“I don’t think so, thank you, sir,” said Fuller, with a manifest air of dissatisfaction.
Sir Julian, knowing his Supervisor, lingered.
“Lady Rossiter has kindly asked the members of the staff out to Culmhayes on Sunday, Sir Julian.”
Sir Julian looked quite as much annoyed as did Mr. Fuller.
Few things were, in the opinion either of the Supervisor or of his employer, less to be commended than Lady Rossiter’s benevolent attempts at keeping in touch with the staff of the College.
Appearances, however, were discreetly maintained.
“I hope as many of them will come as care for the walk,” said Sir Julian, with gloomy civility.
“I am sure they will be delighted, and it will make a nice beginning for Miss Marchrose on her first Sunday.”
Sir Julian walked away even gloomier than before at the recollection that his wife’s hospitality would not improbably be extended to the perpetrator of the outrage which had driven Captain Clarence Isbister to such extreme demonstrations of despair.
“Do you happen to remember did you notice what that woman’s Christian name was?” he enquired of Mark Easter.
“The new Superintendent?”
“Yes.”
“Let me see. I saw her letter to Fuller something unusual.... Was it Pauline?”
“I thought so,” said Sir Julian.
It was characteristic both of Sir Julian’s dislike to anything which came, in his opinion, under the extremely elastic heading of officiousness, and of the care with which he had impressed his dislike upon Mark Easter, that his companion did not ask him why he thus dejectedly took for granted the name bestowed at baptism upon Miss Marchrose. Mark Easter, talkative and open-hearted, was yet the only man from whom Sir Julian said that he had never received an officious enquiry or an unasked offer of assistance.
If the remark might be looked upon as a form of the highest commendation, it was one which Sir Julian had never yet shown any disposition to make in regard to his wife.
Nothing had as yet persuaded Edna Rossiter of the inadvisability of addressing personalities to a man whose surface cynicism was used to cloak extreme sensitiveness, and whose bitterness of speech was the outcome of such disillusionment of spirit as comes only to those capable of an idealism as delicate as it is reserved.
“Are you going home, Mark, or will you lunch at the club?”
“The club,” said Mark decidedly, with an intonation that brought before Sir Julian’s inner vision a lively picture of the probable congealed mutton, underdone potatoes, the lumpy milk-pudding of Sarah’s providing, doubtless to be consumed to an accompaniment of senseless comments and enquiries from Ruthie and Ambrose on the engrossing subject of “Why, Ben! A Story of the Sexes.” As the thought crossed his mind, Mark observed:
“Iris is coming down here later on. Of course, she wants to be in London for the publication of her novel, but that won’t be out till the winter, she says. Poor girl! I wish people would not put it into her head that it is her duty to come and look after me and the children at intervals.”
“Who does put it into her head?”
“Various old aunts. I wish people would mind their own business. Poor Iris hates the country.”
“Is she still living in the flat?”
“Yes, with another girl. I believe they sleep in the boot-hole and do their own cooking, but it’s all a great success, and Iris is very happy, and has the sort of Bohemian society she likes. It is a much better arrangement than her being down here with me. I’m not sure,” said Mark thoughtfully, “that I approve of relations living together after they are grown-up.”
Sir Julian agreed with him so cordially as to suggest that the case in point was emphatically one in which the proposed arrangement would be eminently undesirable.
“I don’t know that Iris, devoted though she is to them, is the best possible person to be with the children.”
“No,” said Julian, with restraint, considering his private opinion to be that if anything on earth could render Mark Easter’s progeny more insufferable than nature and the maternal shortcomings had already made them, it was the society of their affected, suburban, and distinctly underbred young relative. It was a source of continual wonder to him, what sort of a person the second Mrs. Easter could have been, to have presented Mark with such a half-sister as the twenty-year-old perpetrator of “Why, Ben!”
The conclusion long ago come to by him, that Mark had been afflicted with the most intolerable set of relations ever owned by man, was destined to be furnished with yet another proof of validity at the end of the day.
As the two men came back across the fields of Sir Julian’s property late in the afternoon, Mark whistling under his breath and Julian silent in the comfortable companionship of long association and mutual understanding, a sound of hoarse, ceaseless yelling that could have been produced by no other human larynx than that of Mark Easter’s daughter came from the garden of the villa.
“I’m afraid that’s Ruthie,” said her parent, sensibly slackening his pace.
“I’m certain it is.”
Ruthie was bent double across the dangerously creaking top bar of the wooden paling.
She raised a face, flushed and distorted, indeed, as much from her unnatural position as from her vocal efforts, but unstained by tears, and proclaimed aloud:
“Daddy, Peekaboo has been such a naughty boy. Sarah is putting him to bed and I’m singing so that he can hear me from the night-nursery window. He has written up in ink all over the drawing-room door, and the dining-room door, and the nursery door, ‘The two best books in the world are “Why, Ben!” And the Bible.’”
III
EDNA ROSSITER, in common with the majority of her sex, supposed herself to be a religious woman because she had, from early girlhood, indulged nightly in five minutes spent on her knees beside her bed, her face pressed against the satin quilt, while she thought about herself.
Very soon after her marriage she formed the habit of prolonging the five minutes into ten, or even fifteen, while she consecrated a few vindictively earnest thoughts of forgiveness to her husband.
Within the last ten years, all the forbearance which she was capable of displaying being apparently without any effect upon Sir Julian, Lady Rossiter had rather disgustedly transferred her allegiance from the Almighty, in propria persona, to God as He is found in Nature.
Nature, primarily, meant out-of-doors generally, in warm weather, and the sound of the sea two miles off, audible from beside the boudoir fire, in the colder seasons.
Lately, however, Nature had also embraced such of humanity as had its place rather lower than that of the Rossiters in the social scale.
Edna sought for the Divine Spark in her fellow creatures, and frequently discovered it, with renewed satisfaction to herself and to its possessor.
As she often said, smiling a little:
“There’s so much bad in the best of us, There’s so much good in the worst of us.”
She never finished the quotation, except by the smile, because she knew it to be at all times easy to trip over its inversions and repetitions, and thus risk the transition from the sublime to the ridiculous.
One of the most recent manifestations of what Julian had once designated in his wife’s hearing as the “Hunting of the Spark,” was her wholesale invitation to the staff of teachers at the College to spend Sunday afternoon at Culmhayes.
A few stray and tentative young women had availed themselves of it once, showing a marked disposition towards wandering arm-in-arm round the gardens, avoiding their hostess as much as possible, and Cooper had twice walked over from Culmouth and made nervously easy conversation to Lady Rossiter, which had dwindled into a sort of alert silence when her husband came in.
“Mind you bring them all next week,” had been Lady Rossiter’s farewell injunction, to which Cooper had replied with great confidence and assurance.
Preparing for her guests on Sunday afternoon, therefore, Lady Rossi
ter gazed smilingly out of her window at a cloudless day of August. Evidently Nature was in league with her votary.
Lady Rossiter told her maid to bring the black-and-white mousseline de sole. No other colours suited her fairness so admirably, and she always wore the combination when embarking upon any enterprise of particular benevolence. The thick pallor of her complexion could afford to defy the sun, and she seldom wore a hat in the garden. A black-and-white-striped sunshade made quite as effective a background for her mass of auburn hair and black eyebrows and lashes.
Before going downstairs she thoughtfully slipped the rings from her long white fingers, and bade her maid substitute a small crystal cross on a velvet ribbon for her pearl necklace.
The maid had not been with her very long, and obeyed the mandate with such wooden matter-of-factness that Lady Rossiter added gently:
“One doesn’t want anyone to feel the least little difference in any way. We have all grown to have such false ideas of values...”
‘Yes, m’lady,” said Mason, looking so thoroughly bewildered that Lady Rossiter resolved to read extracts from Ruskin aloud to her while her hair was being brushed at nights.
She went downstairs slowly, to find Julian reading in the hall.
“Jorrocks?” she enquired playfully, but with a meaning that she knew would not be lost upon her husband.
Ever since she had wrung from a monosyllabic Julian the admission that neither Ruskin, Pater, nor Stevenson “meant” to him that which they meant to her, Edna had assumed, by almost imperceptible degrees, that her husband’s only literature consisted of Jorrocks and the volumes of the Badminton series.
Dickens she had unwillingly conceded to him, since Dickens made no appeal to her personally, but she was more apt to dwell upon his liking for the “Pickwick Papers “And “Nicholas Nickleby “than for “Great Expectations “or “David Copperfield.”
At her enquiry Julian closed his book.
“Jorrocks, of course,” he assented expressionlessly, putting down Huysman’s “En Route,” And not troubling to display the title.
“Did Mr. Fuller tell you how many of my staff meant to come this afternoon?”
“No. I don’t suppose, in any case, that they would have told him.”
“That’s so curious to me, Julian. To work together all the week, and yet know nothing of one another’s real life nothing of what goes on in the free time, or the one holiday of the week.”
“What generally goes on, I imagine, is that the girls have their hair waved on Saturday afternoons, stay in bed on Sunday mornings, and go out with their young men on Sunday evenings. I doubt if the procedure ever varies.”
“And that with God’s own blue sea less than a mile away!” ejaculated Lady Rossiter under her breath, but nevertheless quite audibly.
“Cooper generally goes for a walk on Saturday afternoon,” said Sir Julian consolingly; “And Fuller, and I imagine a good many of the other fellows as well, to a football or cricket match.”
“Can you wonder that we long to win them to clearer, wider ideals?” his wife enquired.
She waited for no reply, aware of old that Julian invariably professed a supreme indifference to the outlook of the College staff when outside their College walls, but trailed into the wide, cool drawing-room containing little furniture and an abundance of roses and heliotrope.
Lady Rossiter arranged the flowers herself, and did so exquisitely. She often said that flowers were literally a necessity to her an opinion frequently held by those whose financial situation has never compelled them to regard flowers as an alternative to, let us say, butter for breakfast, in which case the relative value of the commodities in question is apt to undergo alteration.
Poised over her bowls of pink roses, Lady Rossiter was taken by surprise when her guests eventually arrived.
Sir Julian strongly suspected that had the drawing-room window given on to the drive, instead of on to the green bowling-alley, his wife would herself have met her visitors at the hospitably opened hall door, thus sparing the dignity of Horber, undemocratic as only a butler can be, from the announcement which he stiffly made out of the extreme corners of his mouth.
“Miss Farmer, Miss Sandiloe, and Mr. Cooper, m’lady.”
Miss Farmer, in a green linen which accorded singularly ill with a sallow complexion; Miss Sandiloe, girlish, pretty and full of giggles that threatened disaster to a tightly-fitting and transparent white muslin; and Mr. Cooper, obviously in the toils of Miss Sandiloe, came one by one into the drawing-room, where Lady Rossiter, in point of fact, had never intended them to penetrate at all.
Sir Julian, watching the entry in an angle of the hall window-seat which he trusted to be invisible from the drawing-room, could not forbear the tribute of an unwilling admiration to his wife’s handling of the rather embarrassed trio.
“Ah, but how nice! Miss Farmer, of course we’ve met before; and Mr. Cooper” -a shake of the hand to each. “And?” A pause, with pleasantly uplifted eyebrows, in front of Miss Sandiloe.
“Miss Sandiloe,” Miss Farmer supplied, and added rather haltingly, obviously unsure of the etiquette governing the position:
“The junior teacher of shorthand, Lady Rossiter.”
“I’m so glad to see you,” said the lady, with an additional graciousness designed, Julian imagined, to set the youthful stranger at her ease.
The unexpectedly high-pitched note, however, upon which Miss Sandiloe off-handedly replied, “Oh, thanks!” did not indicate shyness.
Julian viewed it as an example of the law of cause and effect that his wife’s next observation was made in tones that savoured less of kindly welcome and more of rather distant patronage.
“I am always anxious to get to know all the members of the College staff, and have them out here if I possibly can. I take a great interest in the College. In fact, I’m on the committee of management.”
“Are you?” said Miss Sandiloe indifferently. “What topping flowers those are!”
She thrust her face into the fragrant mass which Lady Rossiter had just left.
“You must all come into the garden, when it’s a little cooler.”
Lady Rossiter addressed herself to Miss Farmer.
“Meanwhile it’s too bad of me to keep you standing in this hot room. Come into the morning-room.”
Julian fancied that Miss Farmer, heated and wearied, and with dusty patent-leather shoes that creaked as she walked, and bore a large crack across each, as though they were too tight, cast a rather wistful look at the large, beautifully-shaded room of which they had penetrated no further than the threshold.
But she obediently followed her hostess, and Miss Sandiloe, giggling slightly, tripped behind her with Cooper in tow.
From sheer curiosity, Julian went into the morningroom twenty minutes later.
His wife, looking unusually harassed, was seated near the window, Miss Farmer, Miss Sandiloe and Mr. Cooper having unconsciously placed themselves in a semi-circle in front of her, each seated upon the edge of an upright chair.
“Why,” Lady Rossiter was exclaiming in her brightest voice, “one of my greatest friends is a dear little dressmaker who lives in Culmouth, and another is the quaint old man who looks after the lifeboathouse down in our Duckpool Cove.”
Edna must be hard put to it, Julian reflected, to have made use of both her dear little dressmaker and her quaint old man within one sentence. Both, he knew, were frequently in requisition for the dissipation of any sense of awkwardness which she suspected might be assailing her visitors, but one was generally held in reserve to supplement the effect of the other if necessary.
“Here you are!” Edna exclaimed, almost with relief in her voice, as he entered, thereby, Julian told himself, depriving young Cooper of a remark which he would certainly have made his own.
Young Cooper, however, was not to be defeated. “We’ve accepted Lady Rossiter’s kind invitation, you see, Sir Julian,” he observed.
“How are you, Cooper? How d�
��y’e do?” He shook hands with the shorthand teachers. “Were you the only people energetic enough to walk over in this heat?”
“Why, yes. The new Lady Superintendent spoke of coming since Lady Rossiter was so kind, but she didn’t turn up, so we’ve come without her.”
“Tell me about the new Superintendent,” said Edna quickly. “Miss Marchrose, isn’t she?”
“Most pleasant and energetic,” said Cooper rapidly. “The sort of young lady I call capable.”
“She’s got into the way of things very quickly,” Miss Farmer supplemented.
“I wonder if she is connected with a Miss Marchrose whom I used to hear about, some years ago “said Lady Rossiter thoughtfully.
“Here’s Easter!” exclaimed her husband, looking from the window and feeling thankful for any interruption to Edna’s possible intention of recapitulating the scandal attaching to the unfortunately uncommon name of the new Superintendent.
Young Cooper sprang up.
“Let me make rather more room. I’ll move to this chair, if I may, Lady Rossiter.”
Mark Easter’s arrival improved matters greatly, even though he was accompanied by the preposterous Ruthie, adopting a sudden pose of extreme shyness, and concealing her face on her left shoulder, after the manner of a timid infant of two years old. The members of the staff knew Mark, had laughed at his jokes in and out of office hours, had experienced his pleasant, courteously-abrupt authority in work-time, and knew him for a fellow-worker who spared himself less than he did them.
Miss Sandiloe launched into the shrill fire of giggling repartee which was her nearest approach to naturalness. Miss Farmer’s frown of strained attention relaxed, and she leant back, as though for the first time able to look at her surroundings, and Cooper ceased to fix bulging and attentive eyes upon his hostess.
Julian marvelled, not at all for the first time, at the invariable effect upon his surroundings of Mark Easter’s elementary witticisms and gay, indefinable charm of manner.
He knew that his wife liked Mark, if only because he was always ready to let her talk to him in lowvoiced, womanly sympathy of the otherwise unmentioned Mrs. Easter. Lady Rossiter often said that, but for her, the tragedy of Mark’s life would have been left to corrode in silent bitterness.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 126