“Ruthie! Let go of your little brother this moment! How dare you?”
Slap!
Scream!
Bang! Slap!
“Ruth! I am ashamed of you.”
Lady Rossiter clung to the curtains with one strong white hand and endeavoured to reach and to separate these makers of a hideous brawl with the other, but was placed at a disadvantage by the extreme probability of overbalancing herself and contributing an anti-climax to the situation.
“I’ll pay you out, Peekaboo, I will,” bellowed Ruthie viciously, and abundantly making good the threat as she uttered it.
Nor did she cease belabouring her victim until he had torn himself from her grasp and fled back to the security of the avenue as fast as his short legs could cover the ground.
Edna raised her person from its attitude of perilous incline.
A more unprecedented opportunity for preaching the great rule of love, with the text, as it were, under her own window, had never yet come to rouse that passion for propaganda which is so vital a characteristic of those who know least of human nature.
It may definitely be assumed that Edna, gravely compelling the representative of a younger generation into the morning-room, and confronting her with earnest tenderness, was more bent upon delivering herself of beautiful truths than upon ascertaining their applicability or otherwise to the individuality of her exceedingly unpromising convert.
“Ruthie, Ruthie, do you know that cruelty and violence are the very worst sins that anyone can commit? To hurt somebody else is to hurt one’s own soul.... You are sinning against the greatest law in the whole world when you behave as you did just now the Law of Love.”
Ruthie was silent, and Lady Rossiter, with a fleeting thought of what an admirable mother she would have made, drew the child gently to her.
“Don’t you know that we all contribute, by everything we do and say, to the good and bad in the world? When you are angry, you send out black, ugly thoughts that help to destroy all the good and beautiful harmony that God has put into this lovely world.”
Ruthie cast an enquiring glance out of the window at the bleak, grey sky, perfectly bare borders and rather uncompromising Scotch firs which were alone visible at the moment of this lovely world.
“When you have gentle, loving, beautiful thoughts,” said Lady Rossiter eloquently, “they send out little wordless messages into the air and go to join the great Divine chorus of Love that is going on everywhere without stopping. You know we are all giving out something all the time?”
Ruthie for the first time looked faintly interested.
“Am I giving?”
“Yes, dear, that’s what I’m trying to tell you about. That’s why little Ruthie must.”
“Is Daddy?”
“Certainly.”
“Is Peekaboo?”
“Yes,” said Lady Rossiter, beginning to wonder if a catalogue raisonné of the Easter family and its connections was to be unrolled before her.
“Even Ambrose is not too little to—”
“Do you give?”
“I try to do so, Ruthie, certainly.”
“Does Sir Julian give?”
Lady Rossiter not impossibly struggled for a moment with an unhallowed impulse before answering:
“I hope so. But will you try to remember what I’ve been telling you, Ruthie? It is not our business to think about whether other people give out in the right way or not never, never judge others,” said Edna parenthetically. “But I do want you to remember about Love. That it is the biggest thing in all the world and that nothing is quite so bad and ugly as to be angry, or unkind, or unloving. Love is what matters most, always.”
Miss Easter, more suâ, contrived to combine a sort of perverted relevance with indecent vulgarity in her bored reply:
“Mr. Garrett kissed Auntie Iris this morning. Me and Peekaboo were hiding in the cowhouse and we saw. Auntie Iris said it was love.”
Lady Rossiter received in silence this singular application of the Divine Law which she had promulgated so often and so indiscriminately that she had long ago come to look upon it as her own production.
“What have the children been doing?” said Mark’s voice at the window. “Lady Rossiter, I’m afraid they’ve been worrying you dreadfully. I’m ashamed of them.”
“Come in, Mark,” said Edna, not without relief. “I hope, after what I’ve been saying to her, that Ruthie is going to make it up with Ambrose at once.”
Mark lifted his daughter out of the window and despatched her in immediate search of her injured junior.
He leant against the low sill of the open window as Lady Rossiter came towards it.
She had long ago formed the habit, which she would not have admitted as being exceedingly agreeable to her, of taking it as her right to advise and question Mark Easter on all personal matters connected with his wifeless household. She belonged, indeed, to the class of those women who have a perfectly genuine love of approaching any admittedly scabreux topics which intimately and painfully touch the life of another a form of prurience sometimes decorated with such titles as “the tender touch of a good, pure woman.”
“Poor little Ruthie! I’ve tried to talk to her a little bit. It’s motherhood that’s lacking in their lives, Mark.”
It might reasonably be supposed that such motherhood as the unfortunate victim to alcohol who had partnered Mark’s few, unhappy years of matrimony had afforded to his children was as well out of their way, but Mark made no such unsympathetic rejoinder. He gazed at Lady Rossiter with the straight, candid look that had never held anything but honest gratitude and admiration for Sir Julian’s beautiful wife.
“They are getting older,” he said disconsolately, “And they do not seem to improve.”
Mark paused, as though weighing this extremely lenient description of his objectionable family.
“Ambrose can go to school in a year or so,” said Lady Rossiter hopefully.
“I suppose so, but the worst of it is that he really is delicate. Now, Ruthie is as strong as a horse, but then I never did like the idea of sending a little girl to school.”
“I can’t see any alternative,” Edna said decidedly. “She will have to be properly educated, and a governess, in the circumstances, is out of the question.”
“I suppose so,” doubtfully answered Mark.
“It’s very unlikely one could get a good daily one, down here, and a resident one you’re a young man still, Mark, and people would talk,” said Edna, seizing instinctively on the aspect of the question that it would afford her the most enjoyment to discuss. Had Mark been less than extraordinarily single-minded, it would also have afforded him the maximum of discomfort in listening to her.
“You see, the circumstances are altogether exceptional, and make things very hard for you, I’m afraid. You are a married man still, and there are always dangers. Well, you know as well as I do that there are things one can’t put into words,” said Edna, with no intention of being taken au pied de la lettre.
“And Mark, there’s another thing. Ruthie is old enough to begin asking questions about her poor mother. What are you going to do about telling her?”
“I don’t know,” Mark said simply. “I’ve never thought about it.”
Lady Rossiter gave a sort of musical groan.
“For all one knows, servants and people may have told her already, and it should have been so tenderly, so delicately done!”
“No, no,” said Mark. “Sarah is a good creature, though she’s rough; she has always been loyalty itself.”
“I’m sure she has; but after all, Mark, it is a thing which everybody round here knows. Ruthie may hear something any day. If ever she does, re member that you can always send her straight to me. Although it hurts so to dwell on those sad, ugly things, I would always put all that aside if I could help you or yours, Mark.”
Edna eyed the recipient of these anticipated sacrifices with a long, compassionate look. If a deep, secret gratification hel
d its place in that thoughtful gaze, Mark Easter was not likely to be any more aware of it than was Edna herself.
“Tell me,” she exclaimed, as though struck by a sudden thought, “I’m right in thinking that everybody does know? There’s no mystery, no conspiracy of silence about it all?”
“Not that I know of,” said Mark, frankly astonished. “You know, you couldn’t expect people to come up and ask me how I like it, or anything of that sort, could you?”
Edna’s gravity did not for an instant relax at the rueful extravagance of the suggestion.
“I don’t know if I ought to say this, Mark but I think I must. One can’t let one’s friends risk shipwreck just for lack of a little moral courage.”
It might well have been supposed that any shipwreck destined to Mark Easter had long since passed into the realm of accomplished fact, but it was evident that Edna had in view other and more pressing possibilities of disaster.
“You’ve thought of the trouble, the wretchedness that might be entailed on others, and the self-reproach to yourself, if there was any want of openness about the whole miserable question?”
“But I don’t think there is any want of openness,” said Mark blankly.
“Mark, forgive me. You don’t resent my speaking about it all? You know I do it only because I’m so dreadfully sorry, and couldn’t bear that there should be anything further...”
“You are everything that is kind,” said Mark steadily, “And you and Sir Julian are the best friends I have in the world.”
Edna could have dispensed with the inclusion of her husband’s name.
It served, in fact, to stem her tide of warning, the more especially as she felt more or less convinced that Mark was not making the intended application of her words.
She gave smilingly graceful congratulations to the newly-betrothed Iris, the more strongly tinged with motherliness from her consciousness of recent success with Ruthie, and even endured a prolonged wringing of her hand from Mr. Garrett, who had followed his new lodestar to Culmhayes.
But that evening, after a silence more fraught with thought fulness even than usual, and in consequence even more studiously ignored than usual by Sir Julian, she said to him abruptly:
“Have you any idea whether Clarence Isbister’s jilt knows the true facts of the case about Mark?”
Few things could be more designedly insulting than Lady Rossiter’s practice of invariably alluding to Miss Marchrose in her capacity of a wrecker of hearts. Julian, however, replied imperturbably:
“Do you mean the dipsomaniac?”
Lady Rossiter liked the term no better than her husband liked that of “jilt,” as applied to Miss Marchrose, and as she would not be guilty of making use of it, she merely inclined her head gravely.
“Because, Julian, if that woman knows into what she is drifting, then it will be a case of Clarence over again, and I am going to save my poor Mark from her. And if she doesn’t know, I am going to tell her, whatever it costs me to speak about it, that Mark is a married man.”
X
EDNA had no immediate opportunity of putting her altruistic designs into execution. Miss Marchrose was not easily available, and Mark Easter was reported to be less frequently at the College in consequence of the business devolving upon him in connection with Iris’ approaching marriage.
“I don’t know why Iris is in such a hurry, but they are going to be married at the beginning of the new year,” Lady Rossiter told her husband. “Mr. Garrett is going to stay on down here.”
“What an ass!”
Lady Rossiter always looked a little pained at a flippant or unkind reference to anyone. She did so now, and replied gently:
“He is very young and first love is a very beautiful thing. He naturally wants to stay where Iris is.”
To which Sir Julian responded with an even greater intensity of conviction in his voice than before:
“What an ass!”
The chief manifestations indulged in by first love, as personified by Miss Easter and Mr. Garrett, were perhaps not altogether unaccountable for Sir Julian’s lack of enthusiasm.
To their habitual attitude of mutual admiration they now added an apparently inexhaustible stock of recondite jests and allusions utterly unintelligible to anybody but themselves.
When Lady Rossiter made civil enquiry of Mr. Garrett as to the length of time he could afford to remain away from his journalistic work in London, he scarcely troubled to answer her, but directed a meaning look towards Iris and said darkly:
“Ah, what would the old man say to that? It tallies quite oddly with that letter we were speaking of, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, indeed,” said Iris obligingly. “You know what I said about telepathy, too, Douglas.”
“What?” Lady Rossiter not unnaturally wanted to know.
Iris’ reply was unsatisfactory rather than informative.
“Oh, just something foolish Douglas and I had been discussing. He’s too silly sometimes, you know.”
“You forget our old friend McTavish,” retorted Douglas, with an air of dry repartee that would have been more effective had anyone, with the presumable exception of Iris, been in possession of any clue as to the identity of McTavish.
An appreciative laugh from Miss Easter rippled lightly through the rather embarrassed silence.
“Oh, poor McTavish! You’re always flourishing that creature at me!”
“Who or what is McTavish?” said Mark, in a tone which voiced the inexplicable but growing feeling of umbrage which was invading the minds of the assembly in regard to the unknown.
Douglas and Iris exchanged mirthful looks that seemed charged with meaning.
“Oh, McTavish! He’s a friend of Douglas a sort of friend. I suppose you would call him a friend, Douglas?”
“Well, hardly my friend, perhaps.”
“Well, perhaps hardly!”
Iris fell into transports of laughter.
“A friend of a friend of yours!” she gasped.
At this sudden introduction of a brand-new element into their exchange of witticisms, Mr. Garrett’s expression of rather satirical humour relaxed also into unrestrained laughter.
“We Scotch lads are accused of having no sense of fun,” he ejaculated, in accents broken with mirth, “but, my certie, a real pawky bit of Scotch humour like that makes a perfect child of me!”
It was not often that Mr. Garrett relapsed into dialect, and his auditors were left to conclude that extreme wit and point must have characterised the reference which had left them so entirely cold.
“Half the time I don’t know what they’re driving at,” Mark disconsolately told Lady Rossiter, but he added that Iris seemed to be very happy and that Garrett was fortunately not dependent upon his profession. That this was vaguely literary was all that could be gathered by those not in Mr. Garrett’s confidence, but he now assumed a more than proprietary tone in discussing “Why, Ben! A Story of the Sexes.”
“I can’t help thinking, Iris, that your next novel will certainly bear an impress of greater maturity,” Mr. Garrett academically observed, “when you have entered upon the second phase of a woman’s deeper experience.”
Iris looked as though she were undecided whether to blush or to look extremely modern and detached.
She finally produced a rather unconvincingly coy flutter of the eyelids, which committed her to nothing.
The second phase of a woman’s deeper experience was to be entered upon in the beginning of January, and Iris spent a great deal of her time in going backwards and forwards between London and Devonshire. She had developed an enthusiasm for Miss Marchrose, and refused to give up her course of typewriting lessons at the College, where her presence produced the slight stirring of interest always provoked by a brideelect.
Even Lady Rossiter, although her opinion of Miss Easter’s conquest was far from being an exalted one, displayed a certain deference to the interesting situation by driving her into Culmouth and talking all the way, in a v
ery candid and enlightening manner, of the sacrifices entailed by matrimony.
At the College, Lady Rossiter, as though struck by a sudden thought, said that she would come upstairs with Iris and seek the Lady Superintendent.
“A very little gratifies them, and I always like to keep in close touch with the staff. I must arrange for one of my little Sunday tea-parties next week, and you must come and help me entertain them all, Iris.”
The social status, ipso facto, conferred upon the wearer of an engagement- or a wedding-ring, by whomsoever bestowed, is curiously typical of the point of view of certain feminine minds. It might be doubted whether Miss Iris Easter, unattached, would have been considered in any way competent to help the chatelaine of Culmhayes in her entertainments.
Iris, however, was never lacking in responsiveness.
“I shall adore that, dear Lady Rossiter. I think Miss Marchrose is simply too sweet for words, you know, and Mark admires her awfully.”
Lady Rossiter was only too well aware of it, but the observation served to strengthen the decision that she had already taken.
“This is my last lesson” Iris said sentimentally, as they went up the stone stairs. “I shall be able to help Douglas, of course, so much more, now that I can really type. Oh, Mr. Cooper, good morning!”
The young man returned cheerful greetings. “You’ll find Miss Marchrose in the High Speed, if you’re looking for her. I’m on my way downstairs.”
“I have not been in to any of the classrooms for a long while,” Lady Rossiter said graciously. “What is happening in the High Speed?”
“A test, I believe, Lady Rossiter. Perhaps you would care to come in and have a look. A stimulus,” said Cooper, with great gallantry, “is always desirable. I will escort you if I may. I’m afraid I always go upstairs two steps at a time. Sometimes three.”
The High Speed room was fairly well occupied. Half a dozen young girls, between the ages of fifteen and twenty, a couple of middle-aged women, a precocious-looking little boy with eyes that seemed ready to pop out of his head, and several half-grown youths, sat at the wooden desks. Miss Marchrose stood at the top of the room, book in hand, and turned as Cooper opened the door.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 133