Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  It will be seen, therefore, that Theresa Austell was an instance the more of the undoubted fact that people as well as things are not what they seem. She seemed, until you knew her quite well, to live uncomplainingly but regretfully among the memories of dead and happier years, whereas, when your acquaintance with her ripened, you would find that she lived with remarkable keenness in the present, and kept a wide and unwavering eye on a live and happier future. She appeared to be soft, gentle and helpless; in reality she was remarkably capable of taking care of herself, and though like ivy she appeared to cling to others for support, her nature was in truth that of the famous ivy that grew on the new mansion in Park Lane; it could stand upright with perfect ease, and was of metallic hardness. Adversity — for she had not had a very happy life — instead of breaking her, had tempered her to an exceeding toughness; what had been at the most soft iron was now reliable steel.

  She gave a faint wan smile at Dora as she entered.

  “I thought you would be here, dear,” she said. “Your Aunt Adeline has telephoned to know if we want her motor. We can have it till dinner-time and it will then take us to her house. I knew you liked a drive, so I thanked her and said ‘yes.’”

  This was merely another way of putting the fact that Lady Austell wanted a drive and also wanted to talk to Dora. But her method of putting it sounded better, and was very likely quite true. Dora did like a drive and since her mother knew it, that might possibly have been the reason why she accepted Aunt Adeline’s offer. But Lady Austell’s next reason (though she had already given reason sufficient) was not so probable. “A drive will do you good, dear,” she said faintly. “You look a little fagged out and pale.”

  Dora had learned not to dispute points with her mother. Though in general she was so full of discursive volubility, she was always rather silent with Lady Austell, of whom, in some way that she scarcely understood herself, she was considerably afraid. But that again was typical of the effect her mother produced on people; those who knew her but slightly thought she was the least formidable of women, but the better she was known the more she was feared. Often Dora argued to herself about the matter; she knew that she was not afraid of anything tangible her mother could do to her; she could not beat her or starve her, or ill-treat her, and it must have been her mother’s nature of which she was afraid. The feeling was analogous to a child’s fear of the dark; it fears not what it knows of, but the unknown possibilities that may lurk therein. It cannot say what they are; if it knew it would probably cease to fear them.

  Dora got up at once.

  “Yes, I should like a drive,” she said.

  “Then put on your hat, dear.” And Lady Austell’s pale melancholy eyes fell on the half-trimmed straw.

  “Another hat, Dora?” she asked. “I should have thought what you had would have lasted you till the end of the season!”

  And at the words Dora’s pleasure in her new hat fell as dead as Sisera at Jael’s feet. Nobody could kill pleasure (though quite innocently) with so unerring an aim as Lady Austell.

  “It didn’t cost twopence,” said Dora. “Jim sent me up the feathers from Grote.”

  Lady Austell looked at the straw with an experienced eye. “It is very cheap for less than twopence,” she remarked. “The only question is whether it was necessary. Then you will join me down below, dear? I have a note to write, and we may as well leave it instead of posting it.”

  This was illustrative of the cause that had made Dora say that when women grew up they were very odd people. Lady Austell would unfalteringly drive through miles of odious roads to deliver a note rather than post it, but would on the same day drive to Oxford Street (a two-shilling fare in a hansom) in order to purchase what she would have paid sixpence more for round the comer. She was the victim of the habit of petty economy, in pursuit of which passion — one of the most fatal — she would become a perfect spendthrift, casting florins and half crowns right and left in order to save pennies. She took great care of the pence and the half-crowns presumably took care of themselves, for at any rate she took no care of them. But when other people’s expenditure was concerned, she took care of it all.

  The note that had to be left (which concerned cessation of subscription from a library in Leicester Square) caused them to traverse the length of Piccadilly, and to retrace it, before they could leave the jostling traffic and turn into the Park, and it so happened that in this traverse of the streets, the month being mid-July, and the hour the late afternoon, Lady Austell had been almost incessantly occupied (though by her own word, she disliked all conventionality) in smiling sadly and regretfully as was her manner, at all the people she knew, and bowing (without a smile) to those who appeared to know her. Somehow, her smile, even when it was most gracious and welcoming, always suggested to the person on whom it was bestowed that something had gone wrong with his affairs, and Lady Austell knew and was most sympathetic, so that Mrs. Osborne (seated in a landau that bobbed prodigiously, owing to the extreme resilience of the springs that came from her husband’s workshops) receiving one of these felt certain for a moment that Mr. O.’s mission that afternoon had not prospered until she remembered that she had seen Lady Austell smile like that before. Soon after, walking gaily eastward, came Austell, whom she had thought to be still in the country, and on whom she bestowed a glance of pained wonder, closely followed by Claude, looking in spite of the heat of the day extremely cool, and comfortable in a straw-hatted suit. Dora did not see him; she was at the moment smiling violently at some one who did not see her. Then the motor checked for a moment at the gates of the Park, slid forward again into the less populous ways, and Lady Austell, abandoning the duties of recognition, did her duty by her daughter. As usual she began a little way off the point so that she could get well into her stride, so to speak, before you saw that she was going anywhere in particular. This was a settled policy with her; it insured, in racing parlance, a flying start instead of a start from rest. During the drive down Piccadilly she had been arranging her thoughts with her usual precision; she knew not only what she was going to say, but how she was going to say it.

  She gave a little sigh.

  “What sermons there are not only in stones,” she said, “but in streets. And, do you know, dear, when one drives down Piccadilly like that and sees all sorts and conditions of men and women jostling each other, what strikes me is not how different people are, but how alike they are. All the differences (she was getting into her stride now) which we think of as so great are really so infinitesimal. Real differences, the things that matter, do not lie on the surface at all. I think our tendency is to make far too much out of mere superficialities and to neglect or discount those traits and qualities which constitute the essential differences between one man and another. Don’t you think so, dear?”

  The ingenious Latin language has certain particles used in asking questions, one of which, the grammarian tells us, is used if a negative reply is expected, another if the reply is expected to be affirmative. Lady Austell, speaking in the less rich language of our day, could not make use of these, but there was something in her intonation quite as effective as “nonne.” Dora, without question, found herself saying “yes.”

  “I am so glad you agree with me, dear,” went on her mother, “and I am sure you will agree with me also in the fact that, this being so, we should try to judge people, or rather to appreciate them, by the true and inner standard, not by the more obvious but less essential characteristics that we see on the surface.”

  Lady Austell’s voice sank a little.

  “If one may say so without irreverence,” she said, “how God must laugh at our divisions of classes. We must look like children arranging books by the colour of their covers instead of by their contents. We class all sorts of noble and ignoble people together and call them gentlemen, neglecting the only true classification altogether.”

  It was evident now to Dora that her mother had got an excellent start, and she could see what she had started for
. There was no need for reply, and Lady Austell having favoured a passing friend with a smile that was positively wintry in its sadness, proceeded.

  “Such a good instance of what I am saying occurred to-day, dear,” she said. “Mr. Osborne called on me at six, as I think I told you he was going to do, and for the first time perhaps I fully saw what true delicacy and feeling he has, and how immensely these outweigh any of those things which we hastily might call faults of manner or breeding. It is the same with her, kind excellent woman that she is. What a priceless thing to inherit all that kindness and sweetness of nature.”

  Lady Austell was flying along now; the race, so to speak, was clearly a sprint. Dora merely waited for her to breast the tape. She proceeded to do so.

  “He came on a subject that very closely concerns you, dear,” she said, “and like a true gentleman he asked my permission before allowing any step to be taken. Can you guess, dear?”

  Dora, as has been said, stood considerably in awe of her mother, but occasionally a discourse of this kind, which she felt to be entirely insincere, roused in her an impulse of the liveliest impatience, which gave sharpness to her tongue.

  “Oh, dear, yes,” she said. “The truly delicate Mr. Osborne asked if Mr. Claude might pay his addresses to me. I expect he used just those words. I hope you allowed him to, mother.”

  Lady Austell’s manner was always admirable. She appeared not to notice the sharpness of the speech at all. She laid her neatly gloved hand on Dora’s.

  “Ah, my dearest,” she said.

  She looked at her with her sad blue eyes, eyes that always looked tender and patient, even when she was disputing a fare with a cabman. “I am sure you will be very happy dear,” she said after a pause. “He is the most excellent young man, everyone speaks well of him. And, my dear, how good-looking. A perfect — I forget the name.”

  Dora had a momentary tendency to giggle at the anticlimax of this. But she checked it, and again her impatience rose to the surface.

  “Adonis?” she suggested. “But are not good looks one of those superficial things which we rate too high?”

  Lady Austell smiled.

  “Ah, you mischievous child,” she said. “You make fun of all I say. I will send a note to Mr. Osborne to-night, for I told him I should have to speak to you first. You will make him very happy, Dora, and you will make somebody else happier. Shall we turn?”

  CHAPTER IIΙ.

  THE garden front of Grote faced southeast, and thus, though all day the broad paved walk in front of it had been grilled by the burning of the August sun, the shadow of the house itself had spread over it like an incoming tide of dark clear water before tea time, and at this moment three footmen were engaged in laying the table for that meal, while the fourth, as a matter of fact, was talking to the stillroom maid under pretence of “seeing to” the urn. They were all in the famous Osborne livery, which was rather gorgeous and of the waspish scheme of colour. There were, it may be remarked, only four of them, because Mr. Osborne was still in London, roughing it, so his wife was afraid, with a kitchen-maid for cook, and only two footmen besides his own man, for Parliamentary business had kept him there for a few days after Mrs. Osborne had left to get things in order at Grote. But he was expected down this afternoon for a couple of nights before he went North, and the six footmen would shine together like evening stars. “Company” also, though not in large numbers, were also arriving that evening, among whom were Lady Austell, her son, and Dora. The latter was now formally and publicly engaged to Claude.

  The house was three-storied, built in the Jacobean style of brick and stone with small-paned windows, and the brick had mellowed to that russet red which is as indescribable as it is inimitable. A door opened from the long gallery inside, which was panelled and hung with portraits — inalienable, luckily, or Austell would have got rid of them long ago — onto this broad-paved walk that ran from end to end of the house. On the other side of it was the famous yew hedge with square doors cut in it, through which were seen glimpses of the flower garden and long riband bed below, and the top of this hedge grew the grotesque shapes of birds. A flight of stone steps led down into the formal flower garden below, which was bordered on the far side by the long riband bed. Below that again two big herbaceous borders stretched away toward the lake, on the far side of which there rose from the edge of the water the great rhododendron thickets. To right and left lay the park, full of noble timber, which climbed up to the top of the hill opposite. Across this ran the road from the station, which skirted the lake on its eastern side, and passing by the flower garden came up to what Mrs. Osborne called “the carriage sweep” on the other side of the house, from which two wings projected, so that the carriage sweep was really the interior of a three-sided quadrangle.

  The warning hoot of an approaching motor caused one of the footmen to disappear into the house with some alacrity, and a few minutes afterward Mr. Osborne emerged from the door into the gallery. He still wore London clothes, dark gray trousers and a black frock coat and waistcoat, for he had driven straight from the House of Commons to Victoria, but he had picked up a Panama hat in the hall, and had substituted it for his silk hat.

  “And tell your missus I’ve come,” he observed to one of the wasps.

  He sat down in a creaking basket-chair for a few moments, “to rest and cool,” as he expressed it to himself, and looked about him with extreme satisfaction. His big high-coloured face was capable of expressing an immense amount of contentment, and though from time to time he carried a large coloured handkerchief to his face, and mopped his streaming forehead with a whistled “Whew!” at the heat, so superficial a cause of discomfort could not disturb his intense satisfaction with life. Things had prospered amazingly with him and his: he was thoroughly contented with the doings of destiny.

  He was still “resting and cooling” when Mrs. Osborne came bustling out of the house, also very hot, and kissed her husband loudly first on one cheek and then on the other.

  “Well, and that’s right, my dear,” she said, “and it’s good to see you. But you are hot, Eddie, and is it wise for you to sit out o’ doors in the shadow without a wrap? You were always prone to take a chill.”

  “I should be prone to take an apoplexy if I put anything else on, Mrs. O.,” remarked he. “But my! it’s a relief to get down into the country again. Not but what things haven’t gone very well this last week for me in the House. Commission on Housing of Employées! I had a good bit to tell them about that, and I warrant you they listened. Lor’, my dear, they like a plain man as’ll talk common sense to them, and tell ’em what he’s seen and what he knows, instead of argufying about procedure. I knew my figures, my dear, and my cubic feet per room, and my statistics about the health of my workmen and their death-rate. I’ve been a common man, myself, my dear, and I told them so, and told them what things was when I was a lad.”

  Mrs. Osborne was slightly aghast.

  “Oh! Eddie, I doubt that’ll tell against you,” she said. “Not a bit of it, old lady. Everyone knew it to begin with, else I don’t say I should have told them. And equally they know that they come and dance at No. 92 when Mrs. O. invites them. Glad they are to come, too, and my dinner table is good enough for anybody to put his legs under. But all that’s over for the present, and I didn’t come away for my holiday, which I’ve deserved, to talk more politics; I came away to enjoy myself, and have a breath of country air. Eh! it’s a pretty little box this. I wish I could have bought it. I should have liked to leave a country seat for Per and Mrs after you and me was dead and buried.”

  This turn in the conversation was not quite to Mrs. Osborne’s taste.

  “Don’t talk so light about dying, Mr. Osborne,” she said, “because you give me the creeps and the shivers for all it’s so hot. There’s a host of things too I want to talk to you about before the company comes, without thinking of buryings. There’s the two pictures of you and me arrived, and it would be a good thing if you’d cast your eye over the
wails, and see where you’d like them hung, and we’d get them up at once. They’re a fine pair, they are, and the frames too remarkably handsome.”

  “Well, you want a handsome frame for a handsome bit of painting,” said her husband, “and finer works I’ve seldom seen. They was cheap at the price. Give me a cup of tea, Mrs. O., and we’ll go and have a squint at ‘em. What else, my dear?”

  Mrs. Osborne poured him out a cup of tea as she knew he liked it, extremely strong. She put in the cream first and stirred it up before handing to him.