“The tea will be quite cold, you’d better ring for some more,” said the
Dowager Lady Beanford.
Susan Lady Beanford was a vigorous old woman who had coquetted with
imaginary ill-health for the greater part of a lifetime; Clovis Sangrail
irreverently declared that she had caught a chill at the Coronation of
Queen Victoria and had never let it go again. Her sister, Jane
Thropplestance, who was some years her junior, was chiefly remarkable for
being the most absent-minded woman in Middlesex.
“I’ve really been unusually clever this afternoon,” she remarked gaily,
as she rang for the tea. “I’ve called on all the people I meant to call
on; and I’ve done all the shopping that I set out to do. I even
remembered to try and match that silk for you at Harrod’s, but I’d
forgotten to bring the pattern with me, so it was no use. I really think
that was the only important thing I forgot during the whole afternoon.
Quite wonderful for me, isn’t it?”
“What have you done with Louise?” asked her sister. “Didn’t you take her
out with you? You said you were going to.”
“Good gracious,” exclaimed Jane, “what have I done with Louise? I must
have left her somewhere.”
“But where?”
“That’s just it. Where have I left her? I can’t remember if the
Carrywoods were at home or if I just left cards. If there were at home I
may have left Louise there to play bridge. I’ll go and telephone to Lord
Carrywood and find out.”
“Is that you, Lord Carrywood?” she queried over the telephone; “it’s me,
Jane Thropplestance. I want to know, have you seen Louise?”
“‘Louise,’” came the answer, “it’s been my fate to see it three times.
At first, I must admit, I wasn’t impressed by it, but the music grows on
one after a bit. Still, I don’t think I want to see it again just at
present. Were you going to offer me a seat in your box?”
“Not the opera ‘Louise’—my niece, Louise Thropplestance. I thought I
might have left her at your house.”
“You left cards on us this afternoon, I understand, but I don’t think you
left a niece. The footman would have been sure to have mentioned it if
you had. Is it going to be a fashion to leave nieces on people as well
as cards? I hope not; some of these houses in Berkeley-square have
practically no accommodation for that sort of thing.”
“She’s not at the Carrywoods’,” announced Jane, returning to her tea;
“now I come to think of it, perhaps I left her at the silk counter at
Selfridge’s. I may have told her to wait there a moment while I went to
look at the silks in a better light, and I may easily have forgotten
about her when I found I hadn’t your pattern with me. In that case she’s
still sitting there. She wouldn’t move unless she was told to; Louise
has no initiative.”
“You said you tried to match the silk at Harrod’s,” interjected the
dowager.
“Did I? Perhaps it was Harrod’s. I really don’t remember. It was one
of those places where every one is so kind and sympathetic and devoted
that one almost hates to take even a reel of cotton away from such
pleasant surroundings.”
“I think you might have taken Louise away. I don’t like the idea of her
being there among a lot of strangers. Supposing some unprincipled person
was to get into conversation with her.”
“Impossible. Louise has no conversation. I’ve never discovered a single
topic on which she’d anything to say beyond ‘Do you think so? I dare say
you’re right.’ I really thought her reticence about the fall of the
Ribot Ministry was ridiculous, considering how much her dear mother used
to visit Paris. This bread and butter is cut far too thin; it crumbles
away long before you can get it to your mouth. One feels so absurd,
snapping at one’s food in mid-air, like a trout leaping at may-fly.”
“I am rather surprised,” said the dowager, “that you can sit there making
a hearty tea when you’ve just lost a favourite niece.”
“You talk as if I’d lost her in a churchyard sense, instead of having
temporarily mislaid her. I’m sure to remember presently where I left
her.”
“You didn’t visit any place of devotion, did you? If you’ve left her
mooning about Westminster Abbey or St. Peter’s, Eaton Square, without
being able to give any satisfactory reason why she’s there, she’ll be
seized under the Cat and Mouse Act and sent to Reginald McKenna.”
“That would be extremely awkward,” said Jane, meeting an irresolute piece
of bread and butter halfway; “we hardly know the McKennas, and it would
be very tiresome having to telephone to some unsympathetic private
secretary, describing Louise to him and asking to have her sent back in
time for dinner. Fortunately, I didn’t go to any place of devotion,
though I did get mixed up with a Salvation Army procession. It was quite
interesting to be at close quarters with them, they’re so absolutely
different to what they used to be when I first remember them in the
’eighties. They used to go about then unkempt and dishevelled, in a sort
of smiling rage with the world, and now they’re spruce and jaunty and
flamboyantly decorative, like a geranium bed with religious convictions.
Laura Kettleway was going on about them in the lift of the Dover Street
Tube the other day, saying what a lot of good work they did, and what a
loss it would have been if they’d never existed. ‘If they had never
existed,’ I said, ‘Granville Barker would have been certain to have
invented something that looked exactly like them.’ If you say things
like that, quite loud, in a Tube lift, they always sound like epigrams.”
“I think you ought to do something about Louise,” said the dowager.
“I’m trying to think whether she was with me when I called on Ada
Spelvexit. I rather enjoyed myself there. Ada was trying, as usual, to
ram that odious Koriatoffski woman down my throat, knowing perfectly well
that I detest her, and in an unguarded moment she said: ‘She’s leaving
her present house and going to Lower Seymour Street.’ ‘I dare say she
will, if she stays there long enough,’ I said. Ada didn’t see it for
about three minutes, and then she was positively uncivil. No, I am
certain I didn’t leave Louise there.”
“If you could manage to remember where you _did_ leave her, it would be
more to the point than these negative assurances,” said Lady Beanford;
“so far, all we know is that she is not at the Carrywoods’, or Ada
Spelvexit’s, or Westminster Abbey.”
“That narrows the search down a bit,” said Jane hopefully; “I rather
fancy she must have been with me when I went to Mornay’s. I know I went
to Mornay’s, because I remember meeting that delightful Malcolm
What’s-his-name there—you know whom I mean. That’s the great advantage
of people having unusual first names, you needn’t try and remember what
their other name is. Of course I know one or two other Malcolms, but
none that could possibly be described as delightful. He gave me two
tickets for the Happy Sunday Evenings in Sloane Square. I’ve probably
left them at Mornay’s, but still it was awfully kind of him to give them
to me.”
“Do you think you left Louise there?”
“I might telephone and ask. Oh, Robert, before you clear the tea-things
away I wish you’d ring up Mornay’s, in Regent Street, and ask if I left
two theatre tickets and one niece in their shop this afternoon.”
“A niece, ma’am?” asked the footman.
“Yes, Miss Louise didn’t come home with me, and I’m not sure where I left
her.”
“Miss Louise has been upstairs all the afternoon, ma’am, reading to the
second kitchenmaid, who has the neuralgia. I took up tea to Miss Louise
at a quarter to five o’clock, ma’am.”
“Of course, how silly of me. I remember now, I asked her to read the
_Faerie Queene_ to poor Emma, to try to send her to sleep. I always get
some one to read the _Faerie Queene_ to me when I have neuralgia, and it
usually sends me to sleep. Louise doesn’t seem to have been successful,
but one can’t say she hasn’t tried. I expect after the first hour or so
the kitchenmaid would rather have been left alone with her neuralgia, but
of course Louise wouldn’t leave off till some one told her to. Anyhow,
you can ring up Mornay’s, Robert, and ask whether I left two theatre
tickets there. Except for your silk, Susan, those seem to be the only
things I’ve forgotten this afternoon. Quite wonderful for me.”