CHAPTER V.
TEATIME IN ARCADIA.
It was long since Vansittart had been haunted by the face of a woman as he was haunted by the face of Eve Marchant. He had not come to nine and twenty years of age without one or twograndes passions, which had begun out of a mere fancy, a glance—like one of those once fashionable toys called Pharaoh’s Serpents—had swollen to colossal dimensions, and had ended, like the serpent, in a puff of smoke. This time he wondered at his own feelings when he found himself so deeply interested in the girl he always thought of as Titania. He was inclined to ascribe this sudden interest to the eccentric manner of their first meeting, the three pretty faces springing out of a turn in the wooded road, like sylphs in fairyland, the light, silvery laughter, and the something of sadness in the fate of this bright, light-hearted girl which appealed to his deeper feelings.
To whatever cause he might ascribe his interest, the fact remained that he was interested; for he found himself thinking about Eve Marchant a great deal more than he had ever thought of any one subject, except that one fatal subject of his misadventure at Venice; and he found himself very bad company for other people in consequence.
For ten days after the ball at Mandelford he lived in expectation of seeing Miss Marchant again, somewhere, somehow; and to further that desire of his heart he lived in a state of perpetual locomotion; now driving one of the Hartley dog-carts to Mandelford or Midhurst,Fernhurst or Haslemere, as the case might be; and anon patrolling those towns and villages on foot, in the ardent expectation of meeting Colonel Marchant’s daughters upon some shopping or visiting expedition.
Go where he would he drew blank. Could it be that the Colonel was so deep in debt to the local tradespeople that his daughters dared not show themselves in those rural streets, where, after all, as the local gentry said condescendingly, one could really get almost everything one wanted?
He walked, he drove, he haunted the great pond in Redwold Park, which was thrown open to the public for skating, and where the men and maidens of the neighbourhood came daily to disport themselves: but vainly did he look for the Marchants.
“I thought the Miss Marchants were skaters,” he said to Miss Green, on the third morning, as he helped her to put on her Mount Charles skates.
“So they are. They almost lived on this pond before Christmas. Perhaps they have worn out their boots, and are obliged to stay at home.”
Those ten days of expectancy and disappointment made Jack Vansittart desperate. It seemed to him ages since the night of the ball. He began to think he should never see Eve Marchant again, and panic-stricken at this idea, he started after a morning’s pheasant shooting to walk to the Homestead, Fernhurst, to make a formal call upon the sisters. Surely he had the right to call and inquire how they had survived the fatigue of the dances, the perils of the cold drive home. He was quick to make up his mind that he had such a right, and no walk taken for pleasure or for health had ever been more exhilarating than that tramp from the westward shoulder of Blackdown to the further side of Fernhurst. The roads were hard and dry, the wind was north-west, and the sun was going down in wintry splendour. It was late in the afternoon to make a ceremonious visit, but there was all the better hope that he would find Colonel Marchant’s daughters within doors.
The house stood high above the road, on a ridge of meadow-land which had been encroached upon for half an acre of garden. It was a long, low house, with steep gable ends, and a high slanting roof, red tiled and lichen grown. Originally only a farm labourer’s cottage, it had been expanded and improved by more than one tenant, the last addition being made by Colonel Marchant, who at the beginning of his tenancy had built a comfortable covered porch, which served as vestibule, and a large room on the ground floor, which had been first known as the nursery, then as the schoolroom, and which was now simply the parlour, or general living-room for the whole family. The resident governess, that element of respectability, had shakenthe dust of Colonel Marchant’s Bohemian dwelling-place off her feet a year ago, and had vanished into space, leaving a long arrear of salary behind her.
It was twilight, the grey twilight of a frosty winter day. Vansittart noted the snowdrops peeping over the box border as he walked up the steep gravel path that made the only approach to the Marchant dwelling. Carriage approach there was none. The Marchant girls’ cheap satin slippers had to trip along that gravel path, in fine weather or foul, when they went to a party, and the poor little feet inside the slippers had to dance away any feeling of chilly dampness which the sodden gravel might occasion.
Vansittart looked about him in the evening grey as he waited for the opening of the door. He had rung a bell that sounded twice too loud for the size of the house, and had set up much barking of indoor and outdoor dogs.
There were two long strips of grass sloping down to the holly-hedge that shut off the road, and a long flower border on either side of the gravel path. This was the garden, so far as ornamental garden went, but beyond the grass strip on one side of the house there were cabbage rows, and the usual features of a vegetable garden. Beyond, right and left, stretched meadow-land, away to the dark background of copse and hillside.
The house, even after all its improvements, had a humble and homely aspect; walls roughly plastered, small lattice windows, and that steep slant of the roof, which Vansittart could have touched with his hand. The porch was a square enclosure, with a sloping thatch, and two little windows, right and left. An old woman, in a blue stuff gown and white cap and apron, opened the door, and even as it opened Vansittart heard again that ripple of silver-clear laughter which he had heard on the hilltop in the snowy night, nearly ten days ago.
Ten days. Only ten! Until ten days ago he had lived in happy ignorance that there was such a woman as Eve Marchant in the world. It seemed to him now as strange not to have known of her as it would be not to know of her namesake—the universal mother.
The same sweet laughter, not loud or boisterous, but soft and clear! Her laugh! He would have known it amidst a chorus of laughing girls.
Miss Marchant was at home, the old woman told him, and thereupon led him through a small, dark room—the original cottage parlour—through another room, faintly lit by a low fire, into a third and much larger room, which was bright with fire and lamp light.
Here the whole Marchant family, except the Colonel, were assembled at afternoon tea, which in this establishment had come to be the most enjoyable meal of the day.
Happily Vansittart had lunched lightly in the woods with the shooters, so was hungry enough to find the odour of toasting bread rather a comfortable addition to the atmosphere; or, at any rate, he was in a humour to be pleased with everything, even the sprawling attitude of a tall overgrown girl in a yellow cotton pinafore, sitting on the hearthrug, and making toast, watched and assisted by a smaller sister.
The three grown-up Miss Marchants sat at the table, two of them with their elbows on the board, where a large home-made cake—in north-country phraseology, a plum-loaf—a glass dish of marmalade and another of jam, and a pile of thick bread and butter, testified to the serious purpose of the meal.
Eve, the tea-maker and mistress of the feast, rose as Mr. Vansittart was announced, and came forward two or three steps to greet him, half in firelight, half in lamplight, brilliant and full of colour as an early Italian picture. Her gown was bright red merino, which set off the fairness of her complexion, and the pale gold in her brown hair; such a cheap gown, if he had only known, bought at one of the sales for half its value, timid beauty being afraid of the strong colour.
The other two girls were in somewhat tawdry attire, skirts of one colour, bodices of another; but they were fond of colour at the Homestead, and girls with scanty purses cannot bend to the iron rule of fashion.
To Vansittart’s admiring eyes, Eve’s red gown was the most exquisite and artistic of garments. He who was generally so much at his ease in all kinds of company found himself hesitating a little as he said that he had come to ask them if they had quite recovered from the fatigue of the dance; and, if so, how it was they had not been on the ice in Redwold Park.
“But perhaps you are tired of skating.”
“Tired? Why, we all adore it,” cried Eve. “But we have been dreadfully busy, making our winter gowns.”
The second week in January seemed to Mr. Vansittart a late date at which to set about the making of winter raiment. He did not know that for many young women with slender purses the January and July sales are the only periods for the purchase of drapery. Twice a year the Marchant girls treated themselves to third-class tickets from Haslemere to Waterloo, and spent a long day going from shop to shop to secure the utmost value for their poor little stock of cash.
“Yes; it’s really dreadful to lose a week of this delicious hard frost, ain’t it?” exclaimed Sophy, much readier of speech this evening than her elder sister.
“Run to the kitchen and get me another teapot, Peggy,” whisperedEve; whereupon the youngest girl started up from the rug and bounded off on her errand.
“Just as we were all improving in our skating,” said Jenny. “We had conquered the outside edge, and Sophy and I were beginning to grasp the right idea of the Dutch roll, and were even aspiring to the grape vine.”
“And then the hockey,” interjected Sophy; “the hockey was too delightful.”
Again the fair head bent itself towards the hearthrug. There was another whisper, and the elder girl bounced up and ran off.
“She has gone for a cup and saucer, and I am going to give you some fresh tea,” said Eve, smiling at the visitor as he sat in the Colonel’s chair, in that corner of the room which bore no traces of girlish litter. “I hope you don’t mind our waiting upon ourselves. We have only our old Yorkshire Nancy, and a little parlour-maid; and as it is the little maid’s afternoon out, here we are, five intelligent young people, ready to help each other.”
“I cannot conceive a more delightful spectacle. But why make fresh tea, Miss Marchant? I am sure there is some of your last brew which would do capitally for me.”
“If I did not know you are saying that for kindness, I might think you one of those unsympathetic people who don’t care for tea.”
“Do tea and sympathy go together?”
“I think most nice people are tea-drinkers. Indeed, it seems to me that tea is the link that holds society together. Oh, what should we do with our afternoons—however could we go and call upon people—if it were not for afternoon tea?”
“And I see that afternoon tea, with you young ladies, is a somewhat serious function,” said Vansittart, with a glance across the well-spread table to the pile of toast which Sophy was buttering.
The younger girls had come back, one with a china teapot, the other with a cup and saucer, and Eve was busy with her second brew.
“Please don’t laugh at us. We are a very irregular family in the matter of luncheon, and this is our hungriest meal.”
The youngest girl, who had resumed her seat on the hearthrug, was at this juncture seized with a giggling fit, which she vainly endeavoured to suppress, and which speedily communicated itself to the youngest but one, also seated on the rug.
“Those children are too absurd,” exclaimed Sophy, after trying to frown them into propriety. “They are always laughing at nothing.”
“Happy age,” said Vansittart; “the time so soon comes when we can’t laugh at anything.”
“She said it was our hungriest meal!” gasped Hetty, of theyellow pinafore, in convulsions of undisguised laughter; “I should rather think it was.”
“I suppose these young ladies are not yet promoted to late dinners?” hazarded Vansittart, wondering a little why this question of afternoon tea could afford such scope for mirth.
“No, we don’t dine late,” protested Hetty, more and more hilarious. “Wedon’t, do we, Peggy?”
Peggy, the white-pinafored youngest, was speechless with laughter.
Vansittart began to divine the mystery. In this household of narrow means there was no late dinner for the ladies of the family. There was doubtless a dinner for the Colonel. Man cannot long support life without the regulation evening meal; but for this household of girls bread and jam and plum-loaves were an all-sufficient repast. Was low living—this diet of innocent bread and butter—one of the causes of Eve’s peerless complexion, he wondered? All the girls were more or less pretty. It might be that this Arcadian fare had something to do with their prettiness.
Never had he enjoyed a meal so much as that afternoon tea in the Marchants’ parlour. As he sat looking at the room in the lamplight he began to think he had never seen a prettier room for a family to live in. The fireplace was wide and spacious, an open hearth, with a high projecting mantelpiece, and narrow shelves over that, slanting upward to the ceiling, and dotted about with trumpery blue teacups, and yellow and red vases from the Riviera. The Colonel had begun with the intention of making an ingle nook, but being told, in the rustic builder’s phraseology, that an ingle nook would run into money, he had contented himself with a wide fireplace and a projecting chimney. There was only black and white on the walls, a few etchings, and a good many photographs of pictures, against a dark red paper. There was a cottage piano in a corner, draped with a Bellagio rug of vivid amber, and there were other Bellagio rugs on the sofa, and on the Colonel’s armchair. For the rest the furniture was of the shabbiest; clumsy substantial old chairs and tables that suggested the hindermost dens of the second-hand furniture dealer, those yards and back premises in which he keeps his least attractive goods. The room was uncarpeted, but crudely coloured Indian rugs of the cheaper kind brightened the oak-stained floor here and there, and gave a suggestion of luxury. The lamp in the middle of the round table was subdued by a large shade of art muslin, daintily frilled and ribboned, evidently a home production; the German tablecloth was of white and red damask, the crockery was white, cheap but pretty, and there were a few winter flowers and bright berries in brown glass vases. Altogether that tea-table had a delightful aspect to John Vansittart. The room, the firelight, the fresh young faces, with that one fairest face shininglike a star among the others, the hoydens upon the hearthrug giggling at the idea of a dinnerless household, made up a scene of homely enchantment. Even a white fox-terrier which had begun by snapping at him, and which was now at his knee begging for toast, seemed part and parcel of the pleasant homeliness. It was teatime in a domestic fairyland; a fairyland where people eat slices of buttered plum-loaf and hot frizzling toast; a fairyland odorous of strawberry jam; a land where young women put their elbows on the table, and had no need of a chaperon to keep them in countenance during the visit of a young man; in a word, the fairyland of Bohemia. To Vansittart, who in England had known only the respectabilities, the everlasting laws and conventionalities of smart people, differing in detail with the fashion of the hour, but fundamentally the same—to Vansittart, the young man of property and position, this glimpse of an unconventional household was as novel as it was fascinating. Pretty as Eve Marchant was, he would not have admired her half so much at a ball in Grosvenor Square. It was the touch of pathos, the touch of comedy in the girl’s history and surroundings which interested him.
He sat long at the tea-table, and eat more buttered toast than he had eaten at a sitting since he was an undergraduate. He forgot even to ask if Colonel Marchant were at home, and had almost forgotten the existence of that gentleman when Hetty, the youngest but one, on being reproved for noisy utterance, replied, “It don’t matter, father can’t hear me at the Rag.”
“Colonel Marchant is in town, I conclude,” said Vansittart.
“He went up by the afternoon train,” Eve answered with a stately air. “He is dining with some old chums to-night, and I don’t think he’ll be home before Saturday.”
“I have not been fortunate enough to meet him yet.”
“I’m afraid he’s rather unsociable,” answered Eve, suddenly serious, while over all the young faces there spread a shadow of seriousness. “He lets us accept invitations—and I’m sure people are very kind to go on asking us when we can’t pay them the proper respect of new frocks.”
“What do people care about frocks?” exclaimed Jenny, the third daughter, with a Republican air. “If we are asked out it is because we are liked, in spite of our old frocks.”
“Or because people are sorry for us,” said Eve, gravely.
“I don’t think people are ever sorry for youth and beauty,” said Vansittart. “Both are objects of envy rather than of compassion.”
“Oh, I can’t follow you there,” answered Eve; “everybody is young once. Youth is as common as chickweed or groundsel, and it lasts such a short time; and if one has to spend that one brightlittle bit of life in a state of perpetual hard-uppishness, I am sure one deserves to be pitied.”
She talked of her poverty with an alarming frankness. Most people hide their indigence as if it were an ugly sore, or if they speak of it, speak softly, apologetically, or with an assumed lightness, as if their poverty were not really poverty, but only a genteel limitation of means, implying none of the shortcomings of actual want. But this girl talked of her old frock and her father’s poverty, without a blush.
“Father won’t visit anywhere now,” she said. “He can’t forget that he once lived in a big house, and had a thousand acres of shooting, and bred his own pheasants. He can hardly bring himself to shoot other people’s birds, even when they ask him to their big shoots.”
“Your old home was in the North, I think?” said Vansittart, delighted at being let into the family secrets.
“In Yorkshire—within ten miles of Beverley. Do you know Beverley?”
“Yes; I was there once—a queer sleepy old place, once renowned for its corruption; now from a political point of viewnil. A town with a Bar—a Bar which did something to Charles the First, I believe. Did Beverley shut him out, or did Beverley let him in after Hull had shut him out? My common or Gardiner history is at fault there.”
“Beverley is a dear old town,” asserted Eve. “I haven’t seen it since I was twelve years old, but I can remember the countenance of every house in the market-place, and the colouring of every window in the Minster. Father won a cup at the races when I was eleven, and I took it home in the carriage with me. I remember having it in my lap, a great gilt cup. I thought it was gold till my governess told me it was only silver-gilt. Heaven knows what became of that cup! Father despised it. The race was a paltry affair, I believe, and his horse was a poor creature. He had won ever so many better cups at bigger races; but I only remember the cup I carried home, and the broad, bright common, and the blazing July day, and the happy-looking people. It was my last summer in Yorkshire, my last summer in the house where I was born. Before the next summer we all came here. Mother, and the governess, and the rest of us. Peggy was a baby in long clothes, and mother was only just beginning to be seriously ill.”
“And if you could have seen this place when we first came to it you would have pitied us,” said Sophy. “A parson’s family had been living in it, an overgrown family like us, but without the faintest idea of the beautiful. The parson’s wife kept poultry, and there were horrid wired enclosures close to the parlour window, andthere was no porch, and no possibility of saying ‘Not at home’ to callers. There were only vegetables in the garden, potatoes and scarlet-runners, where we have made lawns.”
“She calls those long strips of grass lawns,” interjected Peggy, irreverently disposed towards a dictatorial grown-up sister who was not the eldest. Against Eve no one rebelled.
“And think how squeezed we all must have been till father built this room, and picture to yourself the mess and muddle we had to endure all the time it was being built. It didn’t matter to him, for he was out of the worst of it.”
“He had to take mother to the South that winter,” explained Eve. “She had been in weak health for ever so long before we left Yorkshire. A weakly plant can’t bear being torn up by the roots, can it? I think that change in our fortunes broke her heart—added to—to other things.”
She did not say what the other things were, and he could not ask her; nor would he ask her what had brought about the Colonel’s ruin. He could make a shrewd guess upon the latter point. The value of landed property had gone down, and the man had kept a racing stud. Between those two facts there was ample room for change of fortune.
“Mother never came back to us,” said Eve, with a gentle sigh. “She is lying in the cemetery at Cannes. People have told me about her grave, and that it is in a lovely spot. There is some comfort in being able to think of that, after all these years.”
“I know that resting-place well,” said Vansittart. “There is no lovelier home for the dead.”
There was a brief silence. Even the children on the hearthrug were dumb, and there was no sound but the contented purring of Hetty’s colossal cat, a brindled grey, with a fluffy white breast, a cat that was satiated with the worship of pretty girls, and gave himself as many airs as if he had been kittened in Egypt, and ranked among gods.
“Dear as Beverley was, I hope you all like your Sussex home,” said Vansittart.
“Sussex is well enough, but when one is used to a big stone house, with a picture-gallery, and one of the finest Jacobean staircases in the East Riding, it is rather hard to come down to a labourer’s cottage that has been dodged and expanded into the most inconvenient house in the neighbourhood,” said Sophy, with a grand air, and tilting her retroussé nose a little higher than usual.
Again the girls on the hearthrug burst into inextinguishable laughter.
“What a snob you are, Sophy!” cried the outspoken Hetty. “You say all that as if you had learnt it by heart; and as forcoming down, you came down to the labourer’s cottage when you were eleven years old. You ought to be used to it now you are twenty.”
Twenty. Sophy, the second, was twenty—and there was only a year between her and Vansittart’s incomparable she, who had migrated to Sussex when she was twelve. One and twenty, in the fair majority of her girlish charms. He thought it the most delightful period in woman’s life—fair as in her teens, but wiser: mature for love and wisdom.
All earthly blisses must end. The blissfullest five o’clock tea cannot last for ever; but Vansittart was determined to make this endure as long as he could. The meal was finished. Even those long, lean hands of the youngsters had ceased to be stretched harpy-like towards the table for more bread and jam, or another slice of cake, which an elder sister dispensed with somewhat offensive comments upon the ravenous maw of youth.
“Oh, come now,” cried the offended Peggy. “Suppose I do eat a lot; I haven’t stopped growing yet. You have, yet I’ve heard you say you could sit and eat one of Nancy’s plum-loaves all the evening. But that was when there was no one here but ourselves.”
Sophy blushed furiously, and Vansittart came laughingly to the rescue.
“I can vouch for the seductiveness of Nancy’s plum-loaf,” he said. “I think I must coax her to impart the recipe to my mother’s cook. Is your Nancy a coaxable person?”
“Not very. She adores us, but she is rather gruff and grim to the outside world. She was in father’s service as kitchen-maid when she was fourteen, at the time of his marriage, ages before I was born,” said Eve.
Ages. Yet she was the eldest. What did that word ages mean? Three years, perhaps, in a young lady’s vocabulary.
“And she followed your fortunes from the old house, and she is as faithful asCaleb Balderstone, I dare say,” said Vansittart, and felt in the next moment that it was precisely one of those things he had better have left unsaid.
“She is just like Caleb,” replied Eve, frankly accepting the suggestion, “just as faithful and true. I feel sure that if it were suddenly put upon us to give a dinner, and there were a saddle of mutton or a fore-quarter of lamb hanging conveniently before a neighbour’s fire, Nancy would elope with it just as audaciously as Caleb made off with the cooper’s spit—all for the credit of the family. She works like a slave for us from morning till night. She is a splendid manager, and she makes tea-cakes as only a Yorkshirewoman can.”
“And in cooking she could give points to many of your professedcooks,” said Jenny. “Father is a difficult man in the matter of dinner.”
“And dinner is a difficult matter for poor people,” laughed Eve, to the annoyance of Sophy, who had not yet taken to heart the foolishness of the ostrich family, and who was always anxious to slur over an impecuniousness which was visible to the naked eye. It was only Eve who had learnt to grasp the nettle. Perhaps it was her country life, among green fields and blackthorn hedgerows, and chestnut copses, and the barren heather-clad hills, which had kept her free from the age’s worst fever, the sickly longing for wealth. Had she been reared in Pimlico or Brompton, she too might have been spoilt, her nature warped, her mind tainted with the sordid thirst for gold, the desire for finery and fine living, the aching envy of rich men’s daughters. The people she knew and mixed with were county people, who wore their old gowns, and lived simple, old-fashioned lives when they were in the country, and left their modern vices behind them in London ready for use next season.
Vansittart glanced at a cheap little American clock ticking among the cups and vases on the chimney-piece. A quarter past six, and his watch had told him that it was a quarter before five as he approached the Homestead.
“I don’t know how to apologize for staying so long,” he faltered, as he rose from the Colonel’s comfortable chair and extricated his hat from the reluctant paws of the grey cat.
“Don’t apologize,” said Jenny, who was the pertest of the sisters; “there is nothing so unflattering to one’s amour propre as a short visit. And then there are so many of us. A visitor must stay a longish time in order to give each of us a civil word.”
Vansittart’s conscience smote him at this remark. He feared that he had addressed his conversation exclusively to Eve. He had no consciousness of having spoken to any one else. For him the room had held only Eve; only that one salient figure. The others were faintly sketched in the background. She was the picture.
He got out of the room somehow, after shaking hands all round, and even in his deep trance of love he was conscious that the two youngest hands were sticky with traces of strawberry jam. There being no one else to show him out—for who could disturb Nancy, remote in the kitchen, with futile ringing of a ceremonial bell?—the whole bevy of sisters accompanied him to the outer door, the youngest carrying a tall candle, which threatened to topple over and sprinkle her with a shower of ozokerit. He had time to notice the rooms through which they went—one shabbily furnished as a dining-room, with an old harpsichord for sideboard; the other evidently the Colonel’s den for books, boots, and tobacco. He hadtime to note the porch or vestibule, where there hung much outer apparel, feminine and masculine, hats, scarves, fishing basket, sticks of all shapes and thicknesses, mostly from native woods and hedgerows. He had time to note everything during that lingering departure, protracted by idle talk about the roads and the weather: and yet while his eye took in the shabbiness and smallness of those two rooms, the rustiness of the Colonel’s overcoats, mind and eye both were filled with but one image—the figure of a tall, fair girl, whose fluffy head overtopped her sisters, and shone conspicuous among them all (as it would have shone, he thought, amidst a thousand), by its fresh and innocent beauty.
“And that is the girl I love; and that is the girl I mean to marry,” he said to himself, as he walked briskly along the footpath towards Blackdown.
After such dawdling in Armida’s parlour he would have to walk his fastest to be in time to dress for the eight o’clock dinner.