Nature, or rather the adaptation from Nature which we call civilisation,
deals very hardly with unmarried ladies of twenty-five for the next ten
or a dozen years. Then it seems to give them up, and we have arrived at
what is politely known as the uncertain age. Very uncertain it is, for,
from thirty-five to forty-five some ladies seem to stand still.
Miss Heathery was one of these, and the mid-life stage seemed to have
made her evergreen, for seven years' lapse found her much the same,
scarcely in any manner changed.
Poor Miss Heathery! For twenty years she had been longing with all the
intensity of a true woman to become somebody's squaw. Her heart was an
urn full of sweetness. Perhaps it was of rather a sickly cloying kind
that many men would have turned from with disgust, but it was sweetness
all the same, and for these long, long years she had been waiting to
pour this honey of her nature like a blessing upon some one's head,
while only one man had been ready to say, "Pour on," and held his head
ready.
That one would-be suitor was old Gemp, and when he said it, poor Miss
Heathery recoiled, clasping her hands tightly upon the mouth of the urn
and closing it. She could not pour it there, and the love of Gemp had
turned into a bitter hate.
If the curate in his disappointment would only have turned to her, she
sighed to herself!
"Ah!"
And she went on thinking and working. What comforting fleecy
undergarments she could have woven for him! What ornamental braces he
should have worn; and, in the sanguine hopes of that swelling urn of
sweets, she designed--she never began them--a set of slippers, a set of
seven, all beautifully worked in wool and silks, and lined with velvet.
Sunday: white with a gold sun; Monday: dominating with a pale lambent
golden green, for it was moon's day; Tuesday puzzled her, for it took
her into the Scandinavian mythology, and there she was lost hopelessly
for a time, but she waded out with an idea that Tuisco was Mars, so the
slippers should be red. The Wednesday slippers brought in Mercury, so
they were silvery. Thursday was another puzzle till the happy idea came
of crossing Thor's hammer, which would give the slippers quite a college
look, black hammers on a red ground. Friday--Frega, Venus--she would
work a beauteous woman with golden hair on each. She felt rather
doubtful about the woman's face; but love would find out the way. Then
there was Saturday.
Just as she reached Saturday, she remembered having once heard that Sir
Gordon had a set of razors for every day in the week, and the design
halted.
Ah! if Sir Gordon would only have looked at her with that sad melancholy
air of tenderness, how happy she could have been! How she would have
prompted him to keep on that fight of his against time! But he never
smiled upon her; and though she paid in all her little sums of money at
the bank herself, and changed all her cheques, Mr James Thickens--as he
was always called, to distinguish him from a Mr Thickens of whom some
one had once heard somewhere--made no step in advance. The bank counter
was always between them, and it was very broad.
"What could she do more to show her affection?" she asked herself. She
had petitioned him to give her a "teeny weeny gold-fish, and a teeny
weeny silver fish," and he had responded at once; but he was close in
his ways: he was not generous. He did not purchase a glass globe of
iridescent tints and goodly form; he borrowed a small milk tin at the
dairy and sent them in that, with his compliments.
But there were the fish, and she purchased a beautiful globe herself,
placed three Venus's ear-shells in the bottom, filled it with clear
water from the river carefully strained through three thicknesses of
flannel, and there the fish lived till they died.
Why they died so soon may have been from over-petting and too much food.
For Miss Heathery secretly called the gold-fish James, and the silver
fish Letitia, her own name, and she was never so happy as when feeding
James and coaxing him to kiss the tips of her thin little fingers.
Perhaps it was from over-feeding, perhaps from too much salt, for as
Miss Heathery, after long waiting, had to content herself with the
chaste salutes of the gold-fish, dissolved pearls distilled from her sad
eyes, and fell in the water like sporadic drops of rain.
Miss Heathery's spirit was low, and yet it kept leaping up strangely,
for she had been at the bank one morning to change a cheque, and with
the full intention of asking Mr James Thickens to present her with a
couple more fish from the store of which she had heard so much, but
which she had never seen.
That morning, as she noted how broad the pathway had grown from the
forehead upwards, and had seen when he turned his back that it expanded
into a circular walk round a bed of grizzle in the back of his crown,
and was then continued to the nape, Mr James Thickens seemed to be
extremely hard and cold. He looked certainly older too than he used; of
that she was sure.
He seemed extremely abrupt and impatient with her when she wished him a
sweet and pensive good-morning, which was as near a blessing upon his
getting-bald head as the words would allow.
She said afterwards that it was a fine morning, a very fine morning, a
fact that he did not deny, neither did he acknowledge, and so abstracted
and strange did he seem that the gold-fish slipped out of her mind, and
for a few moments she was agitated. She recovered though, and laying
down a little bunch of violets beside her reticule, she went through her
regular routine, received her change, and with a strange feeling of
exultation at the artfulness of her procedure, she had reached the door
after a most impressive "good-morning," for Miss Heathery always kept up
the fiction of dining late, though she partook of her main meal at
half-past one.
She had reached the door, when James Thickens spoke, his voice, the
voice of her forlorn hope, thrilling her to the core. It was not a
thrilling word, though it had that effect upon her, for it was only a
summons--an arrest, a check, to her outward progress.
"Hi!"
That was all. "Hi!" but it did thrill her, and she stopped short with
bounding pulses. It was abrupt, but still what of that! Gentlemen were
not ladies; and if in their masterful, commanding way, they began their
courtship by showing that they were the lords of women, why should she
complain? He had only to order her to be his wife, and she was ready to
become more--his very submissive slave.
She stopped, and, after a moment's hesitation, turned at that "Hi!" so
full of hope to her thirsty soul. Her eyes were humid with pleasurable
sensations, and but for that broad mahogany counter, she could have
thrown herself at his feet. At that moment she was upon the dazzling
pinnacle of joy; the next she was mentally sobbing despairingly in the
vale of sorrow and despair into which she had fallen, for James Thickens
said coldly:
"Here, you've left something behind."
Her violets! Her sweet offering that she had laid upon the altar behind
which her idol always stood. That bunch was gathered by her own
fingers, tied up with her own hands, incensed with kisses, made dewy
with tears. It was the result of loving and painful thought followed by
an inventive flash. It meant an easy confession of her love, and after
laying it upon the mahogany altar, her sanguine imagination painted
James Thickens lifting it, kissing it, holding it to his breast,
searching among the leaves for the note which was not there; and,
lastly, wearing it home in his button-hole, placing it in water for a
time, and then keeping it dried yet fragrant in a book of poetry--the
present of his love.
All that and more she had thought; and now James Thickens had called
out, "Hi! you've left something behind."
She crept back to the counter, and said, "Thank you, Mr Thickens," in a
piteous voice, her eyes beneath her veil too much blinded by the
gathering tears to see Mr Trampleasure passing through the bank, though
she heard his words, "Good-day, Miss Heathery," and bowed.
It was all over: James Thickens was not a man, he was a rhinoceros with
an impenetrable hide; and, taking up her bunch of flowers, she was about
to leave the bank when Thickens spoke again.
"Look here," he said, "I want to talk to you. Can't you ask me to tea?"
The place seemed to spin round, and the mahogany counter to heave and
fall like a wave, as she tried to speak but could not for a few moments.
Then she mastered her emotion, and in a hurried, trembling,
half-hysterical voice, she chirped out:
"Yes; this evening, Mr Thickens, at six."