you in the same way.”
“Oh no!” said Julia.
And then, somehow, the idea was born that Alfred Whittaker should give a little trifle of remembrance to Regina and their daughter. The little trifle of remembrance consisted of a very handsome turquoise ring for the mother and a very smart bangle for the girl.
“I had no idea, dear daddy,” said Julia, “of yourbuying me anything to-day. I have been wanting one of these bangles for, oh! such a long time.”
“And you never breathed it!” said Regina.
“I never thought of it,” said Julia; “but I am all the more delighted because I did not think of anything for myself.”
Then they departed carrying with them the lovely earrings which Maudie was to wear in remembrance of home as long as she should live.
“They know you in that shop, daddy,” said Julia, as they walked back toward Piccadilly.
“Oh yes, I have gone there for years; but how do you know that they knew me?”
“Oh—from the way they said ‘good day’ to you when you went in, and then you brought the earrings away with you and only paid for them by cheque—to say nothing of my beautiful bangle and mother’s ring.”
At this Alfred Whittaker laughed and said that being known at shops like this was one of the advantages of having a solid business behind one. Then they looked into one or two windows, and Mrs. Whittaker beguiled Alfred into a certain lace shop under the excuse that she was going to wear a lace garment at the wedding and that she wanted him to help her to choose it. Then they went to some very smart tea-rooms and refreshed themselves after the usual manner of five o’clock, and then they went home to Ye Dene, where they found Maudie, who had just come in, struggling with a perfect avalanche of presents.
“Where did you get that heart?” said Julia, looking fixedly at her sister.
Maudie’s hand, the one with the diamonds on it, touched the jewel. “Oh, my heart,” she said in her soft, cooing voice. “Harry has been over, he brought it from town—he wants me to wear it always. See, it’s got a little miniature of him at the back. He thought I should like to have it to be married in—just his heart, you know—because I had decided not to wear my necklace, or—my—er—fender.”
“A very pretty idea,” said Regina, beaming proudly upon the bride-elect, with an expression as if the thought had emanated from her brain instead of that of the bridegroom-to-be. “We have come from town, your father and I, and we have brought you a present.”
“Oh! you darlings! What have you brought me? But I know it is something nice.”
“It’s not very big,” said her father, producing the little packet from his waistcoat pocket, “but we hope you will like it all the same.”
“Oh, a ring,” cried Maudie, as she caught sight of the box. “I love rings more than anything else, and it is so sweet and kind of you to remember my little tastes, and to give me something that I can carry about with me always when I am not living here any more.”
Regina looked hard out of the window. In spite of her pride at her girl’s approaching marriage, it was a bitter wrench to her to think that she soon would have only one child in the home nest. Indeed,she looked forward further still to the time when she and Alfred would be Darby and Joan, with no young life to disturb the serenity of their daily round. It was the voice of Julia which brought her back to earth again.
“Now come, don’t stand there rhapsodizing about it, but open your parcel, old lady, and see what luck will send you,” she said to her sister. “I am sure Harry has given you rings enough. You don’t credit mother and father with over-much sense when you think they would give you something of which Harry has already given you a dozen.”
At this moment Maudie gave a faint scream. “Oh, you darlings! you darlings! I never thought of this; I don’t know which of you to kiss first. Oh, oh, what will Harry say? Oh! Julia, you had a hand in this. Single stone earrings! Oh, they are too good for me.”
“Why should you say they are too good for you?” said Regina. “Nothing is too good for me to give my daughter.”
“But you were right in one thing,” said Julia, as Maudie slipped one of the sparkling stones from its nest of white velvet, and insinuated the gold ring into her ear, “they have given you something that you can wear every day.”