No matter how late either Vida Levering or her half-sister had gone to
bed the night before, they breakfasted, as they did so many other
things, at the hour held to be most advantageous for Doris.
Mr. Fox-Moore was sometimes there and often not. On those mornings when
his health or his exertions the night previous did not prevent his
appearance, there was little conversation at the Fox-Moore breakfast
table, except such as was initiated by the only child of the marriage, a
fragile girl of ten. Little Doris, owing to some obscure threat of
hip-disease, made much of her progress about the house in a footman's
arms. But hardly, so borne, would she reach the threshold of the
breakfast room before her thin little voice might be heard calling out,
'_Fa_-ther! _Fa_-ther!'
Those who held they had every ground for disliking the old man would
have been surprised to watch him during the half hour that ensued,
ministering to the rather querulous little creature, adapting his tone
and view to her comprehension, with an art that plainly took its
inspiration from affection. If Doris were not well enough to come down,
Mr. Fox-Moore read his letters and glanced at 'the' paper, directing his
few remarks to his sister-in-law, whom he sometimes treated in such a
way as would have given a stranger the impression, in spite of the
lady's lack of response, that there was some secret understanding
between the two.
A great many years before, Donald Fox-Moore had tumbled into a
Government office, the affairs of which he had ultimately got into such
excellent running order, that, with a few hours' supervision from the
chief each week, his clerks were easily able to maintain the high
reputation of that particular department of the public service. What Mr.
Fox-Moore did with the rest of his time was little known. A good deal of
it was spent with a much younger bachelor brother near Brighton. At
least, this was the family legend. In spite of his undoubted affection
for his child, little of his leisure was wasted at home. When people
looked at the sallow, smileless face of his wife they didn't blame him.
Sometimes, when a general sense of tension and anxiety betrayed his
presence somewhere in the great dreary house, and the master yet forbore
to descend for the early meal, he would rejoice the heart of his little
daughter by having her brought to his room to make tea and share his
breakfast.
On these occasions a sense of such unexpected surcease from care
prevailed in the dining-room as called for some celebration of the
holiday spirit. It found expression in the inclination of the two women
to linger over their coffee, embracing the only sure opportunity the day
offered for confidential exchange.
One of these occasions was the morning of Wark's warning, which,
however, Vida determined to say nothing about till she was obliged. She
had just handed up her cup for replenishing when the door opened, and,
to the surprise of the ladies, the master of the house appeared on the
threshold.
'Is--is anything the matter?' faltered his wife, half rising.
'Matter? Must something be the matter that I venture into my own
breakfast-room of a morning?'
'No, no. Only I thought, as Doris didn't come, you were breakfasting
upstairs, too.' No notice being taken of this, she at once set about
heating water, for no one expected Mr. Fox-Moore to drink tea made in
the kitchen.
'I thought,' said he, twitching an open newspaper off the table and
folding it up--'I thought I asked to be allowed the privilege of opening
my paper for myself.'
'Your _Times_ hasn't been touched,' said his wife, anxiously occupied
with the spirit-lamp.
He stopped in the act of thrusting the paper in his pocket and shook it.
'What do you call this?'
'That is my _Times_,' she said.
'_Your_ _Times_?'
'I ordered an extra copy, because you dislike so to have yours looked at
till you've finished with it.'
'Dreadful hardship _that_ is!' he said, glancing round, and seeing his
own particular paper neatly folded and lying still on the side table.
'It was no great hardship when you read it before night. When you don't,
it's rather long to wait.'
'To wait for what?'
'For the news of the day.'
'Don't you get the news of the day in the _Morning Post_?'
'I don't get such full Parliamentary reports nor the foreign
correspondence.'
'Good Lord! what next?'
'I think you must blame me,' said Vida, speaking for the first time.
'I'm afraid you'll find it's only since I've been here that Janet has
broken loose and taken in an extra copy.'
'Oh, it's on your account, is it?' he grumbled, but the edge had gone
out of his ill-humour. 'I suppose you _have_ to keep up with politics or
you couldn't keep the ball rolling as you did last night?'
'Yes,' said Vida, with an innocent air. 'It is well known what
superhuman efforts we have to make before we can qualify ourselves to
talk to men.'
'Hm!' grumbled Fox-Moore. 'I never saw _you_ at a loss.'
'You did last night.'
'No, I didn't. I saw you getting on like a house afire with Haycroft and
the beguiling Borrodaile. It's a pity all the decent men are married.'
Mrs. Fox-Moore allowed her own coffee to get cold while she hovered over
the sacred rite of scientific tea-making. Mr. Fox-Moore, talking to Vida
about the Foreign Office reception, to which they had all gone on after
the Tunbridges' dinner, kept watching with a kind of half-absent-minded
scorn his wife's fussily punctilious pains to prepare the brew 'his
way.' When all was ready and the tea steaming on its way to him in the
hands of its harassed maker, he curtly declined it, got up, and left the
room. A moment after, the shutting of the front door announced the
beginning of yet another of the master's absences.
'How can you stand it?' said Vida, under her breath.
'Oh, I don't mind his going away,' said the other, dully.
'No; but his coming back!'
'One of the things I'm grateful to Donald for'--she spoke as if there
were plenty more--'he is very good to you, Vida.' And in her tone there
was criticism of the beneficiary.
'You mean, he's not as rude to me as he is to you?'
'He is even forbearing. And you--you rather frighten me sometimes.'
'I see that.'
'It would be very terrible for _me_ if he took it into his head not to
like you.'
'If he took it into his head to forbid your having me here, you mean.'
'But even when you aren't polite he just laughs. Still, he's not a
patient man.'
'Do you think you have to tell me that?'
'No, dear, only to remind you not to try him too far. For my sake, Vida,
don't ever do that.'
She put out her yellow, parchment-like hand, and her sister closed hers
over it an instant.
'Here's the hot milk,' said Vida. 'Now we'll have some more coffee.'
'Are you coming with me to-day?' Mrs. Fox-Moore asked quite cheerfully
for her as the servant shut the door.
'Oh, is this Friday? N--no.' The younger woman looked at the chill grey
world through the window, and followed up the hesitating negative with a
quite definite, 'I couldn't stand slums to-day.' The two exchanged the
look that means, 'Here we are again up against this recurring
difference.' But there was no ill-humour in either face as their eyes
met.
Between these two daughters of one father existed that sort of haunting
family resemblance often seen between two closely related persons,
despite one being attractive and the other in some way repellent. The
observer traces the same lines in each face, the same intensification of
'the family look' in the smile, and yet knows that the slight disparity
in age fails to account for a difference wide as the poles.
And not alone difference of taste, of environment and experience, not
these alone make up the sum of their unlikeness. You had only to look
from the fresh simplicity of white muslin blouse and olive-coloured
cloth in the one case, to the ungainly expensiveness of the black silk
gown of the married woman, in order to get from the first a sense of
dainty morning freshness, and from Mrs. Fox-Moore not alone a lugubrious
_memento mori_ sort of impression, but that more disquieting reminder of
the ugly and over-elaborate thing life is to many an estimable soul.
Janet Fox-Moore had the art of rubbing this dark fact in till, so to
speak, the black came off. She seemed to achieve it partly by dint of
wearing (instead of any relief of lace or even of linen at her throat) a
hard band of that passementerie secretly so despised of the little
Tunbridges. This device did not so much 'finish off' the neck of Mrs.
Fox-Moore's gowns, as allow the funereal dulness of them to overflow on
to her brown neck. It even cast an added shadow on her sallow cheek. The
figure of the older woman, gaunt and thin enough, announced the further
constriction of the corset. By way of revenge the sharp shoulder-blades
poked the corset out till it defined a ridge in the black silk back. In
front, too, the slab-like figure declined co-operation with the corset,
and withdrew, leaving a hiatus that the silk bodice clothed though it
did not conceal. You could not have told whether the other woman wore
that ancient invention for a figure insufficient or over-exuberant. As
you followed her movements, easy with the ease of a child, while she
walked or stooped or caught up the fragile Doris, or raised her arm to
take a book from the shelf, you got an impression of a physique in
perfect because unconscious harmony with its environment. If, on the
contrary, you watched but so much as the nervous, uncertain hand of the
other woman, you would know here was one who had spent her years in
alternately grasping the nettle and letting it go--reaping only stings
in life's fair fields. Easy for any one seeing her in these days (though
she wasn't thirty-six) to share Mrs. Freddy's incredulous astonishment
at hearing from Haycroft the night before that Janet Levering had been
'the beauty of her family.' Mrs. Freddy's answer had been, 'Oh, don't
make fun of her!' and Haycroft had had to assure her of his seriousness,
while the little hostess still stared uncertain.
'The _lines_ of her face are rather good,' she admitted. 'Oh, but those
yellow and pink eyes, and her general muddiness!'
'Yes, yes,' Sir William had agreed. 'She's changed so that I would never
have known her, but her colouring used to be her strong point. I assure
you she was magnificent--oh, much more striking than the younger
sister!'
The bloodless-looking woman who sat uneasily at her own board clutching
at a thin fragment of cold dry toast that hung cheerlessly awry in the
silver rack, like the last brown leaf to a frosty tree, while she
crunched the toast, spoke dryly of the poor; of how 'interesting many of
them are;' how when you take the trouble to understand them, you no
longer lump them all together in a featureless misery, you realize how
significant and varied are their lives.
'Not half as significant and varied as their smells,' said her
unchastened sister.
'Oh, you sometimes talk as if you had no heart!'
'The trouble is, I have no stomach. When you've lured me into one of
those dingy alleys and that all-pervading greasy smell of poverty comes
flooding into my face--well, simply all my most uncharitable feelings
rise up in revolt. I want to hold my nose and hide my eyes, and call for
the motor-car. Running away isn't fast enough,' she said, with energy
and a sudden spark in her golden-brown eye.
Mrs. Fox-Moore poised the fat silver jug over her own belated cup, and
waited for the thick cream to come out in a slow and grudging gobbet
with a heavy plump into the coffee. As she waited, she gently rebuked
that fastidiousness in her companion that shrank from contact with the
unsavoury and the unfortunate.
'It isn't only my fastidiousness, as you call it, that is offended,'
Vida retorted. 'I am penetrated by the hopelessness of what we're doing.
It salves my conscience, or _yours_----' Hurriedly she added,
'----that's not what you mean to do it for, I _know_, dear--and you're
an angel and I'm a mere cumberer of the earth. But when I'm only just
"cumbering," I feel less a fraud than when I'm pretending to do good.'
'You needn't pretend.'
'I can't do anything else. To go among your poor makes me feel in my
heart that I'm simply flaunting my better fortune.'
'I never saw you flaunting it.'
'Well, I assure you it's when you've got me to go with you on one of
your Whitechapel raids that I feel most strongly how outrageous it is
that, in addition to all my other advantages, I should buy self-approval
by doing some tuppenny-ha'penny service to a toiling, starving
fellow-creature.'
Mrs. Fox-Moore set down her coffee-cup. 'You mustn't suppose----' she
began.
'No, no,' Vida cut her short. 'I don't doubt _your_ motives. I know too
well how ready you are to sacrifice yourself. But it does fill me with a
kind of rage to see some of those smug Settlement workers, the people
that plume themselves on leaving luxurious homes. They don't say how
hideously bored they were in them. They are perfectly enchanted at the
excitement and importance they get out of going to live among the poor,
who don't want them----'
'Oh, my dear Vida!'
'Not a little bit! Well, the _wily_ paupers do, perhaps, for what they
can get out of our sort.'
Mrs. Fox-Moore cast down her eyes as though convicted by the
recollection of some concrete example.
'We're only scratching at the surface,' Vida, said--'such an ugly
surface, too! And the more we scratch, the uglier things come to light.'
'You make too much of that disappointment at Christmas.'
'I wasn't even thinking of the hundredth time you've been
disillusioned.' Vida threw down her table napkin, and stood up. 'I was
thinking of people like our young parson cousin.'
'George----'
Vida made a shrug of half-impatient, half-humorous assent. 'Leaves the
Bishop's Palace and comes to London. He, too, wants "to live for the
poor." Never for an instant one of them. Always the patron--the person
something may be got out of--or, at all events, hoped from.'
She seemed to be about to leave the room, but as her sister answered
with some feeling, 'No, no, they love and respect him!' Vida paused, and
brought up by the fire that the sudden cold made comforting.
'George is a different man since he's found his vocation,' Mrs.
Fox-Moore insisted. 'You read it in his face.'
'Oh, if all you mean is that _he's_ happier, why not? He's able to look
on himself as a benefactor. He's tasting the intoxication of the King
among Beggars.'
'You are grossly unfair, Vida.'
'So he thinks when I challenge him: "What good, what earthly good, is
all this unless an anodyne--for you--is good?"'
'It seems to me a very real good that George Nuneaton and his kind
should go into the dark places and brighten hopeless lives with a little
Christian kindness--sometimes with a little timely counsel.'
'Yes, yes,' said the voice by the fire; 'and a little good music--don't
forget the good music.'
'An object-lesson in practical religion, isn't that something?'
'Practical! Good Heaven! A handful of complacent, expensively educated
young people playing at reform. The poor wanting work, wanting decent
housing--wanting _bread_--and offered a little cultivated
companionship.'
'Vida, what have you been reading?'
'Reading? I've been visiting George at his Settlement. I've been
intruding myself on the privacy of the poor once a week with you--and
I'm done with it! Personally I don't get enough out of it to reconcile
me to their getting so little.'
'You're burning,' observed the toneless voice from the head of the
table.
'Yes, I believe I was a little hot,' Vida laughed as she drew her
smoking skirt away from the fire. But she still stood close to the
cheerful blaze, one foot on the fender, the green cloth skirt drawn up,
leaving the more delicate fabric of her silk petticoat to meet the fiery
ordeal. 'If it annoys you to hear me say that's my view of charity, why,
don't make me talk about it;' but the face she turned for an instant
over her shoulder was far gentler than her words. 'And don't in
future'--she was again looking down into the fire, and she spoke slowly
as one who delivers a reluctant ultimatum--'don't ask me to help, except
with money. _That_ doesn't cost so much.'
'I am disappointed.' Nothing further, but the sound of a chair moved
back, eloquent somehow of a discouragement deeper than words conveyed.
Vida turned swiftly, and, coming back to her sister, laid an arm about
her shoulder.
'I'm a perfect monster! But you know, my dear, you rather goaded me into
saying all this by looking such a martyr when I've tried to get out of
going----'
'Very well, I won't ask you again.' But the toneless rejoinder was
innocent of rancour. Janet Fox-Moore gave the impression of being too
chilled, too drained of the generous life-forces, even for anger.
'Besides,' said Vida, hurriedly, 'I'd nearly forgotten; there's the
final practising at eleven.'
'_I'd_ forgotten your charity concert was so near!' As Mrs. Fox-Moore
gathered up her letters, she gave way for the first time to a wintry
little smile.
'The concert's mine, I admit, but the charity's the bishop's. What
absurd things we women fill up the holes in our lives with!' Vida said,
as she followed her sister into the hall. 'Do you know the real reason
I'm getting up this foolish concert?'
'Because you like singing, and do it so well that--yes, without your
looks and the indescribable "rest," you'd be a success. I told you that,
when I begged you to come and try London.'
'The reason I'm slaving over the concert--it isn't all musical
enthusiasm. It amuses me to organize it. All the ticklish, difficult,
"bothering" part of getting up a monster thing of this sort, reconciling
malcontents, enlisting the great operatic stars and not losing the great
social lights--it all interests me like a game. I'm afraid the truth is
I like managing things.'
'Perhaps Mrs. Freddy's not so far wrong.'
'Does Mrs. Freddy accuse me of being a "managing woman," horrid
thought?'
'She was talking about you in her enthusiastic way when she was here the
other day. "Vida could administer a state," she said. Yes, _I_ laughed,
too, but Mrs. Freddy shook her head quite seriously, and said, "To think
of a being like Vida--not even a citizen."'
'I'm not a citizen?' exclaimed the lady, laughing down at her sister
over the banisters. 'Does she think because I've lived abroad I've
forfeited my rights of----'
'No, all she means is---- Oh, you know the bee she's got in her bonnet.
She means, as she'll tell you, that "you have no more voice in the
affairs of England than if you were a Hottentot."'
'I can't say I've ever minded that. But it has an odd sound, hasn't
it--to hear one isn't a citizen.'
'Mrs. Freddy forgets----'
'I know! I know what you're going to say,' said the other,
light-heartedly. 'Mrs. Freddy forgets our unique ennobling influence;'
and the tall young woman laughed as she ran up the last half of the long
flight of stairs. At the top she halted a moment, and called down to
Mrs. Fox-Moore, who was examining the cards left the day before,
'Speaking of our powerful influence over our men-folk--Mr. Freddy
wasn't present, was he, when she aired her views?'
'No.'
'I thought not. Her influence over Mr. Freddy is maintained by the
strictest silence on matters he isn't keen about.'