CHAPTER XXIVThe Ham SandwichElma lay on her bed in the pink and white room. The first warm spring sunshine in vain tried to find an opening to filter through partly closed shutter and blinds. A nurse in grey dress and white cap and apron moved silently in the half-light created by drawn blinds and an open door She nodded to Mrs. Leighton who had just come in and who now sat near the darkened window. The nurse pointedly referred her to the bed, as though she had good news for her.Elma opened her eyes. Their misty violet seemed dazed with long sleep."Oh, mummy, you there?" she asked."Yes," said Mrs. Leighton quietly.Elma looked at her inquiringly."Is there anything you want?" asked Mrs. Leighton in answer to that expression. How often had they asked the same question uselessly within the past weeks!Elma looked up at the white walls."Yes, mummy, there's one thing. I should like a large ham sandwich.""There," said Nurse emphatically. "That's it. Now the fight is really going to begin.""I should like to have plenty of butter on it and quite a lot of mustard," said Elma."Mustard?" said Mrs. Leighton helplessly. "Do you know what's been wrong with you all these weeks?"Elma moved her eyes curiously, there being not much else that she could move. It had never dawned on her till that moment to wonder what had been wrong with her."No, mummy," she said, "I haven't a notion."Mrs. Leighton looked for instructions to the nurse."She'd better know now, Mrs. Leighton," she said, "now that she begins to ask for ham sandwiches.""You've had typhoid fever, Elma," said her mother.Elma sighed gently."Dear me," she said, "how grand. But you don't know how hungry I am or you would give me a ham sandwich. You ought to be rather glad that I'm so much better that I want to eat."Then an expression of great cunning came into her eyes."I ought to be fed up if I've had a fever," she informed them."We shall get the doctor to see to that," said the nurse.She came to her and held her hand firmly."Do you know," she said, "you have been very ill and you are ever so much better, but nothing you've gone through will worry you so much as what you've got to do now. You've got to be starved for ten days, when you are longing to eat. You will lie dreaming of food--and----""Ham sandwiches?" asked Elma."And we shall not be allowed to give them to you," said Nurse."Isn't she nice, mummy, she's quite sorry. And people say that nurses are hard-hearted," said Elma."I've had typhoid myself," said Nurse briefly.Elma looked at her, her own eyelids heavy with sleep still to be made up."Well, barring the sandwich, what about lemon cheese cakes," she asked.Mrs. Leighton let her hands fall."Oh, Elma," she said, "what a thing to choose at this stage.""Or sausages," remarked Elma. "I'm simply longing for sausages."She endeavoured to throw an appealing look towards Nurse."This isn't humour on my part, mummy dear," she said. "I just can't help it. I can't get sausages out of my mind," she said."If you would think of a little steamed fish or a soaked rusk, you'd be a little nearer it," said Nurse, "you'll have that in ten days."Elma looked at her in a determined way."I've always been told that a simple lunch, a very simple lunch might be made out of a ham sandwich. Why should it be denied to me now?""Elma," said Mrs. Leighton, "I never knew you were so obstinate.""You know, mummy," said Elma, "I'm not dreaming now. I'm wide awake, and I'm awfully hungry. I'm sorry I ever thought of sausages, because ham sandwiches were just about as much as I could bear. Now I've both to think of, and Nurse won't bring me either.""Don't mind her, Mrs. Leighton," said the nurse. "It's always the same, and, without nurses, generally a relapse to follow. You aren't going to have a relapse," she said to Elma.She gave her some milk in a methodical manner, and the down-dropping of Elma's eyelids continued till she fell asleep once more.So she had slept since the fever had begun to go down. Probably she had had the best of the intervening weeks.There was the slow stupor of a fever gaining ground. It began with the headache of the Turberville's dance, a headache which never lifted until Elma returned to her own again, weak and prostrate in bed. The stupor gradually cut her off from common affairs. It sent her to bed first because she could no longer stand up, and it crowded back her ideas and her memory till at last she was in the full swing of a delirium. What this illness cost Mr. and Mrs. Leighton in anxiety, probably no one knew. Elma had always covered up her claims to sympathy and petting, always been moderately well. Here she was with blazing cheeks and wandering eyes talking largely and at random about anything or every one.Mr. Leighton used to sit by her and stroke her hair. Long years afterwards, she was to feel the touch of his fingers, hear the tones of his voice as he said, "Poor little Elma."She faded gradually into the delirium which seemed to have cut her illness in two, the one illness where she lay with dry mouth and an everlasting headache, the other where she was merely hungry.Mrs. Leighton was appalled by the worrying of Elma's mind. She went through some of her wild dreams with her, calling her back at places by the mere sound of her voice to a kind of sub-consciousness in which Elma grew infinitely relieved."Oh, is that you, mummy? Have I really been dreaming?"She dreamt of Mabel and she dreamt of Adelaide Maud. But more than any one, she dreamt of Mr. Symington. Here is where the deceptiveness of a fever comes in. Elma pleaded so piteously with her mother to bring back Mr. Symington that Mrs. Leighton awoke to an entirely new and wrong idea of the state of Elma's affections."It's quite ridiculous, John," said she, "but that child, she was only a child, seems to have filled her head with notions of Mr. Symington.""What! More of it?" asked poor Mr. Leighton."She begs and begs to have him back," said Mrs. Leighton."I've never made out why he left as he did," said Mr. Leighton. "There was always the idea with me that he cleared out for a reason. But this small child, why, she hadn't her hair up.""She will soon be eighteen," said Mrs. Leighton.He went into her room a little later. Elma lay with unseeing eyes staring at him. He could hardly bear it."Elma," he said vaguely, trying to recall her."Oh," she answered promptly, but still staring, "is that you, Sym--Sym--Symington!"Her father choked down what he could of the lump that gathered, and moved quietly away.These were dark days for every one. Elma had the best of it. She left the Symington groove after a day or so, and worked on to Isobel. Isobel invaded her mind. It was a blessing that Isobel was barred by real distaste to the business from going in to help with the nursing of Elma. What she said of her pointed to more than a mere dislike. It revolved into fear as the delirium progressed. Then a second nurse arrived, and between them the two began really to decrease the temperature. The first good news came, "Asleep for ten minutes," and after that there was no backward turn in the illness for Elma.Throughout this time there had been the keenest inquiries made as to what had caused the illness. Cuthbert was down and "made things hum" in the matter of wakening up the sanitary authorities and so on. But no flaw in the arrangement of the White House or anything near it could be discovered. Then Dr. Merryweather called one day."I have another patient in Miss Annie," he said.Miss Annie! This gave a clue."Typhoid at her age is unusual," he said, "but she has not developed the power of resisting disease like ordinary people. She has been in a good condition for harbouring every germ that happened to be about. I'm afraid we cannot save her." He turned to Mrs. Leighton. His kind old face twitched suddenly."Oh, dear, dear," she exclaimed. "What will Miss Grace do? What will little Elma do?""Miss Grace is all right," said Dr. Merryweather. "I've seen to that. Elma must not know, of course.""This looks like contraction from a common cause," said Cuthbert. "I'll be at it whatever it is. We don't want any one else sacrificed."Dr. Merryweather looked at him gravely."I have just been getting at the tactics of the local government," said he. "You couldn't believe they could be so prompt in Ridgetown. Three weeks ago, a gardener living near Miss Annie complained of an atrocious stench coming from over the railway. It was so bad that when the local government body at his demand approached it, they had to turn and run. An open stream had been used as a common sewer and run into the railway cutting, where it had stagnated. Can you imagine the promptness of the local government? Evans, the gardener, threatened to report to you, Mr. Leighton, since your daughter was so ill and had visited so much at Miss Annie's. They managed to keep his mouth shut, and they have removed the sewer. Too late for Miss Annie.""Too late for my little girl," said Mr. Leighton.It seemed an extraordinary thing that the two daughters who had gone away, and given them so much anxiety, should be coming home radiantly independent, and Elma, sheltered at home, should be lying just lately rescued from death.The same thought seemed to strike Dr. Merryweather in another connection."Ah, well," he said, "we would save some gentle souls a lot of suffering if we could. It's no use evading life, you see, and its consequences. Death has stolen into Miss Annie's beautiful bedroom, from an ugly sewer across the way. Nothing we could do for her now can save her."Miss Annie died on a quiet morning when Elma lay dreaming of ham sandwiches. Elma never forgot that, nor how dreadful it seemed that she had never asked for Miss Annie nor Miss Grace, but just dreamed of what she would eat."You had had a lot to stand," Nurse told her a week or two afterwards when she heard about Miss Annie for the first time, "and it's a compensation that's often given to us when we are ill, just to be peaceful and not think at all."Dr. Merryweather had wakened up Miss Grace finally in a sharp manner."There's that poor child been ill all this time and you've never even seen her. Take her along some flowers and let her see that you are not grieving too much for Miss Annie. She won't get better if she worries about you."Then to Elma."Cheer up Miss Grace when she comes. You have your life before you, and she has had to put all hers behind her. Don't let her be down if you can help it."In this wise he pitted the two against one another, so that they met with great fortitude."Why, my dear, how pretty your hair is," Miss Grace had burst out.Elma was lying on a couch near the window by this time. She looked infinitely fragile."Oh, Miss Grace, it is a wig," she replied.Miss Grace laughed in a jerky hysterical sort of manner."Then I wish I wore a wig," said she.Elma smiled."Do you know, that's what they all say. They come in and tell me in a most surprised manner, "Why, how well you are looking!" and say they never saw me so pretty and all that kind of thing. And then I look in my mirror, and I see quite plainly that I'm a perfect fright. But I don't care, you know. Mabel and Jean know now how ill I've been. I'm so glad they didn't before, aren't you? It would have spoiled Jean's coming home like a conqueror. They say she sings beautifully. And oh, Miss Grace, I've such a lot to tell you. One thing is about Mr. Symington. You know I never said why he went away. It was because Miss Meredith made him believe that Robin was engaged to Mabel, and she wasn't at all. It made her appear like a flirt, you know. Didn't it?"Miss Grace nodded."Well, I've been thinking and thinking. I can't tell you how I've been dreaming about Mr. Symington. Well, now, I've been thinking, 'Couldn't we invite him to Isobel's wedding?'"Miss Grace's eyes gleamed."Fancy Mr. Symington at breakfast at some outlandish place. A letter arrives. He opens it. 'Ha! The wedding invitation. Robin Meredith, the bounder!' I beg your pardon, Miss Grace. 'Robin Meredith to Isobel--what--niece of--why what's this?' What will he do, Miss Grace?""Come to the wedding, sure," said Miss Grace laughingly."Well, if I've to send the invitation myself, one is going to Mr. Symington."Elma had not passed her dreaming hours in vain.Besides, Miss Grace had got over the difficult part of meeting Elma again, and was right back in her old part of counsellor, evidently without a quiver of the pain that divided them. Yet, they both felt the barrier that was there, the barrier of that presence of Miss Annie which had always entered first into their conversations, and now could not be mentioned.Elma thought of the visits that Miss Grace would have to make to her. She saw that Miss Grace had been warned not to agitate her. This was enough to enable her to take the matter entirely in her own hands with no agitation at all."I think you know, Miss Grace, that when one has been so near dying as I've been, and not minded--I mean I had no knowledge that I was so ill, and even didn't care much--since it was myself, you know, except for the trouble it gave to people----"Elma was becoming a little long-winded."I want to tell you that you must always tell me about Miss Annie, not mind just because they say I'm not to be agitated, or anything of that sort. I won't be a bit agitated if you tell me about Miss Annie.""My dear love," Miss Grace stopped abruptly."Dr. Merryweather said----" and she stopped again."Yes, Dr. Merryweather said the same to me, he said that on no account was I to speak to you of Miss Annie. Dr. Merryweather simply knows nothing about you and me."Miss Grace shook her head drearily."You are a bad little invalid," said she.But it broke the ice a little bit, and one day afterwards Miss Grace told her more than she could bear herself. Dr. Merryweather was right, Miss Grace broke down over the last loving message to Elma. She had a little pearl necklace for Elma to wear, and fastened it on without a word.Then came Mrs. Leighton looking anxious."See, mummy, Miss Grace has given me a beautiful little necklace from Miss Annie."All trace of Elma's childish nervousness had departed with her fever. She had looked right into other worlds, and it had made an easier thing of this one. Besides, Miss Grace must not be allowed to cry.Miss Grace did not cry so much as one might have expected. Miss Annie's death was a thing she had feared for twenty-eight years, and Dr. Merryweather had given her no sympathy. He had almost made her think that Annie ought not to consider herself an invalid. How she connected typhoid fever with the neurotic illness which Dr. Merryweather would never acknowledge as an illness, it was difficult to imagine. Certainly, she had the feeling that Annie in a pathetic manner had justified her invalidism at last. It was a sad way in which to recover one's self-respect, but in an unexplained way she felt that with Dr. Merryweather she had recovered her self-respect. She could refer to Miss Annie now, and awaken that twitching of his sympathies which one could see plainly in that rugged often inscrutable face, and feel thereby that she had not misplaced her confidence by giving up all these years to Annie. Indeed, the death of Miss Annie affected Dr. Merryweather far more than one could imagine. As also the sight of Elma, thinned down and fragile, her hair gone and a wig on.He teased her unmercifully about the wig."So long as I look respectable when Mabel and Jean come home! Oh! Dr. Merryweather, please have me looking respectable when Mabel and Jean come home."Dr. Merryweather promised to have her as fat as a pumpkin.CHAPTER XXVThe Wild AnemoneMabel and Jean had been successfully deceived up to a certain point in regard to Elma's illness. They were told the facts when the danger was past. It was made clear to them then that the fewer people at home in an illness of that sort the better, while skilled nurses were so conveniently to be had. Mabel pined a little over not having been there to nurse Elma, as though she had landed her sensitive little sister into an illness by leaving too much on her shoulders. The independent vitality of Jean constantly reassured her however."She would just have been worse with that scared face of yours at her bedside," Jean would declare. "Every time you think of Elma you get as white as though you were just about to perform in the Queen's Hall. You'll have angina pectoris if you don't look out."Jean had made a great friend of a nurse who never talked of common things like heart disease or toothache. "Angina pectoris" and "periostitis" were used instead. When Jean wrote home in an airy manner in the midst of Elma's illness to say that she was suffering from an attack of "periostitis," Mrs. Leighton immediately wired, "Get a nurse for Jean if required.""What in the wide world have you been telling mother?" asked Mabel with that alarming communication in her hand.Jean was trying to learn fencing from an enthusiast in the corridor."Oh, well." Her face fell a trifle at the consideration of the telegram. "I did have toothache," said Jean.Mabel stared at the telegram. "Mummy can't be losing her reason over Elma's being ill," she said. "She couldn't possibly suppose you would want a nurse for toothache. That's going a little too far, isn't it?"Mabel was really quite anxious about her mother."Oh, well," said Jean lamely, "Nurse Shaw said it was periostitis.""And you--"--Mabel's eyes grew round and indignant--"you really wrote and told poor mummy that you had perios--os----""Titis," said Jean. "Of course, I did--why not?"She was a trifle ashamed of herself, but the dancing eyes of the fencing enthusiast held her to the point."That's the worst of early Victorian parents," said this girl with a bright cheerful giggle. "One can't even talk the vernacular nowadays."She made an unexpected lunge at Jean."Oh," cried Jean, "I must answer that telegram. Say I'm an idiot, Mabel, and that I've only had toothache."Mabel for once performed the duties of an elder sister in a grim manner."Am an idiot," she wrote, "only had toothache an hour. Fencing match on, forgive hurry. Jean."She read it out to the fencers."Oh, I say," said Jean with visible chagrin, "you are a little beggar, Mabel.""Send it," cried the fencing girl. "One must be laughed at now and again--it's good for one. Besides, you can't be both a semi-neurotic invalid and a good fencer. Better give up the neurotic habit."Jean stepped back in derision."I'm not neurotic," she affirmed."You wouldn't have sent that message about your perio--piérrot--what's the gentleman's name? if you hadn't been neurotic."Mabel had scribbled off another message."Well," said Jean gratefully, "my own family don't talk to me like that.""Oh, no," said the fencing girl coolly, "they run round you with hot bottles, and mustard blisters. All families do. They make you think about your toothache until you aren't pleased when you haven't got it. That's the benefit of being here. Here it's a bore to be ill."She went suddenly on guard."Oh," said Jean, in willing imitation of that attitude, "if you only teach me to fence, you may say what you like."It was more the importance of Jean's estimate of herself than any real leanings towards being an invalid which made her look on an hour's depression as a serious thing, and an attack of toothache as an item of news which ought immediately to be communicated to her family. She criticized life entirely through her own feelings and experiences. Mabel and Elma had enough of the sympathetic understanding of the nature of others, to tune their own characters accordingly. But Jean, unless terrified, or hurt, or joyous herself never allowed these feelings to be transmitted from any one, or because of any one, she happened to love. It kept her from maturing as Mabel and even Elma had done. She would always be more or less of the self-centred person. It was a useful trait in connexion with singing for instance, and it seemed also as though it might make her a good fencer. But the flippant merry fencing enthusiast in front of her was right when she saw the pitfall ready for the Jean who should one day dedicate herself to her ailments. In the case of Mabel this very lack of sympathy in Jean helped her in a lonely manner to regain some of her lost confidence in herself. It never dawned once on Jean that Mabel was fighting down a trouble of her own. Mabel had bad nights and ghostly dreams, and a headache occasionally, which seemed as though it would put an end to any enthusiasm she might ever have had for such an occupation as piano playing. But in the morning one got up, and there were always the interests, the joys or troubles, or the quaint little oddities of other girls, to knock this introspection and worry into the background, and make Mabel her companionable self once more. It was better, after all, than the scrutiny of one's own family, even a kind one. Jean was merely conscious of change in any one when they refused a match or a drive or a walk with her. The world was of a piece when that happened--"stodgy"--and the interests of Jean were being neglected--a great crime.Mabel despatched the telegram, and the fencing was resumed with vigour. The corridor at this end of the house contained a bay window, seated and cushioned, and more comfortable as a tea-room than many of the little bedrooms. They had arranged tea-cups, and were preparing that fascinating and delightful meal when a girl advanced from the far end of the corridor, in a lithe swinging manner. The fencing girl drew back her foil abruptly. "Who is that?" she asked, staring. The girls were conscious of a most refreshing and invigorating surprise. Elsie Clutterbuck stood there, with the wild sweetness of the open air in her bearing, her hair ruffled gently, her eyes shining in a pale setting."You beautiful wild anemone!" breathed the fencing girl in a whisper.Mabel and Jean heard the soft words with surprise. It was a new light through which to look on Elsie. They had never quite dropped the pose of the benignant girls who had taken Elsie "out of herself." To them she was rather a protégé than a friend; much as Mabel at least would have despised herself for that attitude had she detected it in herself. She acknowledged an immediate drop in her calculations, when the fencing girl did not ask as most people did, "Who is that queer little thing?" It was difficult in one sudden moment to adjust oneself to introducing Elsie as "You beautiful wild anemone!"Jean, however, merely summed up the fencing girl as rather ignorant. "Why," she said frankly, "I declare it's Elsie!" and in a whisper declared, "There's nothing beautiful about Elsie."They welcomed her heartily, curiously, and wondered if Lance's latest news of the family was true."Mother Buttercluck," he had written, "has come in for a little legacy. It's she who clucks now (grammar or no grammar) and the Professor chimes in as the butter portion merely. May heard about it. Can you imagine Mrs. C. saying, 'I'd love to have some one to lean on,' and the Buttercluck, who would have declared before--'On whom to lean. Pray do be more careful of your English,' not having a cluck left! Though I do think Elsie had knocked a little of the cluck out before the legacy arrived."Elsie did not seem to be bursting with news. She sat in rather a grown-up, reliable way, opening her furry coat at their orders, and drawing off her gloves. Her hair was up in loose, heavy coils on her neck, and it parted in front with that restless rippling appearance which made one think of the open air. The tip-tilted nose, which had seemed the principal fault in the face which had always been termed plain in childhood, seemed now to lend a piquancy to her features. These were delicately irregular, and her eyebrows were too high, if one might rely on the analysis of Jean.The fencing girl sat and stared at her with her foil balanced on a crossed knee. If one wanted to do the fencing girl a real kindness, to make her radiantly happy, then one introduced her to some one in whom she might be interested. Life was a garden to her, and the friends she made the flowers. She was not particular about plucking them either. "Oh, no indeed," she would say, "I've seen some one in the park to-day who is more sweet and lovely than any one human ought to be. I should love to know her, of course, but she was just as great a joy to look at. Why should you want to have everything that's beautiful? It's merely a form of selfishness."Mabel and Jean imagined that it was more a pose on the part of the fencing girl than any talent of Elsie's which immediately impressed her on this afternoon. They were later to discover that a thrill of expectancy, of interest, was Elsie's first gift to strangers."Oh, no," breathed the fencing girl to herself, "you are not beautiful, really; you are a personality--that's it."Elsie sat pulling her gloves through her white hands."Lance says Mrs. Clutterbuck has a legacy," said Jean bluntly. "I suppose it's true, but we are never sure of Lance, you know."She passed a cup and some buttered toast."Oh, yes, it's true," said Elsie. "I do so envy mamma.""Why? Doesn't she--haven't you the benefit of it too?" asked Mabel in surprise."Oh, yes. It isn't that, you know." Elsie swept forward, with a little furry cape falling up to her ears as she recovered a dropped glove. "It's giving papa a holiday. I've thought all my life how I should love to grow up and become an heiress, and give my papa a holiday.""You thought that," asked Jean accusingly. "Come now--when you were climbing lamp-posts and skimming down rain-pipes----""Yes, and breaking into other people's houses," said Elsie slowly."Did you do that too?" asked Jean."Once," said Elsie dreamily, "only once. I was a dreadful trial to my parents," she explained to the fencing girl."You weren't spanked enough," said Mabel, shaking her head at her."My papa was too busy, and mamma too concerned about him to attend to me," smiled Elsie. "Poor mamma! She knew if I told my father what I did, it would disturb his thoughts, and if his thoughts were disturbed he couldn't work, and if he couldn't work the rent wouldn't be paid.""Oh," said Mabel with memories heaping on her, "had you really to worry about the rent?"The fencing girl began to talk at last."It makes me tired," said she vigorously, "the way in which you people, brought up in provincial and suburban places, talk. Because you can't afford to be there unless your fathers have enough money to take you there, you think there's no struggle in the world. You ought to live a bit in towns where people are obliged to show the working side as well as the retired and affluent side. You poor thing, stuck in suburbia, among those Philistines, and thinking about the rent! I suppose they only thought you were bad tempered."The fencing girl had landed them into a conversation more intimate than any they had attempted together."Oh," said Elsie, and she looked shyly at Mabel and Jean. "I was a tiny little thing when I got my first lesson. A lady and her daughter called on mamma the second week we were in Ridgetown. I came on them in the garden afterwards. They were going out at the gate, and they didn't see me coming in. This lady said to her daughter, quite amiably: 'It's no use, my dear; I suppose you observed they have only one maid.' They never called again."The fencing girl bit her lip with an interrupted laugh."Isn't that suburbia?" she asked. "Now, isn't it?""It made me a little wild cat," said Elsie. "Everybody in Ridgetown had at least two maids, except ourselves.""Do you know," said Jean, "I know the time when we would have wept at that if it had ever happened to us. It isn't a joke," she told the fencing girl.Elsie gave a long, quiet laugh. "If I ever have children," she said, "I hope I may keep them from being silly about a trifle of that sort.""That's one of the jokes of life though. You won't have children who need any support in that way."Won't I?" asked Elsie with round eyes."No, they'll all be quite different. They'll be giving you points on the simple life, and advising you to dispense with maids altogether," said the fencing girl. "I'm not joking. It's a fact, you know, that children are awfully unlike their parents. Are you like your mother?" she asked Elsie."Not a bit," said Elsie laughing."Don't study yourself merely in order to know about children. You may just have been a selfish little prig, you know," said the fencing girl cheerily. "Study them by the dozen, be public-spirited about it. Then some day you may be able to understand the soul of a child when you get it all to yourself. You won't just sit and say in a blank way, 'In my day children were different.'""Oh," cried Jean. "Now don't. If there's anything I hate, it's when Evelyn begins to preach about children.""Oh, well," said the fencing girl with a shrug, "if Mrs.----, whatever your mother's name is, had known as much about their little ways as I do, she would never have let you worry about that one maid. We are all wrong with domestic life at present. The one lot stays in too much and loses touch with the world, and the other lot are too busy touching the world to stay in enough. We are putting it right, however," she said amiably. "We are----" She spread her hands in the direction of the company collected. "We are getting up our world at present. After that we may be of some use in it."Elsie looked at her rather admiringly."My father would love to hear you talk," she said amiably."Talk," said the fencing girl in a fallen voice, "and I hate the talkers so!""Nevertheless," said Mabel, "given a friend of ours in for tea--who does the talking?""Evelyn," said Jean, "and invariably her own subjects too."It seems that this girl was not always fencing.She controlled the collecting of rents and practically managed the domestic matters in three streets of tenements of new buildings recently erected in a working part of London. She was also engaged to be married."Doesn't this sort of independent life unsettle you for a quiet one?" she was often asked by her friends."And it's quite different," she would explain. "Knowing the stress and the difficulties of this side of it make me long for that little haven of a home we are getting ready at Richmond. I would bury myself there for ever, from a selfish point of view that is, and probably vegetate like the others. But I've made a pledge never to forget--never to forget what I've seen in London, and never to stop working for it somewhere or somehow.""What about your poor husband?" asked Jean."He isn't poor," said the fencing girl with a grin. "He is getting quite rich. He fell in love with me at the tenements. He built them. I should think he would divorce me if I turned narrow-minded."She gazed in a searching way at Elsie."You have the makings of a somebody," she said gravely, "more than these two, though they are perfectly charming.""I want to go to the Balkans," said Elsie. She turned to Mabel. "Cousin Arthur declared he really would take me.""Is Mr. Symington there now?" asked Jean. Mabel thanked her from the bottom of a heart that couldn't prompt a single word at that supreme moment."No, but he said he was going some day," said Elsie. That was all. Mabel had seen a blaze of sunshine and then blackness again."Oh," said the robust, unheeding Jean, "what do your people say to that?""Papa says he won't have me butchered," said Elsie with a radiant smile."Look here," said the fencing girl, with her eyes still searching that "wild flower of a face" of Elsie's. "Will your father come and see my tenements?"The answer of Elsie became historic in the girls' club."I think he will," said she. "He was up the Ferris wheel last night."CHAPTER XXVIUnder Royal PatronageMrs. Leighton made use of the fact of the Clutterbuck's being in London to write to the Professor's wife."We have been so anxious about Elma, who now however is picking up. But we have the saddest news of Miss Annie. It seems as though she would not live more than a day or two. If I have bad news to send to Mabel and Jean, may I send it through you? It would be such a kindness to me if I knew you were there to tell them."Mrs. Clutterbuck responded in that loving tremulous way she had of delighting in being useful. She could not believe in her good fortune with the Professor. After all, it had been worry, concern about material things, which had clouded his affection for a time. He had never been able to give himself to the world, as he desired to give himself, because of that grind at lectures which he so palpably abhorred. Now even the lectures were a delight, since he had leisure besides where he did not need to reflect on the certainty of "the rainy day." He was once more the hero of her girlish dreams. How magnificent not to lose one's ideal! They both rejoiced in the young ardour of Elsie, whose courage made leaps at each new unfolding of the "loveliness of life."It was very delightful now that the two Leightons should come under those gently stretching wings of the reinvigorated Professor's wife.At the time of a call from Mrs. Clutterbuck, Mabel and Jean had just received tickets from Lady Emily for a concert at a great house. The concert, to those who bought guinea tickets, was not so important as the fact that royal ears would listen to it. Herr Slavska disposed of the affair in a speech which could not be taken down in words. His theme was the rush of the "stupids" to see a royal personage, and the tragedy of the poor "stars" of artists who could hardly afford the cab which protected their costumes. Yet some members of his profession, he averred, would rather lose a meal or two than lose the chance of seeing their name in red letters and of bowing to encores from royalty."And why not?" asked Jean. "I think it would be lovely to bow to royalty.""Where is ze art?" he asked as a wind-up. "Nowhere!""That's nonsense, you know," Jean confided afterwards. "I think there must be a lot of art in being able to sing to kings and queens. Besides, why shouldn't they wave their royal hands, and produce us, as it were--like Aladdin, you know."Jean already saw herself at Windsor.Mabel merely concerned herself with the fact that Mr. Green was to play. He had not the scruples of Herr Slavska. "Although it's an abominable practice," said he. "It is the artists who make the sacrifice. Everybody else gets something for it. The crowd gets royalty, royalty gets music, charities get gold. We get momentary applause--that is all.""That's what I'm living for," declared Jean, "just a little, a very little momentary applause. Then I would swell like a peacock, Mabel, I really should. The artists don't get nothing out of it after all. They get appreciation."Mrs. Clutterbuck was intensely interested in the concert. "Do you mean to say there's to be a prince at it?" she asked.There were to be princesses also, it seemed."Oh," said Mabel, "how lovely it would have been for Elsie and you to go."She saw the experience that it would be for a little home bird of the Mrs. Clutterbuck type. She considered for a moment--"Couldn't she give up her ticket for one of them?"Mrs. Clutterbuck saw the indecision in her face."No, my dear, no," said she, "I know the thought in your mind. I have a much better plan."The pleasure of being at last able to dispense favours--transformed her face. She turned with an expectant, delighted look to Elsie."If we could go together," said she, "and it wouldn't be a bore to both of you to sit with two country cousins like ourselves, I should take two tickets. It would be charming."This plan was received with the greatest acclamation."We ought to have a chaperon anyhow," said Jean.It seemed the funniest thing in the world to Mabel that they should be about to be chaperoned by Mrs. Clutterbuck. In some unaccountable way it drew her more out of her loneliness than anything she had experienced in London. On the other hand, she was constantly reminding herself how much amused some people in Ridgetown would be if they only knew.They drove to the concert on a spring day when the air had suddenly turned warm. The streets were sparkling with a radiance of budding leaves, of struggling blossom; and all the world seemed to be turning in at the great gates of the house beyond St. James'.It was not to be expected that one should know these people, though, as Jean declared, "Every little boarding-house keeper in Bayswater could tell you who was stepping out of the carriage in front of you."There was a great crowd inside; heated rooms and a wide vestibule, and a hall where a platform was arranged with crimson seats facing it and denoting royalty.Mrs. Clutterbuck's timidity came on her with a rush. She could hardly produce her two tickets. It was Mabel who saved the situation and piloted them in as though she understood exactly where to go. There was a hush of expectancy in the beautifully costumed crowd within. Everybody looked past one with craning neck. Mabel began to laugh. "It's exactly as though they were built on a slant," she declared.In the end they found seats on the stairs beside the wife of an ambassador."My dear," said Mrs. Clutterbuck in rather a breathless way to Mabel. "My dear, just think of it."Mabel immediately regretted having brought her there."But everybody is sitting on the stairs," she said gravely. "It's quite all right. Lady Emily told me she once took a seat in an elevator in somebody's house because there was no room elsewhere. She spent an hour going up and down, not having the courage to get out."Mrs. Clutterbuck smiled nervously."It isn't that, my dear. It's the gown, that one in front of you. Every inch of the lace is hand-made."Mrs. Clutterbuck was quite enervated by the discovery."Oh," said Mabel in quite a relieved way, "was that it? I began to blame myself for bringing you to the stairs.""Isn't it fun?" said Elsie. "Much funnier looking at these people than it will be looking at royalty. I never saw so many lorgnettes."A sudden movement made them rise. A group of princesses with bouquets appeared and took their seats on the red chairs."Oh," said Jean with a sigh, as they sat down again. "Think of the poor artists now."She had grown quite pale."I don't think I shall ever be able to perform," she said. "My heart simply stops beating on an occasion of this sort."The crowd parted again, and a singer, radiant in white chiffon with silver embroidery, and wearing a black hat with enormous plumes, ascended the platform. She curtseyed elaborately to the princesses, and casually bowed in the direction of the applause which reached her from other sources. She began to sing, and in that hall of reserved voices, of deferential attitudes, of eager, searching glances and general ceremonious curiosity, her voice rang out a clear, beautiful, alien thing. It danced into the shadows of minds merely occupied with staring, it filled up crevices as though she had appeared in an empty room. One moment every one had been girt with a kind of fashionable melancholy which precluded anything but polite commonplaces. The next minute something living had appeared, a liquid voice sang notes of joy, mockery and despair; it lit on things which cannot be touched upon with the speaking voice, and it brought tears to the eyes of one little princess.Jean was shrouded in longing. Nothing so intimately delicious had ever come near her. She might as well shut up her music books and say good-bye to Herr Slavska. Elsie sat beside the lady in real lace. She was in the woods with the fresh air blowing over her; buttercups and daisies at her feet."Is she not then charming?" asked a voice at her side. The real lace had spoken at last. That was how they discovered afterwards that she was the wife of an ambassador. The lady had her mind distracted first by the sheer beauty of a famous voice which she loved, next by the delicate profile of the face beside her--a type not usual in London.Elsie turned her eyes with a start."It's like summer, the voice," she said simply."It's like the best method I've ever heard," said Jean darkly. (Oh, how to emulate such a creature!)"Ah, yes. But she returns. And now, while yet she bows and does not sing--a leetle vulgar is it not?"The ambassador's wife could discount her favourite it seemed. That was just the difficulty in art. To remain supreme in one art and yet recognize other forms of it, that was the fortune of few. The singer had enormous jewels at her neck."She would wear cabbage as diamonds," said the lady, "but with her voice one forgives."Thereafter there was a procession of the most talented performers at that moment in London. Magicians with violins drew melodies in a faultless manner from smooth strings and a bow which seemed to be playing on butter. Technique was evident nowhere, only the easy lovely result of it. In an hour it became as facile a thing to play any instrument, sing any song, as though practice and discouragement did not exist in any art at all."Mr. Green played decorously and magnificently," said Elsie. "They are all a little decorous, aren't they?" she asked, "except that wonderful thing in the white and silver gown."Nothing had touched the daring beauty of that voice.Mrs. Clutterbuck leant forward to Elsie eagerly."I was right, Elsie," said she. "You know I was right.""Right?" asked Elsie. Her eyes shone with a. dark glamour. "You mean about it's being so nice here, romantic and that sort of thing?""No," said Mrs. Clutterbuck. She sometimes had rather a superb way of treating Elsie's little imaginative extravagances. "I mean about mauve--mauve is the colour this year, don't you see?""Mamma," she said radiantly, "I quite forgot. I was simply wondering how long all this would last, or whether they'd suddenly cut us off the way Jean says they do.""They do," said Jean, "at these charity concerts. One after another runs on and makes its little bow. And some are detained, you know, and then the programme just comes to an end.""They seem to be going on all right," said Mrs. Clutterbuck placidly, "and mauve is the colour, you see."Another singer appeared, and Jean's heaven was cleared of clouds by the evidence in this performer of a bad method. Now, indeed, it seemed an easy matter to believe that one could triumph over anything.That first, victorious, delicious voice had trodden on every ambition Jean ever possessed. But the frailty of a newcomer set her once more on her enthusiastic feet."I should say it would be easy enough to get appearing at a concert like this," she said dimly to Elsie. Her eye was on the future, and the platform was cleared. At the piano sat Mr. Green, grown older a little, and more companionable as an accompanist; and in the centre, in radiant silver and white, and--and diamonds, sang Jean, the prima donna, Jean!She was startled by the sudden departure of the ambassador's wife."For the leaving of the princess I wait not," said this lady. With a cool little nod to Elsie, she descended the crowded stairs.Her remarks on the vulgarity of the singer rankled with Jean. The costume seemed so appropriate to that other fair dream."I didn't think her vulgar, did you?" she asked Elsie."Not on a platform, perhaps," said Elsie vaguely. Her thoughts invariably strayed from dress. "But in a drawing-room she would look, look----""Well, what Elsie?" asked Jean impatiently.Elsie's dreamy eyes came down on her suddenly. "In a drawing-room she would look like a lamp shade," she blurted.It really was rather a tragedy for them that the golden voice should have been framed in so doubtful a setting.Elsie's eyes were on the princesses."They have eyes like calm lakes," said she. "How clever it must be to look out and feel and know, only to express very often something entirely different. Don't you wonder what princesses say to themselves when they get alone together after an affair of this sort?""I know," said Mabel. "They say, 'I wonder what girls like these girls on the stairs say of us after we are gone; do they say we are charming, as the newspapers do, or do they say----' But they couldn't think that, for they are charming, aren't they?" asked Mabel."Yes," said Elsie sadly. "But I never could keep a bird in a cage. It must be like being in a cage sometimes for them."There was an abrupt movement among the royal party. The last of the illustrious performers had appeared, and it was time to go. Everybody rose once more. Then there was a hurried fight for a tea-room where countesses played hostess.Mrs. Clutterbuck, now finally in the spirit of the thing, moved along blithely. She spoke, however, in low modulated whispers as though she were attending some serious ceremony."I'm sure your mother would have enjoyed this," she said, as they sat down to ices served in filagree boats. "The countesses and, you know, the general air of the thing--so different to Ridgetown.""Ridgetown!" The girl laughed immoderately. "We couldn't sit on the stairs at Ridgetown, could we?" Mrs. Clutterbuck was getting away from her subject."Take some tea, my dear," she said to Mabel in the tone of voice as one who should say, "you will need it." "It's invigorating after the ice," said the Professor's wife.Mabel took tea.Now that the great event of the concert was over, they were a little tired, and glad of the idea of fresh air."Miss Grace, dear--have you heard from Miss Grace lately?" asked Mrs. Clutterbuck."No. It's a funny thing," said Mabel. "We supposed it was because of Elma's illness, you know. Miss Grace would be in such a state. Shall we go now?"They got out and arranged to walk through St. James' Park together."I had a message," said Mrs. Clutterbuck quietly, "about Miss Grace. I am to have another when I get back just now. Will you come with me? It's about Miss Annie. She has been very ill."It was impossible for her to tell them that the same illness as Elma's had done its work there. They seemed to have no suspicion of that."Oh, poor Miss Annie!" said Mabel. "If I had only known!""That was just it; they couldn't tell you that too with all you had to hear about Elma. Elma is very well now, you understand, but Miss Annie--well, Miss Annie is not expected to live over to-night."The news came to them in an unreal way. It was the break-up of their childhood. That Miss Annie should not always be there, the charming beautiful invalid, seemed impossible."Oh, but," said Mabel, "she has been so ill before, won't she get better?""She was never ill like this before," said Mrs. Clutterbuck. "We will see what the message says."They found a wire at home. At the end of a sparkling day, it came to that. While they had listened to these golden voices, Miss Annie had----The telegram lay there to say that Miss Annie had died.
CHAPTER XXIV
The Ham Sandwich
Elma lay on her bed in the pink and white room. The first warm spring sunshine in vain tried to find an opening to filter through partly closed shutter and blinds. A nurse in grey dress and white cap and apron moved silently in the half-light created by drawn blinds and an open door She nodded to Mrs. Leighton who had just come in and who now sat near the darkened window. The nurse pointedly referred her to the bed, as though she had good news for her.
Elma opened her eyes. Their misty violet seemed dazed with long sleep.
"Oh, mummy, you there?" she asked.
"Yes," said Mrs. Leighton quietly.
Elma looked at her inquiringly.
"Is there anything you want?" asked Mrs. Leighton in answer to that expression. How often had they asked the same question uselessly within the past weeks!
Elma looked up at the white walls.
"Yes, mummy, there's one thing. I should like a large ham sandwich."
"There," said Nurse emphatically. "That's it. Now the fight is really going to begin."
"I should like to have plenty of butter on it and quite a lot of mustard," said Elma.
"Mustard?" said Mrs. Leighton helplessly. "Do you know what's been wrong with you all these weeks?"
Elma moved her eyes curiously, there being not much else that she could move. It had never dawned on her till that moment to wonder what had been wrong with her.
"No, mummy," she said, "I haven't a notion."
Mrs. Leighton looked for instructions to the nurse.
"She'd better know now, Mrs. Leighton," she said, "now that she begins to ask for ham sandwiches."
"You've had typhoid fever, Elma," said her mother.
Elma sighed gently.
"Dear me," she said, "how grand. But you don't know how hungry I am or you would give me a ham sandwich. You ought to be rather glad that I'm so much better that I want to eat."
Then an expression of great cunning came into her eyes.
"I ought to be fed up if I've had a fever," she informed them.
"We shall get the doctor to see to that," said the nurse.
She came to her and held her hand firmly.
"Do you know," she said, "you have been very ill and you are ever so much better, but nothing you've gone through will worry you so much as what you've got to do now. You've got to be starved for ten days, when you are longing to eat. You will lie dreaming of food--and----"
"Ham sandwiches?" asked Elma.
"And we shall not be allowed to give them to you," said Nurse.
"Isn't she nice, mummy, she's quite sorry. And people say that nurses are hard-hearted," said Elma.
"I've had typhoid myself," said Nurse briefly.
Elma looked at her, her own eyelids heavy with sleep still to be made up.
"Well, barring the sandwich, what about lemon cheese cakes," she asked.
Mrs. Leighton let her hands fall.
"Oh, Elma," she said, "what a thing to choose at this stage."
"Or sausages," remarked Elma. "I'm simply longing for sausages."
She endeavoured to throw an appealing look towards Nurse.
"This isn't humour on my part, mummy dear," she said. "I just can't help it. I can't get sausages out of my mind," she said.
"If you would think of a little steamed fish or a soaked rusk, you'd be a little nearer it," said Nurse, "you'll have that in ten days."
Elma looked at her in a determined way.
"I've always been told that a simple lunch, a very simple lunch might be made out of a ham sandwich. Why should it be denied to me now?"
"Elma," said Mrs. Leighton, "I never knew you were so obstinate."
"You know, mummy," said Elma, "I'm not dreaming now. I'm wide awake, and I'm awfully hungry. I'm sorry I ever thought of sausages, because ham sandwiches were just about as much as I could bear. Now I've both to think of, and Nurse won't bring me either."
"Don't mind her, Mrs. Leighton," said the nurse. "It's always the same, and, without nurses, generally a relapse to follow. You aren't going to have a relapse," she said to Elma.
She gave her some milk in a methodical manner, and the down-dropping of Elma's eyelids continued till she fell asleep once more.
So she had slept since the fever had begun to go down. Probably she had had the best of the intervening weeks.
There was the slow stupor of a fever gaining ground. It began with the headache of the Turberville's dance, a headache which never lifted until Elma returned to her own again, weak and prostrate in bed. The stupor gradually cut her off from common affairs. It sent her to bed first because she could no longer stand up, and it crowded back her ideas and her memory till at last she was in the full swing of a delirium. What this illness cost Mr. and Mrs. Leighton in anxiety, probably no one knew. Elma had always covered up her claims to sympathy and petting, always been moderately well. Here she was with blazing cheeks and wandering eyes talking largely and at random about anything or every one.
Mr. Leighton used to sit by her and stroke her hair. Long years afterwards, she was to feel the touch of his fingers, hear the tones of his voice as he said, "Poor little Elma."
She faded gradually into the delirium which seemed to have cut her illness in two, the one illness where she lay with dry mouth and an everlasting headache, the other where she was merely hungry.
Mrs. Leighton was appalled by the worrying of Elma's mind. She went through some of her wild dreams with her, calling her back at places by the mere sound of her voice to a kind of sub-consciousness in which Elma grew infinitely relieved.
"Oh, is that you, mummy? Have I really been dreaming?"
She dreamt of Mabel and she dreamt of Adelaide Maud. But more than any one, she dreamt of Mr. Symington. Here is where the deceptiveness of a fever comes in. Elma pleaded so piteously with her mother to bring back Mr. Symington that Mrs. Leighton awoke to an entirely new and wrong idea of the state of Elma's affections.
"It's quite ridiculous, John," said she, "but that child, she was only a child, seems to have filled her head with notions of Mr. Symington."
"What! More of it?" asked poor Mr. Leighton.
"She begs and begs to have him back," said Mrs. Leighton.
"I've never made out why he left as he did," said Mr. Leighton. "There was always the idea with me that he cleared out for a reason. But this small child, why, she hadn't her hair up."
"She will soon be eighteen," said Mrs. Leighton.
He went into her room a little later. Elma lay with unseeing eyes staring at him. He could hardly bear it.
"Elma," he said vaguely, trying to recall her.
"Oh," she answered promptly, but still staring, "is that you, Sym--Sym--Symington!"
Her father choked down what he could of the lump that gathered, and moved quietly away.
These were dark days for every one. Elma had the best of it. She left the Symington groove after a day or so, and worked on to Isobel. Isobel invaded her mind. It was a blessing that Isobel was barred by real distaste to the business from going in to help with the nursing of Elma. What she said of her pointed to more than a mere dislike. It revolved into fear as the delirium progressed. Then a second nurse arrived, and between them the two began really to decrease the temperature. The first good news came, "Asleep for ten minutes," and after that there was no backward turn in the illness for Elma.
Throughout this time there had been the keenest inquiries made as to what had caused the illness. Cuthbert was down and "made things hum" in the matter of wakening up the sanitary authorities and so on. But no flaw in the arrangement of the White House or anything near it could be discovered. Then Dr. Merryweather called one day.
"I have another patient in Miss Annie," he said.
Miss Annie! This gave a clue.
"Typhoid at her age is unusual," he said, "but she has not developed the power of resisting disease like ordinary people. She has been in a good condition for harbouring every germ that happened to be about. I'm afraid we cannot save her." He turned to Mrs. Leighton. His kind old face twitched suddenly.
"Oh, dear, dear," she exclaimed. "What will Miss Grace do? What will little Elma do?"
"Miss Grace is all right," said Dr. Merryweather. "I've seen to that. Elma must not know, of course."
"This looks like contraction from a common cause," said Cuthbert. "I'll be at it whatever it is. We don't want any one else sacrificed."
Dr. Merryweather looked at him gravely.
"I have just been getting at the tactics of the local government," said he. "You couldn't believe they could be so prompt in Ridgetown. Three weeks ago, a gardener living near Miss Annie complained of an atrocious stench coming from over the railway. It was so bad that when the local government body at his demand approached it, they had to turn and run. An open stream had been used as a common sewer and run into the railway cutting, where it had stagnated. Can you imagine the promptness of the local government? Evans, the gardener, threatened to report to you, Mr. Leighton, since your daughter was so ill and had visited so much at Miss Annie's. They managed to keep his mouth shut, and they have removed the sewer. Too late for Miss Annie."
"Too late for my little girl," said Mr. Leighton.
It seemed an extraordinary thing that the two daughters who had gone away, and given them so much anxiety, should be coming home radiantly independent, and Elma, sheltered at home, should be lying just lately rescued from death.
The same thought seemed to strike Dr. Merryweather in another connection.
"Ah, well," he said, "we would save some gentle souls a lot of suffering if we could. It's no use evading life, you see, and its consequences. Death has stolen into Miss Annie's beautiful bedroom, from an ugly sewer across the way. Nothing we could do for her now can save her."
Miss Annie died on a quiet morning when Elma lay dreaming of ham sandwiches. Elma never forgot that, nor how dreadful it seemed that she had never asked for Miss Annie nor Miss Grace, but just dreamed of what she would eat.
"You had had a lot to stand," Nurse told her a week or two afterwards when she heard about Miss Annie for the first time, "and it's a compensation that's often given to us when we are ill, just to be peaceful and not think at all."
Dr. Merryweather had wakened up Miss Grace finally in a sharp manner.
"There's that poor child been ill all this time and you've never even seen her. Take her along some flowers and let her see that you are not grieving too much for Miss Annie. She won't get better if she worries about you."
Then to Elma.
"Cheer up Miss Grace when she comes. You have your life before you, and she has had to put all hers behind her. Don't let her be down if you can help it."
In this wise he pitted the two against one another, so that they met with great fortitude.
"Why, my dear, how pretty your hair is," Miss Grace had burst out.
Elma was lying on a couch near the window by this time. She looked infinitely fragile.
"Oh, Miss Grace, it is a wig," she replied.
Miss Grace laughed in a jerky hysterical sort of manner.
"Then I wish I wore a wig," said she.
Elma smiled.
"Do you know, that's what they all say. They come in and tell me in a most surprised manner, "Why, how well you are looking!" and say they never saw me so pretty and all that kind of thing. And then I look in my mirror, and I see quite plainly that I'm a perfect fright. But I don't care, you know. Mabel and Jean know now how ill I've been. I'm so glad they didn't before, aren't you? It would have spoiled Jean's coming home like a conqueror. They say she sings beautifully. And oh, Miss Grace, I've such a lot to tell you. One thing is about Mr. Symington. You know I never said why he went away. It was because Miss Meredith made him believe that Robin was engaged to Mabel, and she wasn't at all. It made her appear like a flirt, you know. Didn't it?"
Miss Grace nodded.
"Well, I've been thinking and thinking. I can't tell you how I've been dreaming about Mr. Symington. Well, now, I've been thinking, 'Couldn't we invite him to Isobel's wedding?'"
Miss Grace's eyes gleamed.
"Fancy Mr. Symington at breakfast at some outlandish place. A letter arrives. He opens it. 'Ha! The wedding invitation. Robin Meredith, the bounder!' I beg your pardon, Miss Grace. 'Robin Meredith to Isobel--what--niece of--why what's this?' What will he do, Miss Grace?"
"Come to the wedding, sure," said Miss Grace laughingly.
"Well, if I've to send the invitation myself, one is going to Mr. Symington."
Elma had not passed her dreaming hours in vain.
Besides, Miss Grace had got over the difficult part of meeting Elma again, and was right back in her old part of counsellor, evidently without a quiver of the pain that divided them. Yet, they both felt the barrier that was there, the barrier of that presence of Miss Annie which had always entered first into their conversations, and now could not be mentioned.
Elma thought of the visits that Miss Grace would have to make to her. She saw that Miss Grace had been warned not to agitate her. This was enough to enable her to take the matter entirely in her own hands with no agitation at all.
"I think you know, Miss Grace, that when one has been so near dying as I've been, and not minded--I mean I had no knowledge that I was so ill, and even didn't care much--since it was myself, you know, except for the trouble it gave to people----"
Elma was becoming a little long-winded.
"I want to tell you that you must always tell me about Miss Annie, not mind just because they say I'm not to be agitated, or anything of that sort. I won't be a bit agitated if you tell me about Miss Annie."
"My dear love," Miss Grace stopped abruptly.
"Dr. Merryweather said----" and she stopped again.
"Yes, Dr. Merryweather said the same to me, he said that on no account was I to speak to you of Miss Annie. Dr. Merryweather simply knows nothing about you and me."
Miss Grace shook her head drearily.
"You are a bad little invalid," said she.
But it broke the ice a little bit, and one day afterwards Miss Grace told her more than she could bear herself. Dr. Merryweather was right, Miss Grace broke down over the last loving message to Elma. She had a little pearl necklace for Elma to wear, and fastened it on without a word.
Then came Mrs. Leighton looking anxious.
"See, mummy, Miss Grace has given me a beautiful little necklace from Miss Annie."
All trace of Elma's childish nervousness had departed with her fever. She had looked right into other worlds, and it had made an easier thing of this one. Besides, Miss Grace must not be allowed to cry.
Miss Grace did not cry so much as one might have expected. Miss Annie's death was a thing she had feared for twenty-eight years, and Dr. Merryweather had given her no sympathy. He had almost made her think that Annie ought not to consider herself an invalid. How she connected typhoid fever with the neurotic illness which Dr. Merryweather would never acknowledge as an illness, it was difficult to imagine. Certainly, she had the feeling that Annie in a pathetic manner had justified her invalidism at last. It was a sad way in which to recover one's self-respect, but in an unexplained way she felt that with Dr. Merryweather she had recovered her self-respect. She could refer to Miss Annie now, and awaken that twitching of his sympathies which one could see plainly in that rugged often inscrutable face, and feel thereby that she had not misplaced her confidence by giving up all these years to Annie. Indeed, the death of Miss Annie affected Dr. Merryweather far more than one could imagine. As also the sight of Elma, thinned down and fragile, her hair gone and a wig on.
He teased her unmercifully about the wig.
"So long as I look respectable when Mabel and Jean come home! Oh! Dr. Merryweather, please have me looking respectable when Mabel and Jean come home."
Dr. Merryweather promised to have her as fat as a pumpkin.
CHAPTER XXV
The Wild Anemone
Mabel and Jean had been successfully deceived up to a certain point in regard to Elma's illness. They were told the facts when the danger was past. It was made clear to them then that the fewer people at home in an illness of that sort the better, while skilled nurses were so conveniently to be had. Mabel pined a little over not having been there to nurse Elma, as though she had landed her sensitive little sister into an illness by leaving too much on her shoulders. The independent vitality of Jean constantly reassured her however.
"She would just have been worse with that scared face of yours at her bedside," Jean would declare. "Every time you think of Elma you get as white as though you were just about to perform in the Queen's Hall. You'll have angina pectoris if you don't look out."
Jean had made a great friend of a nurse who never talked of common things like heart disease or toothache. "Angina pectoris" and "periostitis" were used instead. When Jean wrote home in an airy manner in the midst of Elma's illness to say that she was suffering from an attack of "periostitis," Mrs. Leighton immediately wired, "Get a nurse for Jean if required."
"What in the wide world have you been telling mother?" asked Mabel with that alarming communication in her hand.
Jean was trying to learn fencing from an enthusiast in the corridor.
"Oh, well." Her face fell a trifle at the consideration of the telegram. "I did have toothache," said Jean.
Mabel stared at the telegram. "Mummy can't be losing her reason over Elma's being ill," she said. "She couldn't possibly suppose you would want a nurse for toothache. That's going a little too far, isn't it?"
Mabel was really quite anxious about her mother.
"Oh, well," said Jean lamely, "Nurse Shaw said it was periostitis."
"And you--"--Mabel's eyes grew round and indignant--"you really wrote and told poor mummy that you had perios--os----"
"Titis," said Jean. "Of course, I did--why not?"
She was a trifle ashamed of herself, but the dancing eyes of the fencing enthusiast held her to the point.
"That's the worst of early Victorian parents," said this girl with a bright cheerful giggle. "One can't even talk the vernacular nowadays."
She made an unexpected lunge at Jean.
"Oh," cried Jean, "I must answer that telegram. Say I'm an idiot, Mabel, and that I've only had toothache."
Mabel for once performed the duties of an elder sister in a grim manner.
"Am an idiot," she wrote, "only had toothache an hour. Fencing match on, forgive hurry. Jean."
She read it out to the fencers.
"Oh, I say," said Jean with visible chagrin, "you are a little beggar, Mabel."
"Send it," cried the fencing girl. "One must be laughed at now and again--it's good for one. Besides, you can't be both a semi-neurotic invalid and a good fencer. Better give up the neurotic habit."
Jean stepped back in derision.
"I'm not neurotic," she affirmed.
"You wouldn't have sent that message about your perio--piérrot--what's the gentleman's name? if you hadn't been neurotic."
Mabel had scribbled off another message.
"Well," said Jean gratefully, "my own family don't talk to me like that."
"Oh, no," said the fencing girl coolly, "they run round you with hot bottles, and mustard blisters. All families do. They make you think about your toothache until you aren't pleased when you haven't got it. That's the benefit of being here. Here it's a bore to be ill."
She went suddenly on guard.
"Oh," said Jean, in willing imitation of that attitude, "if you only teach me to fence, you may say what you like."
It was more the importance of Jean's estimate of herself than any real leanings towards being an invalid which made her look on an hour's depression as a serious thing, and an attack of toothache as an item of news which ought immediately to be communicated to her family. She criticized life entirely through her own feelings and experiences. Mabel and Elma had enough of the sympathetic understanding of the nature of others, to tune their own characters accordingly. But Jean, unless terrified, or hurt, or joyous herself never allowed these feelings to be transmitted from any one, or because of any one, she happened to love. It kept her from maturing as Mabel and even Elma had done. She would always be more or less of the self-centred person. It was a useful trait in connexion with singing for instance, and it seemed also as though it might make her a good fencer. But the flippant merry fencing enthusiast in front of her was right when she saw the pitfall ready for the Jean who should one day dedicate herself to her ailments. In the case of Mabel this very lack of sympathy in Jean helped her in a lonely manner to regain some of her lost confidence in herself. It never dawned once on Jean that Mabel was fighting down a trouble of her own. Mabel had bad nights and ghostly dreams, and a headache occasionally, which seemed as though it would put an end to any enthusiasm she might ever have had for such an occupation as piano playing. But in the morning one got up, and there were always the interests, the joys or troubles, or the quaint little oddities of other girls, to knock this introspection and worry into the background, and make Mabel her companionable self once more. It was better, after all, than the scrutiny of one's own family, even a kind one. Jean was merely conscious of change in any one when they refused a match or a drive or a walk with her. The world was of a piece when that happened--"stodgy"--and the interests of Jean were being neglected--a great crime.
Mabel despatched the telegram, and the fencing was resumed with vigour. The corridor at this end of the house contained a bay window, seated and cushioned, and more comfortable as a tea-room than many of the little bedrooms. They had arranged tea-cups, and were preparing that fascinating and delightful meal when a girl advanced from the far end of the corridor, in a lithe swinging manner. The fencing girl drew back her foil abruptly. "Who is that?" she asked, staring. The girls were conscious of a most refreshing and invigorating surprise. Elsie Clutterbuck stood there, with the wild sweetness of the open air in her bearing, her hair ruffled gently, her eyes shining in a pale setting.
"You beautiful wild anemone!" breathed the fencing girl in a whisper.
Mabel and Jean heard the soft words with surprise. It was a new light through which to look on Elsie. They had never quite dropped the pose of the benignant girls who had taken Elsie "out of herself." To them she was rather a protégé than a friend; much as Mabel at least would have despised herself for that attitude had she detected it in herself. She acknowledged an immediate drop in her calculations, when the fencing girl did not ask as most people did, "Who is that queer little thing?" It was difficult in one sudden moment to adjust oneself to introducing Elsie as "You beautiful wild anemone!"
Jean, however, merely summed up the fencing girl as rather ignorant. "Why," she said frankly, "I declare it's Elsie!" and in a whisper declared, "There's nothing beautiful about Elsie."
They welcomed her heartily, curiously, and wondered if Lance's latest news of the family was true.
"Mother Buttercluck," he had written, "has come in for a little legacy. It's she who clucks now (grammar or no grammar) and the Professor chimes in as the butter portion merely. May heard about it. Can you imagine Mrs. C. saying, 'I'd love to have some one to lean on,' and the Buttercluck, who would have declared before--'On whom to lean. Pray do be more careful of your English,' not having a cluck left! Though I do think Elsie had knocked a little of the cluck out before the legacy arrived."
Elsie did not seem to be bursting with news. She sat in rather a grown-up, reliable way, opening her furry coat at their orders, and drawing off her gloves. Her hair was up in loose, heavy coils on her neck, and it parted in front with that restless rippling appearance which made one think of the open air. The tip-tilted nose, which had seemed the principal fault in the face which had always been termed plain in childhood, seemed now to lend a piquancy to her features. These were delicately irregular, and her eyebrows were too high, if one might rely on the analysis of Jean.
The fencing girl sat and stared at her with her foil balanced on a crossed knee. If one wanted to do the fencing girl a real kindness, to make her radiantly happy, then one introduced her to some one in whom she might be interested. Life was a garden to her, and the friends she made the flowers. She was not particular about plucking them either. "Oh, no indeed," she would say, "I've seen some one in the park to-day who is more sweet and lovely than any one human ought to be. I should love to know her, of course, but she was just as great a joy to look at. Why should you want to have everything that's beautiful? It's merely a form of selfishness."
Mabel and Jean imagined that it was more a pose on the part of the fencing girl than any talent of Elsie's which immediately impressed her on this afternoon. They were later to discover that a thrill of expectancy, of interest, was Elsie's first gift to strangers.
"Oh, no," breathed the fencing girl to herself, "you are not beautiful, really; you are a personality--that's it."
Elsie sat pulling her gloves through her white hands.
"Lance says Mrs. Clutterbuck has a legacy," said Jean bluntly. "I suppose it's true, but we are never sure of Lance, you know."
She passed a cup and some buttered toast.
"Oh, yes, it's true," said Elsie. "I do so envy mamma."
"Why? Doesn't she--haven't you the benefit of it too?" asked Mabel in surprise.
"Oh, yes. It isn't that, you know." Elsie swept forward, with a little furry cape falling up to her ears as she recovered a dropped glove. "It's giving papa a holiday. I've thought all my life how I should love to grow up and become an heiress, and give my papa a holiday."
"You thought that," asked Jean accusingly. "Come now--when you were climbing lamp-posts and skimming down rain-pipes----"
"Yes, and breaking into other people's houses," said Elsie slowly.
"Did you do that too?" asked Jean.
"Once," said Elsie dreamily, "only once. I was a dreadful trial to my parents," she explained to the fencing girl.
"You weren't spanked enough," said Mabel, shaking her head at her.
"My papa was too busy, and mamma too concerned about him to attend to me," smiled Elsie. "Poor mamma! She knew if I told my father what I did, it would disturb his thoughts, and if his thoughts were disturbed he couldn't work, and if he couldn't work the rent wouldn't be paid."
"Oh," said Mabel with memories heaping on her, "had you really to worry about the rent?"
The fencing girl began to talk at last.
"It makes me tired," said she vigorously, "the way in which you people, brought up in provincial and suburban places, talk. Because you can't afford to be there unless your fathers have enough money to take you there, you think there's no struggle in the world. You ought to live a bit in towns where people are obliged to show the working side as well as the retired and affluent side. You poor thing, stuck in suburbia, among those Philistines, and thinking about the rent! I suppose they only thought you were bad tempered."
The fencing girl had landed them into a conversation more intimate than any they had attempted together.
"Oh," said Elsie, and she looked shyly at Mabel and Jean. "I was a tiny little thing when I got my first lesson. A lady and her daughter called on mamma the second week we were in Ridgetown. I came on them in the garden afterwards. They were going out at the gate, and they didn't see me coming in. This lady said to her daughter, quite amiably: 'It's no use, my dear; I suppose you observed they have only one maid.' They never called again."
The fencing girl bit her lip with an interrupted laugh.
"Isn't that suburbia?" she asked. "Now, isn't it?"
"It made me a little wild cat," said Elsie. "Everybody in Ridgetown had at least two maids, except ourselves."
"Do you know," said Jean, "I know the time when we would have wept at that if it had ever happened to us. It isn't a joke," she told the fencing girl.
Elsie gave a long, quiet laugh. "If I ever have children," she said, "I hope I may keep them from being silly about a trifle of that sort."
"That's one of the jokes of life though. You won't have children who need any support in that way.
"Won't I?" asked Elsie with round eyes.
"No, they'll all be quite different. They'll be giving you points on the simple life, and advising you to dispense with maids altogether," said the fencing girl. "I'm not joking. It's a fact, you know, that children are awfully unlike their parents. Are you like your mother?" she asked Elsie.
"Not a bit," said Elsie laughing.
"Don't study yourself merely in order to know about children. You may just have been a selfish little prig, you know," said the fencing girl cheerily. "Study them by the dozen, be public-spirited about it. Then some day you may be able to understand the soul of a child when you get it all to yourself. You won't just sit and say in a blank way, 'In my day children were different.'"
"Oh," cried Jean. "Now don't. If there's anything I hate, it's when Evelyn begins to preach about children."
"Oh, well," said the fencing girl with a shrug, "if Mrs.----, whatever your mother's name is, had known as much about their little ways as I do, she would never have let you worry about that one maid. We are all wrong with domestic life at present. The one lot stays in too much and loses touch with the world, and the other lot are too busy touching the world to stay in enough. We are putting it right, however," she said amiably. "We are----" She spread her hands in the direction of the company collected. "We are getting up our world at present. After that we may be of some use in it."
Elsie looked at her rather admiringly.
"My father would love to hear you talk," she said amiably.
"Talk," said the fencing girl in a fallen voice, "and I hate the talkers so!"
"Nevertheless," said Mabel, "given a friend of ours in for tea--who does the talking?"
"Evelyn," said Jean, "and invariably her own subjects too."
It seems that this girl was not always fencing.
She controlled the collecting of rents and practically managed the domestic matters in three streets of tenements of new buildings recently erected in a working part of London. She was also engaged to be married.
"Doesn't this sort of independent life unsettle you for a quiet one?" she was often asked by her friends.
"And it's quite different," she would explain. "Knowing the stress and the difficulties of this side of it make me long for that little haven of a home we are getting ready at Richmond. I would bury myself there for ever, from a selfish point of view that is, and probably vegetate like the others. But I've made a pledge never to forget--never to forget what I've seen in London, and never to stop working for it somewhere or somehow."
"What about your poor husband?" asked Jean.
"He isn't poor," said the fencing girl with a grin. "He is getting quite rich. He fell in love with me at the tenements. He built them. I should think he would divorce me if I turned narrow-minded."
She gazed in a searching way at Elsie.
"You have the makings of a somebody," she said gravely, "more than these two, though they are perfectly charming."
"I want to go to the Balkans," said Elsie. She turned to Mabel. "Cousin Arthur declared he really would take me."
"Is Mr. Symington there now?" asked Jean. Mabel thanked her from the bottom of a heart that couldn't prompt a single word at that supreme moment.
"No, but he said he was going some day," said Elsie. That was all. Mabel had seen a blaze of sunshine and then blackness again.
"Oh," said the robust, unheeding Jean, "what do your people say to that?"
"Papa says he won't have me butchered," said Elsie with a radiant smile.
"Look here," said the fencing girl, with her eyes still searching that "wild flower of a face" of Elsie's. "Will your father come and see my tenements?"
The answer of Elsie became historic in the girls' club.
"I think he will," said she. "He was up the Ferris wheel last night."
CHAPTER XXVI
Under Royal Patronage
Mrs. Leighton made use of the fact of the Clutterbuck's being in London to write to the Professor's wife.
"We have been so anxious about Elma, who now however is picking up. But we have the saddest news of Miss Annie. It seems as though she would not live more than a day or two. If I have bad news to send to Mabel and Jean, may I send it through you? It would be such a kindness to me if I knew you were there to tell them."
Mrs. Clutterbuck responded in that loving tremulous way she had of delighting in being useful. She could not believe in her good fortune with the Professor. After all, it had been worry, concern about material things, which had clouded his affection for a time. He had never been able to give himself to the world, as he desired to give himself, because of that grind at lectures which he so palpably abhorred. Now even the lectures were a delight, since he had leisure besides where he did not need to reflect on the certainty of "the rainy day." He was once more the hero of her girlish dreams. How magnificent not to lose one's ideal! They both rejoiced in the young ardour of Elsie, whose courage made leaps at each new unfolding of the "loveliness of life."
It was very delightful now that the two Leightons should come under those gently stretching wings of the reinvigorated Professor's wife.
At the time of a call from Mrs. Clutterbuck, Mabel and Jean had just received tickets from Lady Emily for a concert at a great house. The concert, to those who bought guinea tickets, was not so important as the fact that royal ears would listen to it. Herr Slavska disposed of the affair in a speech which could not be taken down in words. His theme was the rush of the "stupids" to see a royal personage, and the tragedy of the poor "stars" of artists who could hardly afford the cab which protected their costumes. Yet some members of his profession, he averred, would rather lose a meal or two than lose the chance of seeing their name in red letters and of bowing to encores from royalty.
"And why not?" asked Jean. "I think it would be lovely to bow to royalty."
"Where is ze art?" he asked as a wind-up. "Nowhere!"
"That's nonsense, you know," Jean confided afterwards. "I think there must be a lot of art in being able to sing to kings and queens. Besides, why shouldn't they wave their royal hands, and produce us, as it were--like Aladdin, you know."
Jean already saw herself at Windsor.
Mabel merely concerned herself with the fact that Mr. Green was to play. He had not the scruples of Herr Slavska. "Although it's an abominable practice," said he. "It is the artists who make the sacrifice. Everybody else gets something for it. The crowd gets royalty, royalty gets music, charities get gold. We get momentary applause--that is all."
"That's what I'm living for," declared Jean, "just a little, a very little momentary applause. Then I would swell like a peacock, Mabel, I really should. The artists don't get nothing out of it after all. They get appreciation."
Mrs. Clutterbuck was intensely interested in the concert. "Do you mean to say there's to be a prince at it?" she asked.
There were to be princesses also, it seemed.
"Oh," said Mabel, "how lovely it would have been for Elsie and you to go."
She saw the experience that it would be for a little home bird of the Mrs. Clutterbuck type. She considered for a moment--"Couldn't she give up her ticket for one of them?"
Mrs. Clutterbuck saw the indecision in her face.
"No, my dear, no," said she, "I know the thought in your mind. I have a much better plan."
The pleasure of being at last able to dispense favours--transformed her face. She turned with an expectant, delighted look to Elsie.
"If we could go together," said she, "and it wouldn't be a bore to both of you to sit with two country cousins like ourselves, I should take two tickets. It would be charming."
This plan was received with the greatest acclamation.
"We ought to have a chaperon anyhow," said Jean.
It seemed the funniest thing in the world to Mabel that they should be about to be chaperoned by Mrs. Clutterbuck. In some unaccountable way it drew her more out of her loneliness than anything she had experienced in London. On the other hand, she was constantly reminding herself how much amused some people in Ridgetown would be if they only knew.
They drove to the concert on a spring day when the air had suddenly turned warm. The streets were sparkling with a radiance of budding leaves, of struggling blossom; and all the world seemed to be turning in at the great gates of the house beyond St. James'.
It was not to be expected that one should know these people, though, as Jean declared, "Every little boarding-house keeper in Bayswater could tell you who was stepping out of the carriage in front of you."
There was a great crowd inside; heated rooms and a wide vestibule, and a hall where a platform was arranged with crimson seats facing it and denoting royalty.
Mrs. Clutterbuck's timidity came on her with a rush. She could hardly produce her two tickets. It was Mabel who saved the situation and piloted them in as though she understood exactly where to go. There was a hush of expectancy in the beautifully costumed crowd within. Everybody looked past one with craning neck. Mabel began to laugh. "It's exactly as though they were built on a slant," she declared.
In the end they found seats on the stairs beside the wife of an ambassador.
"My dear," said Mrs. Clutterbuck in rather a breathless way to Mabel. "My dear, just think of it."
Mabel immediately regretted having brought her there.
"But everybody is sitting on the stairs," she said gravely. "It's quite all right. Lady Emily told me she once took a seat in an elevator in somebody's house because there was no room elsewhere. She spent an hour going up and down, not having the courage to get out."
Mrs. Clutterbuck smiled nervously.
"It isn't that, my dear. It's the gown, that one in front of you. Every inch of the lace is hand-made."
Mrs. Clutterbuck was quite enervated by the discovery.
"Oh," said Mabel in quite a relieved way, "was that it? I began to blame myself for bringing you to the stairs."
"Isn't it fun?" said Elsie. "Much funnier looking at these people than it will be looking at royalty. I never saw so many lorgnettes."
A sudden movement made them rise. A group of princesses with bouquets appeared and took their seats on the red chairs.
"Oh," said Jean with a sigh, as they sat down again. "Think of the poor artists now."
She had grown quite pale.
"I don't think I shall ever be able to perform," she said. "My heart simply stops beating on an occasion of this sort."
The crowd parted again, and a singer, radiant in white chiffon with silver embroidery, and wearing a black hat with enormous plumes, ascended the platform. She curtseyed elaborately to the princesses, and casually bowed in the direction of the applause which reached her from other sources. She began to sing, and in that hall of reserved voices, of deferential attitudes, of eager, searching glances and general ceremonious curiosity, her voice rang out a clear, beautiful, alien thing. It danced into the shadows of minds merely occupied with staring, it filled up crevices as though she had appeared in an empty room. One moment every one had been girt with a kind of fashionable melancholy which precluded anything but polite commonplaces. The next minute something living had appeared, a liquid voice sang notes of joy, mockery and despair; it lit on things which cannot be touched upon with the speaking voice, and it brought tears to the eyes of one little princess.
Jean was shrouded in longing. Nothing so intimately delicious had ever come near her. She might as well shut up her music books and say good-bye to Herr Slavska. Elsie sat beside the lady in real lace. She was in the woods with the fresh air blowing over her; buttercups and daisies at her feet.
"Is she not then charming?" asked a voice at her side. The real lace had spoken at last. That was how they discovered afterwards that she was the wife of an ambassador. The lady had her mind distracted first by the sheer beauty of a famous voice which she loved, next by the delicate profile of the face beside her--a type not usual in London.
Elsie turned her eyes with a start.
"It's like summer, the voice," she said simply.
"It's like the best method I've ever heard," said Jean darkly. (Oh, how to emulate such a creature!)
"Ah, yes. But she returns. And now, while yet she bows and does not sing--a leetle vulgar is it not?"
The ambassador's wife could discount her favourite it seemed. That was just the difficulty in art. To remain supreme in one art and yet recognize other forms of it, that was the fortune of few. The singer had enormous jewels at her neck.
"She would wear cabbage as diamonds," said the lady, "but with her voice one forgives."
Thereafter there was a procession of the most talented performers at that moment in London. Magicians with violins drew melodies in a faultless manner from smooth strings and a bow which seemed to be playing on butter. Technique was evident nowhere, only the easy lovely result of it. In an hour it became as facile a thing to play any instrument, sing any song, as though practice and discouragement did not exist in any art at all.
"Mr. Green played decorously and magnificently," said Elsie. "They are all a little decorous, aren't they?" she asked, "except that wonderful thing in the white and silver gown."
Nothing had touched the daring beauty of that voice.
Mrs. Clutterbuck leant forward to Elsie eagerly.
"I was right, Elsie," said she. "You know I was right."
"Right?" asked Elsie. Her eyes shone with a. dark glamour. "You mean about it's being so nice here, romantic and that sort of thing?"
"No," said Mrs. Clutterbuck. She sometimes had rather a superb way of treating Elsie's little imaginative extravagances. "I mean about mauve--mauve is the colour this year, don't you see?"
"Mamma," she said radiantly, "I quite forgot. I was simply wondering how long all this would last, or whether they'd suddenly cut us off the way Jean says they do."
"They do," said Jean, "at these charity concerts. One after another runs on and makes its little bow. And some are detained, you know, and then the programme just comes to an end."
"They seem to be going on all right," said Mrs. Clutterbuck placidly, "and mauve is the colour, you see."
Another singer appeared, and Jean's heaven was cleared of clouds by the evidence in this performer of a bad method. Now, indeed, it seemed an easy matter to believe that one could triumph over anything.
That first, victorious, delicious voice had trodden on every ambition Jean ever possessed. But the frailty of a newcomer set her once more on her enthusiastic feet.
"I should say it would be easy enough to get appearing at a concert like this," she said dimly to Elsie. Her eye was on the future, and the platform was cleared. At the piano sat Mr. Green, grown older a little, and more companionable as an accompanist; and in the centre, in radiant silver and white, and--and diamonds, sang Jean, the prima donna, Jean!
She was startled by the sudden departure of the ambassador's wife.
"For the leaving of the princess I wait not," said this lady. With a cool little nod to Elsie, she descended the crowded stairs.
Her remarks on the vulgarity of the singer rankled with Jean. The costume seemed so appropriate to that other fair dream.
"I didn't think her vulgar, did you?" she asked Elsie.
"Not on a platform, perhaps," said Elsie vaguely. Her thoughts invariably strayed from dress. "But in a drawing-room she would look, look----"
"Well, what Elsie?" asked Jean impatiently.
Elsie's dreamy eyes came down on her suddenly. "In a drawing-room she would look like a lamp shade," she blurted.
It really was rather a tragedy for them that the golden voice should have been framed in so doubtful a setting.
Elsie's eyes were on the princesses.
"They have eyes like calm lakes," said she. "How clever it must be to look out and feel and know, only to express very often something entirely different. Don't you wonder what princesses say to themselves when they get alone together after an affair of this sort?"
"I know," said Mabel. "They say, 'I wonder what girls like these girls on the stairs say of us after we are gone; do they say we are charming, as the newspapers do, or do they say----' But they couldn't think that, for they are charming, aren't they?" asked Mabel.
"Yes," said Elsie sadly. "But I never could keep a bird in a cage. It must be like being in a cage sometimes for them."
There was an abrupt movement among the royal party. The last of the illustrious performers had appeared, and it was time to go. Everybody rose once more. Then there was a hurried fight for a tea-room where countesses played hostess.
Mrs. Clutterbuck, now finally in the spirit of the thing, moved along blithely. She spoke, however, in low modulated whispers as though she were attending some serious ceremony.
"I'm sure your mother would have enjoyed this," she said, as they sat down to ices served in filagree boats. "The countesses and, you know, the general air of the thing--so different to Ridgetown."
"Ridgetown!" The girl laughed immoderately. "We couldn't sit on the stairs at Ridgetown, could we?" Mrs. Clutterbuck was getting away from her subject.
"Take some tea, my dear," she said to Mabel in the tone of voice as one who should say, "you will need it." "It's invigorating after the ice," said the Professor's wife.
Mabel took tea.
Now that the great event of the concert was over, they were a little tired, and glad of the idea of fresh air.
"Miss Grace, dear--have you heard from Miss Grace lately?" asked Mrs. Clutterbuck.
"No. It's a funny thing," said Mabel. "We supposed it was because of Elma's illness, you know. Miss Grace would be in such a state. Shall we go now?"
They got out and arranged to walk through St. James' Park together.
"I had a message," said Mrs. Clutterbuck quietly, "about Miss Grace. I am to have another when I get back just now. Will you come with me? It's about Miss Annie. She has been very ill."
It was impossible for her to tell them that the same illness as Elma's had done its work there. They seemed to have no suspicion of that.
"Oh, poor Miss Annie!" said Mabel. "If I had only known!"
"That was just it; they couldn't tell you that too with all you had to hear about Elma. Elma is very well now, you understand, but Miss Annie--well, Miss Annie is not expected to live over to-night."
The news came to them in an unreal way. It was the break-up of their childhood. That Miss Annie should not always be there, the charming beautiful invalid, seemed impossible.
"Oh, but," said Mabel, "she has been so ill before, won't she get better?"
"She was never ill like this before," said Mrs. Clutterbuck. "We will see what the message says."
They found a wire at home. At the end of a sparkling day, it came to that. While they had listened to these golden voices, Miss Annie had----
The telegram lay there to say that Miss Annie had died.