Dom Paradis’s cake, as modified by Rosamond of Roseborough and
twentieth century dietetic caution, came from the oven a golden brown
and snowy white success. Its odour was unique and delectable. Its
weight was light as a puff. Rosamond surveyed it with a pride almost
equal to that which must have extended the cheeks and bosom of its
sybaritic inventor, Lallia y Poptu de Sillihofo Sanza, Countess of
Mountjoye, when she first saw the glory she had evolved to deck the
inner circles of her beloved. She sniffed it in long-drawn delight.
“Mum-mum--ooh-h! No wonder he ate himself to death for love of you,
Contessa! I wonder if Dom Jack, the Prince of Roseborough, is _fat_?”
She dropped herself into Amanda’s apron again and set about preparing
the icing. Countess Lallia had called it:
A stylle and stykkie sauce of the smoothe colour of a pearle
but lyke to a paste wych dydde covere my cake about lyke a
napkyn, as it were a mysterie.
“I think my icing will be nicer than yours, Contessa--without all that
oriental sweetmeat chopped fine and beaten into it. There will be less
anticipatory excitement about my cake and more of the calm satisfaction
one feels when one knows what is coming next. You had so many mixed
spices and sweets and flavours in your cake that Dom Paradis could not
possibly tell from one bite what the next would taste like. There is a
modern slang term that describes the culinary tactics you employed on
the prince’s appetite--you ‘kept him guessing.’”
At first the whole conceit of the Countess of Mountjoye’s
cake--“devysed and styrred first in the yeare 1715,” and now reproduced
in almost identical mixture from the old recipe--had seemed to her
deliciously humorous. She had chuckled and chattered over it to herself
and extracted from it a larger degree of the essence of mirth than had
come to her palate and nostrils in many weeks; for it cannot be denied
that life at Villa Rose lacked brightness. A mansion full of antiques,
with no human associates but servants of the same vintage, did not
provide the kind of environment which spontaneously generates happiness
in the heart of youth. Hibbert Mearely’s widow had been a prisoner in
her own grandeur, daily acquainted with that state which, to the young,
is worse than sharp grief, namely, boredom.
To-day, with the departure of His Friggets, and the new meeting with
her young heart--which had taken place when she regarded herself in the
Orleans mirror--a joy had awakened within her like the return of her
girlhood. So vivid a joy it was, so brave and confident, that it had
sent her forth singing salutations to herself, as if she believed the
whole sun-filled, rose-scented earth were calling to her in that syren
phrase, “Good-morning, Rosamond!”
How swiftly joy had unfolded hope! And how naturally, inevitably, both
had promised love! Permeated with them, she had defied Villa Rose and
its antiquities to hold her spirit twenty-four hours longer. Lo, a day
was given her--a _Wonderful_ Day. In it she might recapture her lost
heritage--romance.
Now, while she beat white of egg and powdered sugar together to make
the fundamental paste of the icing for the Paradis cake, an indefinable
sense of sorrow descended upon her. Thought lost its elasticity of
hope--it lagged and drooped. A lassitude crept over her whole person.
Her eyelids felt hot and heavy. There was a pressure on her head that
kept it from tossing in the air after its wonted fashion like a proud
hollyhock.
“Everything is going wrong,” she whispered. “I have a presentiment of
it--just as if some dreadfully unhappy thing had taken place and I was
about to hear of it.” A tear fell, hit the rim of the soup plate in
which she was beating the icing, and, luckily, rolled off instead of
in. Both eyes filled again. She wiped them on the back of her arm, and,
by this mournful gesture, sent a trail of icing across the wall from
the fork in her hand.
“I never felt so sad in all my life,” was her inward admission, as she
set about filling the cake with the cooked concoction of chopped figs,
nuts, raisins, and candied fruit that made two inches of lusciousness
between the layers. This fruity mixture, further complicated with the
oriental “sweets and spyces” of her period, Countess Lallia had poured
into the centre of the original cake and baked the whole together. In
Rosamond’s day, fortunately for the more nervous digestive apparatus of
current humanity, wisdom has reduced weightiness in cookery--hence the
layer cake.
She proceeded to encase the whole--a large, imposing square of three
layers--in the “stylle and stykkie sauce of the smoothe colour of a
pearle.”
She went about it slowly and with downcast mien--sighing and
sniffing--tears welling over her lids. When she had put the perfected
achievement away in the pantry to await its modern Dom Paradis, she
sank down in the kitchen rocker and let woe take its way with her.
She thought of her high hopes of the morning and marvelled at the
malevolent power of fate, which could change those hopes, at the noon
hour, into vague, insidious griefs. Her body seemed to have lost its
substance, to be let out into space. She felt vacant and psychic.
“Something dreadful is going to happen,” she whimpered. “I feel my
heart sinking right out of me.”
She wished that she were not alone. The big house, so silent and aloof,
was oppressive. She questioned if it were safe for her to remain there,
solitary, and decided that she would have Blake sleep in the house that
night.
“I’d give anything right now to have His Friggets walk in and say ‘It’s
a quarter to one, Mrs. Mearely. I persoom you’ll like your lunch.’ That
reminds me,” she added, “I suppose it must be almost that time now.”
Unable to see the clock from where she sat she rose listlessly.
“Ten minutes past one? Why--no! It is the long hand that is at one.
Surely it can’t be five minutes past _two_!”
She was still denying this when the bell rang from the tower by the
river.
“_Two o’clock!_ Two--and I haven’t had my lunch. Why, I--I’m
_starving_!”
Discovery of the true cause of her sudden malady went far toward curing
it. She ran to the larder, to see what cold fare she could find there,
all ready to be devoured without delay in preparation. She thought,
with compunction, of the faithful Friggets, always as punctual as time
itself, who would never have let her fall into this pathos of the
interior vacuum, had a greater grief not called them from her service.
She found so many dishes, that she might have wondered if His Friggets
had not been secretly preparing for a party, except that she knew well
their one extravagance. They _would_ cook, when the spirit moved them.
They were proud of their cooking; and they argued that what was uneaten
could always be given to the clergyman, whose stipend was meagre, and
what he did not devour he could pass on to the thirteen McGuires, who
embodied Roseborough’s poor. It must be confessed not only that the
vicar was tempted from spiritual yearnings, by the tasty abundance
of His Friggets’ art, but that the thirteen McGuires were fattening
like pigs. Their sleek looks mocked at sweet charity’s very name. Mrs.
McGuire, herself, had given up her random profession of charwoman,
because, as she said: “Sure an’ I’ve got too heavy to be bendin’ me
waist, and up and down on me knees, and the loike.”
It occurred to Rosamond that His Friggets’ extravagance in this one
direction was fortunate for her, to-day, since it not only provided
her with lunch but with refreshments for her guests of the evening.
There were two large trembling jellies, bowls of cream, a junket, a
whole roasted chicken and a whole boiled one--[“I’ll turn the boiled
one into a salad for to-night,” she thought]--cold ham, which had been
boiled in a pot of Amanda’s own brew of currant wine, and half a dozen
quart bottles of the parsnip wine, considered by Amanda, metaphorically
speaking, as the diamond in her crown. All Roseborough admitted that
Amanda Frigget’s parsnip wine was so good, so golden, and so lively,
that it both looked and tasted “exactly like champagne, except that,
instead of the regular champagne taste, it had the taste of parsnips.”
Rosamond appropriated the roast chicken and found bread and butter also
for her needs. To these she added a tall glass of foamy milk. A crock
filled with cookies was another pleasant discovery.
She pictured to herself, amid giggles, the expressions that would adorn
the faces of Amanda and Jemima and all Roseborough if they could see
the distinguished Hibbert Mearely’s widow perched on the end of the
kitchen table eating with her fingers.
“I suppose, if I were a born lady, I’d starve because there’s no one
here to set my lunch before me properly,” she thought, “well, there are
advantages in having a pedigree of butter pats.”
As one second joint, followed by the other, was nipped all around
neatly to the bone, and the milk followed the chicken fragments,
Rosamond’s indefinable sorrow vanished. She hung Amanda’s apron on
its hook, and ran upstairs to wash her face and hands and catch up a
loosened curl or two.
She had decided to spend the afternoon hours in a nook she knew by the
river, not a stone’s throw from the bell tower. It was the loveliest
spot in the valley and, unseen, one might watch the three roads that
crossed one another at the tower. She needed a parasol, and ignoring
the four black ones--one with lavender flowers--and the two black and
white ones--the latest with a white chiffon frill--which, in their
appointed order, had screened her grieved countenance during the last
four years--she selected a shot silk of a grass green, its brightness
tempered with silver gray. As she set out from the house now, with its
silken shade arched over her bright hair and bringing out every bit of
life there was in her skin and her gown, even Mr. Albert Andrews could
not have doubted that the young widow’s mourning days were over.
With her hand on the latch of her gate, she paused. Far down the road,
just on the near side of the bridge, she perceived Blake returning with
the obstreperous mare. Even while she looked, she saw Florence rear and
dart off down the road to Poplars. There was a trotting on the gravel
road immediately round the curve of Villa Rose’s line. In a moment the
rider had reined in at the gate and uncovered in salute to her.
“I hope he doesn’t think he has come to make a special call--he looks
all dressed up--because I’m not going indoors again,” was her mental
greeting. Aloud, she said, cordially, “Good afternoon, Judge Giffen.”
[Illustration]