Cousin Cinderella

by Sara Jeanette Duncan

  “I have sometimes wondered,” continued Evelyn, “whether your brother Graham won’t some day sit on one of those green benches. He could do it quite as well, you know, as Mr. Tally or that funny little Popplewell. And there are some Canadian Members already, aren’t there?”

  “Yes, I think he could,” I said with hideous irony, “and there are some Canadian Members. But I don’t think he will. For one thing, he has lately been elected to the Ottawa House.”

  “Oh, the Ottawa House—”

  “The Ottawa House,” I repeated firmly. “And I’ve heard him rather rude about Colonial M.P.’s over here. He calls them geographical anomalies.”

  “I think he ought to identify himself with this country,” said Evelyn, “and so does everybody.”

  “I wish father could hear you,” I told her.

  “He ought to make a brilliant social connection by marriage,” Evelyn went on. “He could if he liked. Go into politics, and finish, easily, a peer of the realm. Why don’t you put him up to it, Mary?”

  I just laughed, but with misgivings. Evelyn never talked absolute nonsense.

  “He has made a fearfully good impression, you know. Lady Doleford and all that lot think him charming, and she, anyway, isn’t so easily pleased. I think Barbara likes him, too.”

  “I’m so glad!” I said guardedly.

  “The poor dears are all most fearfully depressed just now. It seems Pavis Court must be sold this spring. They would go barefoot to keep it, but going barefoot won’t keep it. Nothing will. The banks and lawyers and people have been very decent, I believe, but nobody can postpone it any longer. Old Lord Doleford and his father broke the entail, and it’s twenty years since the last possible penny was put on it in mortgages. Isn’t it wicked? One of the loveliest places in England!”

  “Can nothing be done to save it?” I asked.

  “I have heard of nothing yet,” said Evelyn.

  CHAPTER XII

  ALL this time the flat was our constant joy, the basis and background for the whole pageant, solidly our own for retreat and reflection, always invitingly there. It made a kind of stronghold for us, against feeling too much as London wanted us, wanted everybody to feel—I mean impressed and intoxicated and carried away just by London, and inclined to deliver ourselves over with rapture to let her play upon us any tune she liked. The flat stood for us, just for Graham and me. It meant the identity we clung to. Here, we could say, we are; here is our wandering tent. We are not swept away and lost among the grandeurs we might purchase if we liked. This is just the size and importance we choose to connect ourselves with, at all events, for the present. A historical proportion, Graham said, was better than a contemporary misfit; and it was somehow good for our self-respect to drive home from marble halls and talk it over in front of Miss Game’s twelve remaining mantel ornaments, when Graham had made up the fire in the grate. And if it was a retreat when London was too alluring, it was also a refuge when she set us at naught, and made us more or less conscious of lapses and blunders and country manners. It said for us in a comforting way that we made no particular pretensions, that nobody could be more honest, and that Towse, at all events, thought us very well. We were sorry for all Colonials without flats, exposed as they must be; and if there were times when I could have wept in Towse’s apron, it was at least fortifying to know that Towse and her apron were there.

  Evelyn Dicey thought it ridiculous, our flat. She said there was no use in placing ourselves in an absolutely false position, and suggested that we should at least have our tea-parties at the Carlton instead. We would have liked to oblige Evelyn, to whom we owed so much, in any way we could; but that we didn’t find possible—hospitality was hospitality, and a hotel was a hotel. We asked everybody to tea at the flat, everybody who asked us, and most of them came. Not the Duchess. We didn’t actually ask the Duchess, though she had been very kind; but Graham declared it was a shame that she should be left out—invidious—and upon Evelyn’s advice we asked her if she would like us to. She said not on any account—she made a point of always being at home herself at tea-time, and we could come to her instead, which we felt to be quite as it should be.

  “Thank you all the same,” she said handsomely; and it was much pleasanter than being worried by the idea that she might have thought we had intentionally left her out.

  Evelyn, naturally, often came; and it was our best way of seeing Lady Barbara (our best even after Graham began those elaborate theatre parties which did of necessity lead to the Carlton, since Towse couldn’t possibly cope with them). Lady Doleford came, too, more than once, but it was the once, the first time, that seemed, I remember, to mean so much. She wasn’t at all precipitate about coming; our little interior appeared to be the last thing she wished to know about us. She found out, in one way or another, almost everything else first, from Evelyn, and I heard afterward, from Lord Selkirk, and by the discreetest questions, from ourselves. For a long time we had been pale and ineffectual ghosts among the concrete figures, mostly of relations, that filled her drawing-room and the ante-chambers of her heart; but in a day—I don’t know what happened, what was said or surmised—we turned into realities, suddenly found ourselves in focus and responding to the laws of gravity as they operated for Lady Doleford. It was then that she came to tea.

  She came alone and early; I was just finishing the azaleas.

  “Ah, how pretty you are!” she said, looking about her for a minute with graciousness as gentle and as sadly faded as anything about her. “What a dear, tiny nest!”

  “It isn’t us, you know,” I said hastily, seeing her eye rest upon the mantel ornaments. “It’s Miss Game. There were a great many more. We locked them up.”

  But in England about aesthetics you never can tell.

  “Locked up dear funny pussies like those!” exclaimed Lady Doleford. “There is, of course, the danger of breaking them, and I daresay you are quite wise, but I am afraid I should have left them to look at. Aren’t they quaint and amusing, with their different expressions?”

  “There were numbers of dogs, too,” I said, “and pigs. The dogs were as lean as the cats, but the pigs were fat.”

  I had the same fatuous feeling with Lady Doleford as with her son; why, I cannot say, unless possibly because she was his mother. A whole family will sometimes have this effect. I was not quite at my best even with Barbara.

  Lady Doleford cowered—it is the only word—into an armchair by the fire and glanced about her.

  “You are quite right to keep it small,” she said, “and Evelyn is wrong, I am sure, in wanting to install you more in accordance with—with her ideas. I think Americans are often too much impressed with the importance of mere size in arrangements. But you are so manageable here!” and Lady Doleford sighed.

  “We aren’t so manageable as we were before Graham began to buy old oak furniture,” I replied. “Tables with melon legs seem to take up more room than modern ones; and I am sure Elizabethan settles were never designed for fiats. I think it would be so much better to have them shipped direct; but Graham won’t. He says he likes staying with them for a while in England first—just letting them serve him here, where they ‘belong.’ Graham is funny in some ways.”

  Lady Doleford listened very attentively. “He is fond of old things, then—your brother? Of old English things?”

  “He lives in museums,” I told her, “or in the House, which is itself a kind of—very distinguished collection, isn’t it? And his dearest friend is a dealer in the Hammersmith Road. At least, almost his dearest friend.”

  There was a slight pause, filled with anguish on my part; for had I not tried to be clever, and not very successfully? I am sure it is always better, when you feel stupid, just to be stupid, and let Providence take care of you. But when Lady Doleford spoke I saw that she had not observed it at all. That is often the case, too.

  “Then,” she said, rather diffidently, “when you come to Pavis Court we shall perhaps be able to show him a few pieces that
may interest him. Has he seen any joint-stools? We have a couple with medallions, so odd, dating from the time of Henry the Eighth, and a Carolean chest with a very funny old inscription, and some other things.”

  “I am sure he would love to see them,” I said, rather puzzled, for I had no idea that we were going to Pavis Court.

  “You will be quite near us—within easy driving distance—at Knowes, you know. My cousin Margot Lippington tells me she is to have the pleasure of a visit from you there.”

  “We are very much looking forward to it,” I murmured.

  Lady Doleford’s next question was still more surprising.

  “And when,” she said, “do your people think of coming home to England to settle?”

  “But they are at home now, Lady Doleford!” I exclaimed.

  “Can one be at home out of England?” she protested gently.

  “I know what you mean,” I told her. “But, oh, yes!—one can. Father would never consent to leave Canada now, and mother, of course, was born there.”

  “That must naturally make a great difference,” Lady Doleford conceded, alluding to mother. “But we are so accustomed, you know, to people coming home—from South Africa, and India, and even Australia. They seem to prefer it,” she added modestly, “when they have—when they are able to.”

  “But Canada is different,” I said. “Nobody prefers to leave Canada.”

  “I think it must be. One of my forebears was in Canada, when we fought the French there. He was a staff officer of General Wolfe’s. Do you live in Upper Canada or Lower Canada?”

  I had to think for a minute. “Upper,” I said, “or what used to be. But the division has ceased to exist, Lady Doleford.”

  “Has it? Indeed!” she replied doubtfully. “I always used to hear my father speak of it in that way. How very interesting! And when did that happen? Some years ago, perhaps.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Not very lately.”

  “Ah, well, things change very rapidly nowadays. But your brother—I understand he has ideas of settling in England.”

  “I am afraid not,” I said. “He loves and adores it, but he is quite devoted to his own country.”

  Lady Doleford looked, for an instant, almost taken aback and inclined to question, as she did about Upper and Lower Canada. “Oh, really?” she said. “I had quite a different impression—I wonder how I got it! I am sure he has a career before him—anywhere,” she added, looking at me as if she wanted support and assurance for what she said, “and perhaps, if, as you say, he loves England, he will like to spend a great deal of his time here.”

  “I think that is very likely,” I said—“later on.”

  “I suppose where you are it is all quite civilised and nice by now?” pursued Lady Doleford with a trace of anxiety. “I am afraid my ideas are almost entirely coloured by my great-grandfather’s letters from Quebec. They were privately published. But I daresay there are comparatively few Iroquois about nowadays. And perhaps no hostile ones.”

  “We aren’t often disturbed by war-whoops at night,” I said, laughing, and Lady Doleford smiled apologetically.

  “And of course communication is so much easier than it was,” she continued. “People seem to think nothing of crossing the Atlantic, or even of spending long periods in America. I myself have a nephew in California, and, as you know, Amherst and Margot Lippington are wild to go out to Canada. And that would be for four or five years.”

  “It seems more intrepid than it actually is,” I assured her. “They would encounter hardly any hardships, really. The kettle boils at last. I am so glad. It’s always said to be dull, watching a kettle boil, but I think it’s rather interesting. So much seems to be going on in its mind, and then at last it speaks, doesn’t it?”

  “Perhaps the people who think it dull are those who are impatient for their tea,” said she, accepting a cup. “If I may, I think I will take off my glove.”

  “Oh, do!” I said hospitably. “Why not take them both off?”

  But Lady Doleford removed the right glove only. It somehow vaguely suggested that one hand was all that she was prepared in her scrupulous way, for the moment, to offer. I looked at the glove as it lay, black and kid and shiny in her lap, and at the thin, nervous, rather knuckly hand with its two or three loose old-fashioned rings, the hand that had held Peter as a baby. And Barbara, too, of course.

  “I am wondering so much,” she said earnestly, “how they are feeling in the Colonies about this sad Romish marriage of our dear Princess. Have you heard whether it has been taken up at all in Canada?”

  “I’m trying to remember,” I said, “but I can’t. I don’t think they mind very much.”

  “Ah!” said Lady Doleford; “no doubt because it is so largely a French, and therefore Roman Catholic country.”

  “But it isn’t,” I interposed.

  “I can understand—perfectly—your not wishing to admit it,” said Lady Doleford kindly, “but I am afraid the fact is there, isn’t it? We must make the best of it. Well, it would of course account for a difference in the popular feeling.”

  “You think that French Roman Catholics might perhaps not be very pleased?” I asked. It struck me afterwards as being a tactless thing to say.

  “Dear me, no—why shouldn’t they? Don’t they get her, body and soul?” demanded Lady Doleford, with something very like warmth. “But for Protestant England—is it not a terrible concession and a sad example? Many of us hope that it is not yet too late. My sister-in-law has written to the Times only this morning.”

  “The Duchess?”

  “Yes; suggesting that if the whole nation would unite in fervent prayer for say a week, the marriage might still be averted.”

  “Poor Princess!” I exclaimed. “To be at the mercy of a nation’s prayers! But here,” I added hastily as Towse loomed in the doorway, “is the teacake, and here—that’s splendid—is Graham!”

  Lady Doleford turned quickly in her chair, and I recognised in the movement the fact, to which I was now quite happily accustomed, that it was Graham she had really come to see.

  CHAPTER XIII

  WHAT I hated about it I may simply say was this, that Barbara and Lady Doleford were taking Graham into account on exactly the principles which they applied to Evelyn; and while I didn’t mind for Evelyn, it is the short fact that I did mind for Graham. With regard to Evelyn—well, one saw that the situation was perfectly simple, and allowed no interpretation that might be foolish or misleading. Evelyn was one of those Americans who are plainly born to emigrate into the Very Most Desirable state of existence, even though it should entail great pains and a long voyage. The clearness of perception and directness of purpose with which they are equipped to carry this out can only be called a miracle of nature; it is arrow-like. One is so filled with admiration of the straightness and sureness that one can’t be very sorry for them because of the various matters that in such haste they must pass by. Especially need one not pity when, as in Evelyn’s instance, the necessary nobleman is a lamb, a dear and precious lamb. But with Graham the case was quite different—now wasn’t it? Anyone could see, I think, that his vision of what he wanted was very imperfect; and even if he quite knew, there would have been fifty considerations before which he would pause and ponder. Those various matters which Evelyn could so well afford to neglect would have been his whole life’s fortune; he was, in fact, badly handicapped for Very Most Desirable transactions, by his heart.

  Then I considered, too, that while Evelyn could be taken simply, for intrinsic reasons, Graham couldn’t be taken quite so simply. After all, when one pursues it, what was Evelyn? A set of attractive features in rather slight American connective tissue, a good temper, a sense of humour, and ten thousand pounds a year. Graham was a great deal more than that, though I say it who am his sister, and perhaps have not made it plain—more than that even, if I must add it, to the figure. The figure, however, is absolutely out of my argument, which is concerned with Graham himself. It was himself, t
he actual self of him, that I couldn’t bear to see left out of consideration the way, it seemed to me, that Barbara and Lady Doleford left it out. I need not try to put what they did seem to consider in its proper order of importance; but they clearly weighed his manners and his appearance, his education and his morals, his future and his fortune—everything that you could put in a list and nothing that could not be catalogued. These were the matters that went into their serious summing up of him, and rightly enough, I suppose. Only they left out so much which seemed to me quite as valuable that their leaving it out annoyed me beyond words. Everything that was most really Graham. It may have been unreasonable to be annoyed; but I couldn’t stand their ignoring just that, with the ridiculous implication that it was of no consequence, that he was in the balance against other considerations altogether. So much so that when in talk now and then, a little essential bit of him would shine out, they would exchange glances in which I could read wonder and a little apprehension.

  “You noticed that,” Barbara’s eyes would convey; and Lady Doleford’s in return would suggest, “It is one of the things for which, after all, it would be quite possible to make allowance.”

  I now see that I did them injustice, poor dears, and that it was only a kind of density in them which isn’t any less opaque for being very well-bred; but I am revealing my impressions as they came to me. And at the moment I could not help thinking it the more unfair in Barbara, as my view of her brother, which was naturally being formed at the same time, gave him credit for so little more than what he was.

  I had always thought it would be so very easy to fall in love with Graham. I had even, there is no harm in saying, seen it happen, with dreadful facility—more than once I could remember having to look discreetly the other way. There was his natural charm, and his character, and his leg; it could not be considered surprising. And at home it had happened, without so to speak, any incentive, just because, I suppose, it was a pleasant thing to do. Now it was constantly borne in upon me that Lady Barbara was trying to do it and finding it difficult. Nobody in my position could think that nice of her. I don’t know which I was inclined to blame her most for, trying or failing. It all comes back to her point of view. With the right point of view it would have been, I insist, not only easy but hard not to. But if you wish to become attached to a set of desirable facts, slightly qualified by circumstances not so desirable, it is not wonderful that you have trouble with your heart.