“Where’s your young man?” Mark asked her, with a laugh. “He ought to be back by this time.”
“Douglas?” said Iris, in a careless and interrogatory way, as though the enquiry might refer to any number of attendant swains. “Oh, he’ll be here directly. I can hear the dear kiddies, Mark.”
So could everyone else, as Ruthie and Ambrose whined, argued, and stampeded their way downstairs.
The usual violent onslaught on the door-handle ensued, but after it had been wrenched from Ambrose by Ruthie’s superior height and strength of muscle, they effected a decorous entry into the drawing-room hand-in-hand.
“Oh, you sweet pets!” was the misguided exclamation of their Auntie Iris. Julian wondered if it were provoked by the unwonted starchy whiteness of Ruthie’s skirts, which had a look of having been outgrown by her some months previously, or by the long, pale sausage of hair that had been forced into an unwilling curl on the extreme top of her brother’s head.
“Say how do you do,” Mark admonished them, with a rather puzzled look as he took in the cleanly aspect for once presented by his progeny.
“How fast Ruthie is growing!” said Lady Rossiter, in a slightly disparaging tone. Mark gazed regretfully at the legs of his daughter and muttered under his moustache:
“They want someone to see to their clothes. Sarah does her best, but servants can’t be expected Lady Rossiter turned upon him a deepened gaze expressive of compassion, comprehension, and much else that was destined to remain unappreciated, as further sounds of arrival took Mark to the door.
“That was a cab, surely,” said Lady Rossiter. “I suppose it’s Miss Marchrose. That seems rather an expensive item for her.”
“How dear of you, Lady Rossiter! I do believe you always think of every little thing.”
On this extravagant assertion of Miss Easter’s her brother returned to the drawing-room with his two remaining guests.
Mr. Douglas Garrett was a tall, saturnine youth, whose conversation principally consisted in emphasising the gulf separating the rest of humanity from himself and some persons unspecified, but amalgamated under the monosyllable “We.”
“We poor motor-cyclists can’t hope to be as punctual as the rest of the world,” he observed to Lady Rossiter, to whom he was presented by Iris as “My great friend, Mr. Garrett, dear Lady Rossiter, but everyone calls him Douglas.”
“You will hardly need to be told that I have Scotch blood in me, after that,” gravely said Mr. Garrett. “We Kelts are faithful to the traditional old names of the Clan.”
“Oh,” said Iris, her head more on one side than ever. “Isn’t there some poem about, ‘Douglas, Douglas, tender and true’?”
Mr. Garrett inclined his head towards her in acknowledgment and murmured something about “We lovers of the dear old bard “which nobody seemed quite to catch.
The room, not over large, now appeared to be rather uncomfortably crowded, and pervaded, more over, by a growing consciousness that something must be happening to the dinner.
Lady Rossiter said to Mark, “I always love a little house, especially in winter. They are so much warmer,” at the same time holding a newspaper between herself and the fire, the size of which was out of all proportion to the room and to the number of its occupants.
“I know you love kiddies,” Auntie Iris remarked in a general sort of way to Miss Marchrose, Julian, and Mr. Garrett. “These little people are too quaint for words; aren’t you, children?”
The rather embarrassing enquiry appeared to present no difficulty to Ruthie, who made it the ground of a sudden onslaught upon Mr. Garrett.
“Are you married?” she enquired with loudness and assurance of the astonished young man.
“Certainly not,” said Mr. Garrett, with emphasis. Ruthie immediately took an uninvited seat upon his knee.
“Come here, Ambrose dear,” said Auntie Iris hastily, “And talk to us.”
“Eh?” said Ambrose, looking enquiringly at her through his spectacles.
It needed no intuition to recognise either the intonation or the vocabulary of Sarah in the pleasing monosyllable shot forth by Master Easter.
“What have you been doing to-day?” rather rashly pursued Auntie Iris.
“Eh?”
“Don’t say ‘eh ‘like that, darling. I can’t imagine what’s come over the child.”
“That’s Peekaboo’s new bad habit,” his sister glee fully proclaimed. “He says ‘eh ‘to everything now.”
Ambrose looked venomously at her, but said nothing.
“Do you know what we Scotch lads and lassies used to be taught in our nursery days?” Mr. Garrett enquired.
“Eh?”
“We used to be taught,” Mr. Garrett said, with great distinctness and an air of originality, “Birds in their little nests agree.”
“That’s what Sarah says.”
Mr. Garrett looked rather depressed at this unenthusiastic reception of his scholastic axiom.
There ensued a pause, during which Julian could hear his host and Lady Rossiter pursuing a conversation in which the last thing had long been said.
He turned to Miss Marchrose, and ill-adapted as were her twenty-eight years, her tired eyes, and her rather worn mauve foulard to bear comparison with the radiant Iris, Julian found it pleasant to look at her and to listen to her charming voice.
The satisfaction, however, was not afforded to him for long. “Auntie Iris! Shall I say my piece?” Ruthie asked in her accustomedly penetrating accents.
Everybody looked doubtful.
“Hark!” exclaimed Julian, quite involuntarily. “Isn’t that?”
Sarah, looking. heated, announced dinner.
“Oh, what a pity!” said Ruthie. “But I daresay me and Ambrose will be still here when you come out from dinner. So I can say it then.”
With this altruistic reassurance still ringing in the air, to an accompaniment of stubbornly reiterated “ehs” from Ambrose, the dining-room was reached.
“I see that your novel is being very well advertised,” Sir Julian began conversation with his hostess. “We have it on order, but it has not yet arrived. I hope that means that the sales are going well.”
“Don’t hope that,” said Mr. Garrett in a deep voice across the table.
“Why not?” said Mark, after giving Sir Julian due time for the enquiry which nothing would have induced him to make.
“‘Why, Ben! ‘is not to be lightly put before the multitude. Iris has shown extraordinary courage in attacking a problem which could only present itself to thinking minds. The very title tells one that a Story of the Sexes. By the by, Iris, we realists of the new school are inclined to wish that you had made that the name of the book outright.”
“No, no,” said Mark, and added courageously, “Besides, I like ‘Why, Ben! ‘It’s so original.”
“Is your book a novel?” Miss Marchrose enquired of Iris.
Mr. Garrett took the reply upon himself. “An extraordinarily powerful study of man’s primitive needs,” he explained.
“Iris Miss Easter has gone straight down to the very bed-rock of the soil. We present-day pagans are gradually winning our way back to Mother Nature, don’t you think?”
Julian involuntarily glanced at his wife at this perverted example of her own theories.
“Perhaps,” said Edna very sweetly, “Mother Nature is herself leading us home. One has only to look round one, after all. Personally, I have a tiny, tiny little nature-class which means a great deal to me. And I make everyone join who has one little spark of the Divine Fire, whoever it may be. But then I’m afraid I’m a socialist a rank, rank democrat.”
The announcement provided ample opportunity for the more strenuous form of egotism known as General Conversation.
“Oh, Lady Rossiter!” piped Iris; “but I always say that if the socialists divided everything up and made everyone equal to-day, things would all go back to the old way to-morrow!”
“I must admit that we thinkers are all in f
avour of democracy as a rule,” said Mr. Douglas Garrett, obviously resentful at having to agree with anyone present; “but take the Keltic element alone perhaps I shall make my point best by putting my own case to you....”
His sombre gaze was fixed upon Miss Marchrose, who brazenly ignored the whole of the last half of his sentence, and said pleasantly that she knew nothing about politics and had always been brought up to believe the whole subject quite unfit for feminine ears.
“This from an emancipated lady who has taken up a business career!” said Edna, with a hint of mockery. “I quite imagined you an advocate of woman’s rights, Miss Marchrose.”
“The cry of Woman’s Rights, my dear Edna, was a catchword which has passed out of the language while Miss Marchrose was still in the nursery,” said Sir Julian suavely; “consequently it probably conveys nothing to her generation, whatever it may do to ours.”
Julian was quite conscious of the anything but doubtful taste of this chivalrous rebuke, and felt rather grateful to Iris for breaking in with the artless and time-honoured statement that she always had all the rights she wanted, and men always seemed ready to give up their seats in omnibuses or railway carriages so as to offer them to her. She also added that she could not think why this was.
Sir Julian gave her the required explanation of the phenomenon, while Mark turned with a certain aspect of relief to his neighbour, Miss Marchrose, and Mr. Douglas Garrett and Lady Rossiter looked disapprovingly at one another and both began to talk at once with immense firmness and determination.
Julian never knew by what means his wife accomplished her end, but at a later stage of dinner, when Mark and Miss Marchrose had been laughing at one another’s jokes for some time, Edna’s voice suddenly fell audible on the other side of the table addressing herself to Mr. Garrett: “... but Clarence Isbister is the only son, and a particularly nice boy.”
Julian would not look at Miss Marchrose, but Edna’s voice had been so distinct that both Mark and she stopped speaking. It was Iris, however, with the praiseworthy instinct of her kind for following up any clue, however remote, that might eventually lead to an only son, who asked:
“Are those the Shropshire Isbisters?”
“A branch of the same family. But I was telling Mr er.”
Edna made a slight and insultingly-meant pretence at having forgotten Mr. Garrett’s name. Nobody supplied it, unless an exception be made of Iris, who murmured that everyone called him Douglas.
“About some dear cousins of mine, Isbisters people who live in Queen’s Gate Gardens most of the year.”
Lady Rossiter paused, looking straight at Miss Marchrose, who said nothing at all, and looked calmly back at her.
There was complete silence for an instant. Before it had assumed significance, Mark Easter broke it with cheerful trivialities.
Julian wondered whether Miss Marchrose was conscious of challenge.
Her face was inscrutable, but he felt by no means sure that she had not very accurately interpreted Edna’s unspoken warning that Mark Easter, if necessary, should yet be told how Clarence Isbister had fared at the hands of his betrothed.
When the not-too-successful dinner had come to an end, and Mark had returned to the drawing-room with the reluctant Julian and a now eloquent Garrett, whose discourse on the convivial proclivities of “We-fellows-about-town “had met with the smallest possible amount of attention from either of his seniors, success seemed within more measurable distance of the evening’s entertainment.
Julian was not, indeed, pleased to find the son and daughter of the house sprawlingly occupying the hearthrug, to the exclusion of everyone else from sight or heat of the fire, but he perceived that Ruthie and Ambrose, objectionable in themselves, had at least served to obviate possible mutual friction between the remaining occupants of the room.
Lady Rossiter was maintaining with persevering sweetness a kindly catechism as to the tastes and habits of Master Ambrose Easter, who responded with his newly-acquired monosyllable, reiterated upon a loud, enquiring, unintelligent note. Iris was picturesquely turning over a heap of music just where the lamplight fell on her bright, soft hair, and Miss Marchrose, leaning back in an armchair, hearkened with an unsympathetic expression to Ruthie’s noisy and highly-emphasised rendering of an objectionable poem blatantly entitled “I am Grandpa’s Little Sweetheart.”
“Children, I thought you were in bed long ago,” said Mark, eyeing them in a rather dejected fashion.
“Sarah can’t put us to bed yet, she’s got to wash Up,” said Ambrose, in a practical way.
“Listen, Daddy!” cried Ruthie:
“So I’m the little girlie who always has to go And stand each happy Christmas beneath the mistletoe, And Grandpa comes up softly.”
“Ruthie! Stop that.”
“But Daddy, it’s my piece!”
Mark sank into a chair with a sort of groan.
“The Rector’s daughter gives them lessons, and she will teach them these things,” he confided to Miss Marchrose, who responded almost more sympathetically than was courteous.
“We’ve just come to the end.”
Accordingly, when Ruthie’s final assertion of her hypothetical grandparent’s infatuation had died away, and Lady Rossiter had said coldly, “Very nice, Ruthie dear.” And Mr. Garrett had muttered something about we votaries of the Muse to Iris, and everybody else had maintained an unenthusiastic silence, Mark Easter bribed, commanded, and cajoled his children into immediate disappearance from the drawing-room.
“Auntie Iris will come and tuck you up, darlings,” exclaimed Miss Easter winningly, waiting until they might safely be assumed to be well out of hearing, and merely with the evident intention of captivating Mr. Douglas Garrett.
He immediately joined her as she stood, still fluttering music-leaves.
“Won’t you sing?” he enquired tenderly.
But Iris was in the case of the majority of those of her sex known to sing. She had studied for some time, reported ecstatic opinions of her voice, its power and its quality, possessed a large quantity of music, and had never been heard to utter a note.
“The Signora won’t hear of my trying my voice yet,” said Iris, in the accustomed formula of these carefully sheltered nightingales. “She thinks it may take eight or ten years to develop it, and then I might even think of Grand Opera. It seems too quaint, doesn’t it?”
This last tribute to modesty appearing to require no reply, Mr. Garrett turned to Miss Marchrose.
“I fancy from your speaking voice that you can sing,” he said kindly. “We musicians are not overcritical, as I’m sure Iris will tell you, and I’m sure it would be delightful to hear you.”
Miss Marchrose looked at her host.
“Do,” he said.
He and Julian listened to her, while Iris and Mr. Garrett retired to a distant sofa and conversed in undertones, and Lady Rossiter put on one of her kindest expressions.
Miss Marchrose had chosen the only old-fashioned volume from amongst Iris’s extremely modern selection, and she sang “Annie Laurie “And “Jock o’ Hazeldean.” Her voice had the indescribable quality of pathos that is sometimes heard in Irish voices, and was fairly well trained, though it was quite evident that no cherishing Signora had ever had the charge of it. It was not a beautiful voice, but every note within its small compass was exceedingly sweet.
“Thanks — thanks so much,” said Mr. Garrett from his sofa. “We Kelts have a very soft corner for the Songs of Hame. Won’t you try ‘Loch Lomond ‘?”
But Miss Marchrose said no, and that she was afraid that she had forgotten that part of her audience was Scotch, or she would never have attempted Scotch songs, thus making an end of the pretty illusion that her selection had been out of compliment to Mr. Garrett and his nationality.
“Isn’t your voice sufficiently trained to be of a little use to you?” Lady Rossiter asked the singer. “Private engagements are really not so very difficult to get, and I’m sure you’d like adding to th
e music of the world better than that eternal shorthand.”
“I am better qualified to add to the music of the world on a typewriter than on a piano,” said Miss Marchrose.
“Go on singing,” Julian told her.
This time she sang popular musical comedy songs, rather amusingly, and with the slightest of accompaniments.
Mark roared with laughter, Lady Rossiter substituted a tolerant look for the one of kindness, and Iris and Mr. Garrett exchanged a slight shudder.
“Well done!” said Sir Julian, when she stopped. “But sing ‘Annie Laurie ‘once more.”
He listened with peculiar satisfaction while she did as he had asked her.
The dinner-party was broken up by Lady Rossiter, who said to Miss Marchrose as she bade her good night:
“We mustn’t keep your cab waiting; that ‘King’s Head ‘fly charges abominably as it is. Besides, I don’t forget that you have to be at work at nine tomorrow morning. Good night.”
She drew on her fur coat, preparatory to walking with Julian the few hundred yards to their own gates.
As they turned away, Mark Easter handed Miss Marchrose into her cab, and they heard him say, “Good night, Annie Laurie.”
VII
AFTER that evening, Mark often called Miss Marchrose “Annie Laurie.”
Julian frequently wondered what the result might be if he ever did so in the presence of Lady Rossiter.
Lady Rossiter, however, was much engaged with the valedictory meetings at which the members of the nature-class bade nature farewell until the return of warmer weather, and had no immediate leisure to bestow upon the growing friendship between Mark and Miss Marchrose.
Julian made his own observations, and was more than ever convinced that Mark Easter was in no danger from a repetition of the fate which had overtaken Captain Clarence Isbister. That episode, moreover, remained to him utterly incomprehensible. He surmised that the clue to it might be found in that contradiction between the half -mocking, half -defiant directness of Miss Marchrose’s eyes and the curiously unconscious pathos of her mouth.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 130