[Illustration: Cover art]
[Frontispiece: MARGUERITE]
DIMBIE AND I
--AND AMELIA
BY
MABEL BARNES-GRUNDY
_Author of_ "_Hazel of Heatherland._"
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
_Copyright_, 1906
By THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
_Copyright_, 1907
BY THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
Published, March, 1907
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
WHICH INTRODUCES DIMBIE
CHAPTER II
NANTY DISCOURSES ON THE WRITING OF BOOKS
CHAPTER III
ON AMELIA, FLUES, AND DRAIN-BAMBOOS
CHAPTER IV
DIMBIE'S BIRTHDAY
CHAPTER V
A LETTER FROM MISS FAIRBROTHER
CHAPTER VI
SORROW OVERTAKES ME
CHAPTER VII
DR. RENTON BREAKS SOME NEWS TO ME
CHAPTER VIII
DIMBIE COMFORTS ME
CHAPTER IX
AMELIA EXPRESSES HER OPINION OF ME
CHAPTER X
I DISCOVER THAT DR. RENTON IS IN LOVE
CHAPTER XI
MY FIRST CALLER
CHAPTER XII
NANTY CHEERS ME UP
CHAPTER XIII
UNDER THE APPLE TREE
CHAPTER XIV
MOTHER AND PETER ARRIVE ON A VISIT
CHAPTER XV
AMELIA GIVES ME NOTICE
CHAPTER XVI
FOREBODINGS
CHAPTER XVII
MY WORST FEARS ARE REALISED
CHAPTER XVIII
DIMBIE ROLLS A GREAT LOAD FROM MY HEART
CHAPTER XIX
WE INHERIT A FORTUNE
CHAPTER XX
PROFESSOR LEIGHRAIL PAYS US A CALL
CHAPTER XXI
JANE FAIRBROTHER'S IMPENDING VISIT
CHAPTER XXII
A LITERARY LADY HONOURS ME WITH A VISIT
CHAPTER XXIII
I SURPRISE DR. RENTON'S SECRET
CHAPTER XXIV
MUSINGS ON AUTUMN AND THE ARRIVAL OF JANE
CHAPTER XXV
AN ENGAGEMENT, AND I TELL JANE MY STORY
CHAPTER XXVI
DIMBIE TAKES PETER AND AMELIA IN HAND
CHAPTER XXVII
A DISCUSSION ABOUT A WEDDING GOWN
CHAPTER XXVIII
PREPARATIONS FOR A WEDDING
CHAPTER XXIX
JANE'S WEDDING
CHAPTER XXX
THE DEATH OF A LITTLE BLACK CHICKEN
AN AFTERWORD
ILLUSTRATIONS
Marguerite . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
Peter has spent his spare time building canoes
Professor Leighrail
This is how he began
Marguerite, I don't want to frighten you
Your will will always be mine, Marguerite
Dimbie and I--and Amelia
CHAPTER I
WHICH INTRODUCES DIMBIE
Outside, the world is bathed in sunshine, beautiful, warm, life-giving
spring sunshine.
Other worlds than mine may be shivering in a March wind, but my own
little corner is simply basking.
The chestnut in the frog-pond field at the bottom of the garden is
holding forth eager arms, crowned with little sticky, swelling buds, to
the white, warm light. The snowdrops and crocuses have raised their
pretty faces for a caress, and a chaffinch perched in the apple tree
is, in its customary persistent fashion, endeavouring to outsing a
thrush who keeps informing his lady-love that she may be clever enough
to lay four speckled eggs, but her voice, well--without wishing to be
too personal--would bear about the same relation to his as the croak of
those silly frogs in the field would bear to the note of his esteemed
friend Mr. Nightingale, who was still wintering in the south.
Yes, there is sunshine out of doors and sunshine in my heart. So much
sunshine, that in my exuberance I have only just refrained from
embracing Amelia, in spite of her down-at-heel, squeaky shoes, rakish
cap, and one-and-three-ha'penny pearl necklace.
You will surmise I have had a fortune left me by my great-uncle. I
don't possess a great-uncle. That I have been the recipient of a new
Paris hat. Wrong. That someone has said I am the prettiest girl in
the county. Bosh! That Peter has ceased to bully mother. That will
happen when the millennium arrives.
Oh, foolish conjecturer! You will never guess. It is something far
more delightful than any of these things. I will whisper it to you.
"Dimbie is coming home this evening." You smile while I ecstatically
hug Jumbles. "Dimbie's a dog?" you hazard. "A white, pink-eyed,
objectionable Maltese terrier." I chuckle at your being so very wrong.
You are not brilliant; in fact, you are stupid.
Dimbie's a husband. _My_ husband. And he's been away for three days
at the bedside of his sick Aunt Letitia, who lives in Yorkshire. I
think it is most unreasonable for any aunt to live in Yorkshire and be
ill when we live in Surrey. It is so far away. Anyhow, Dimbie shall
never go away again to Aunt Letitia, sick or well, without taking me
with him. For I find I cannot get on at all without him. When I turn
a retrospective eye upon the years without Dimbie, it seems to me that
I did not know the meaning of the word happiness.
I was foolish enough to say this to Peter just before I was married,
and he sniffed in the objectionable way which mother and I have always
so specially disliked. It sounds undutiful to speak of father thus,
but he does sniff. And I might as well remark in passing that I am
very far from being attached to Peter, as I always call him behind his
back, being less like a father than anyone I have ever met. I am sorry
that this should be so, but I didn't choose him for a parent. Parents
have a say in their children's existence, but you can't select your own
progenitors. Were this within your power, General Peter Macintosh and
I would only be on distant bowing terms at the moment, certainly not
parent and child. And yet mother would be lonely without me, although
I have left her. Poor, darling mother! That is my one trouble, the
fly in the ointment; her loneliness, her defencelessness.
I do not mean that Peter kicks her with clogs, or throws lamps at her
head. But he worries her, nags at her.
Now Dimbie never nags. I think it was his utter unlikeness to Peter
that first attracted me. Peter is small and narrow in his views;
Dimbie is large in every sense of the word. Peter has green eyes;
Dimbie has blue. Peter has a straight, chiselled nose--the Macintosh
nose he calls it: Dimbie has a dear crooked one--an accident at
football. Peter has---- But I think I'll just keep to Dimbie's
"points" without referring to General Macintosh any further--well,
because Dimbie is incomparable.
I met him first in an oil-shop in Dorking. I was ordering some varnish
for one of Peter's canoes. Since Peter "retired," which, unfortunately
for mother and me, was many years ago--he having married late in
life--he has spent his spare time in a workshop at the bottom of the
garden building canoes which, up to the present, he has never succeeded
in getting to float. But that is a mere detail. No one has ever
expressed a wish to float in them, so what matters? The point is that
this arduous work kept him shut up in his workshop for many hours away
from mother and me. It was then we breathed and played and laughed,
and Miss Fairbrother, my governess, read us entrancing stories and
taught me how to slide down the staircase on a tea-tray and do other
delightful things, while mother kept a sharp look-out for the advance
of the enemy.
[Illustration: PETER HAS SPENT HIS SPARE TIME BUILDING CANOES]
Well, Dimbie and I got to know each other in this little oil-shop. I,
or my muslin frock, became entangled in some wire-netting, which really
had no business to be anywhere but at an ironmonger's, and Dimbie
disentangled me, there being no one else present to perform this kindly
act, the shopman being up aloft searching for his best copal varnish.
We were not engaged till quite six weeks had elapsed after this,
because Peter would not sanction such a proceeding. He said I must
behave as a general's daughter, and not as a tradesman's; and when I
pointed out that royalties frequently became engaged after seeing each
other about half a dozen times, and that publicly, he just shouted at
me. For years mother and I have been trying to persuade Peter that we
are not soldiers, but he doesn't appear to believe us. He only gave
his consent in the end to our engagement because he was tired and gouty
and wanted to be let alone.
Dimbie was like the importunate widow, and he importuned in season and
out of season, from break of day till set of sun. He neglected his
business, took rooms in Dorking, would fly up to the city for a couple
of hours each day, and spent the rest of his time on our doorstep when
he wasn't allowed inside the house. Peter tried threats, bribery,
shouting, drill language of the most fearful description; but Dimbie
stuck manfully to his guns, and at last Peter was bound to admit that
Dimbie must have come of some good fighting stock. Dimbie admitted
most cheerfully that he had, that his great-great-grandfather had
stormed the heights of Abraham and Wolfe. At which Peter laid down his
arms and briefly said, "Take her!" And Dimbie did so at the very
earliest opportunity, which was during the Christmas holidays. And so
I am his greatly-loving and much-loved wife.
Much loved I know I am by the very way he looks at me, strokes my hair,
whispers my name, stares angrily at Amelia when upon some pretext she
lingers in the room after bringing in coffee and won't leave us alone.
Ah, that being alone! How delightful it is. We have enjoyed that best
of all. We had so few opportunities before we were married, Peter
appearing to think it was our duty to play whist each evening, with
most cheerful countenances; and were I, out of sheer desperation, to
trump his best card, he would scream with annoyance.
But I'm not getting on with Dimbie's points. I think his dearest
friend, or even his wife or mother, would be over-stepping the strict
boundary-line of truth were they to describe him as handsome. He's not
handsome. For which Nanty, mother's old schoolfellow, says I should be
deeply grateful. Handsome men, she tells me, have no time to admire
their own wives, so taken up are they with their own graces, which is a
pity for the wives.
In addition to the crooked nose I mentioned Dimbie has also a crooked
mouth, giving him the most humorous, comical, and at the same time the
most kindly expression. I wouldn't have Dimbie's mouth straight for
the world. It droops at the left corner. He opines that he was born
that way, that it must be a family mouth, at which his mother is
extremely indignant. She asserts that the mouths in her family at any
rate were quite perfect, and that this droop is the result of a horrid
pipe which was never out of the corner of his mouth, alight or dead,
throughout his college days. Dimbie laughs at this, and says shall he
grow a moustache to cover up the defect, and I say No, he shan't.
The crook of his mouth and nose happen to be in opposite directions, so
even when he's depressed he looks quite happy and amused.
Nature, trying to balance things up a little, then gave him jolly,
blue, twinkling eyes, and crisp brown hair with little kinks in it.
He will be thirty-one on the second of next month. His mother, whom I
have only once seen and that was at our wedding, doesn't approve of his
telling his age to any casual inquirer in his usual direct manner, for
it naturally gives her own age away. Mrs. Westover, Nanty says,
imagines she would pass for under forty when the wind is in the west.
"Why west?" mother and I had cried together.
"A soft damp west wind will make a woman look ten years younger," said
Nanty sagely. "It is a north wind which works such havoc with her
complexion."
Mother and I have learnt a great deal from Nanty one way or another,
and the funny part of it is that the information which doesn't matter
always seems to stick in my memory, while important things go, which
Dimbie says is the way of the world.
Dimbie is "on" the Stock Exchange. Peter calls it a sink of iniquity
and its denizens liars and thieves. One of the liars and thieves
married me on the strength of a good deal in Rio Tintos. Rio Tintos
must be beautiful things to have been the means of giving us so much
happiness. Dimbie says they are not, that they are just plain copper
mines in Spain. Dimbie is mistaken. Copper is one of the most
beautiful of metals with its red-gold, warm colour. It is the most
romantic of metals. A tin mine in Cornwall would never have done for
us what Rio Tintos have done, I feel convinced. The dictionary says
copper was perhaps the first metal employed by man, which makes it
doubly interesting to me. Each day I scan the financial column of the
paper to see if Rio Tintos are up or down. Dimbie says he has no
interest in them now, and smiles at my eagerness, but it makes no
difference. The words stand to me for happiness, and I shall search
for them always.