"On s'ennuie presque toujours avec ceux qu'on ennuie."
Hester did not fail a second time to warn the Gresleys of the arrival of
guests. She mentioned it in time to allow of the making of cakes, and
Mr. Gresley graciously signified his intention of returning early from
his parochial rounds on the afternoon when Dick and Rachel were
expected, while Mrs. Gresley announced that the occasion was a
propitious one for inviting the Pratts to tea.
"Miss West will like to meet them," she remarked to Hester, whose jaw
dropped at the name of Pratt. "And it is very likely if they take a
fancy to her they will ask her to stay at the Towers while she is in the
neighborhood. If the captain is at home I will ask him to come too. The
Pratts are always so pleasant and hospitable."
Hester was momentarily disconcerted at the magnitude of the social
effort which Rachel's coming seemed to entail. But for once she had the
presence of mind not to show her dismay, and she helped Mrs. Gresley to
change the crewel-work antimacassars, with their washed-out kittens
swinging and playing leap-frog, for the best tussore-silk ones.
The afternoon was still young when all the preparations had been
completed, and Mrs. Gresley went up-stairs to change her gown, while
Hester took charge of the children, as Fräulein had many days previously
arranged to make music with Dr. and Miss Brown on this particular
afternoon. And very good music it was which proceeded out of the open
windows of the doctor's red brick house opposite Abel's cottage. Hester
could just hear it from the bottom of the garden near the church-yard
wall, and there she took the children, and under the sycamore, with a
bench round it, the dolls had a tea-party. Hester had provided herself
with a lump of sugar and a biscuit, and out of these many dishes were
made, and were arranged on a clean pocket-handkerchief spread on the
grass. Regie carried out his directions as butler with solemn
exactitude; and though Mary, who had inherited the paternal sense of
humor, thought fit to tweak the handkerchief and upset everything, she
found the witticism so coldly received by "Auntie Hester," although she
explained that father always did it, that she at once suited herself to
her company, and helped to repair the disaster.
It was very hot. The dolls, from the featureless midshipman to the
colossal professional beauty sitting in her own costly perambulator (a
present from Mrs. Pratt), felt the heat, and showed it by their moist
countenances. The only person who was cool was a small, nude, china
infant in its zinc bath, the property of Stella, whose determination to
reach central facts, and to penetrate to the root of the matter, at
present took the form of tearing or licking off all that could be torn
or licked from objects of interest. Hester, who had presented her with
the floating baby in the bath, sometimes wondered, as she watched Stella
conscientiously work through a well-dressed doll down to its stitched
sawdust compartments, what Mr. Gresley would make of his daughter when
she turned her attention to theology.
They were all sitting in a tight circle round the handkerchief, Regie
watching Hester cutting a new supply of plates out of smooth leaves with
her little gilt scissors, while Mary and Stella tried alternately to
suck an inaccessible grain of sugar out of the bottom of an acorn cup.
Rachel and Dick had come up on their silent wheels, and were looking at
them over the wall before Hester was aware of their presence.
"May we join the tea-party?" asked Rachel, and Hester started
violently.
"I am afraid the gate is locked," she said. "But perhaps you can climb
it."
"We can't leave the bicycles outside, though," said Dick, and he took a
good look at the heavy padlocked gate. Then he slowly lifted it off its
hinges, wheeled in the bicycles, and replaced the gate in position.
Rachel looked at him.
"Do you always do what you want to do?" she said, involuntarily.
"It saves trouble," he said, "especially as no one can be such a
first-class fool as to think a padlock will keep a gate shut. He would
expect it to be opened."
"But father said no one could come in there now," explained Regie, who
had watched, open-mouthed, the upheaval of the gate. "Father said it
could not be opened any more. He told mother."
"Did he, my son?" said Dick, and he kissed every one, beginning with
Hester and finishing with the dolls. Then they all sat down to the
tea-party, and partook largely of the delicacies, and after tea Dick
solemnly asked the children if they had seen the flying half-penny he
had brought back with him from Australia. The children crowded round
him, and the half-penny was produced and handed round. Each child
touched it, and found it real. Auntie Hester and Auntie Rachel examined
it. Boulou was requested to smell it. And then it was laid on the grass,
and the pocket-handkerchief which had done duty as a table-cloth was
spread over it.
The migrations of the half-penny were so extraordinary that even Rachel
and Hester professed amazement. Once it was found in Rachel's hand, into
which another large hand had gently shut it. But it was never discovered
twice in the same place, though all the children rushed religiously to
look for it where it was last discovered.
Another time, after a long search, the doll in the bath was discovered
to be sitting upon it, and once it actually flew down Regie's back; and
amid the wild excitement of the children its cold descent was described
by Regie in piercing minuteness until the moment when it rolled out over
his stocking at his knee.
"Make it fly down my back too, Uncle Dick," shrieked Mary. "Regie, give
it to me."
But Regie danced in a circle round Dick, holding aloft the wonderful
half-penny.
"Make it fly down my throat," he cried, too excited to know what he was
doing, and he put the half-penny in his mouth.
"Put it out this instant," said Dick, without moving.
A moment's pause followed, in which the blood ebbed away from the hearts
of the two women.
"I can't," said Regie; "I've swallowed it." And he began to whimper, and
then suddenly rolled on the grass screaming.
Dick pounced upon him like a panther, and held him by the feet head
downward, shaking him violently. The child's face was terrible to see.
Hester hid her face in her hands. Rachel rose and stood close to Dick.
"I think the shaking is rather too much for him," she said, watching the
poor little purple face intently. "I'm bound to go on," said Dick,
fiercely. "Is it moving, Regie?"
"It's going down," screamed Regie, suddenly.
"That it's not," said Dick, and he shook the child again, and the
half-penny flew out upon the grass. "Thank God," said Dick, and he laid
the gasping child on Hester's lap and turned away.
A few minutes later Regie was laughing and talking, and feeling himself
a hero. Presently he slipped off Hester's knee and ran to Dick, who was
lying on the grass a few paces off, his face hidden in his hands.
"Make the half-penny fly again, Uncle Dick," cried all the children,
pulling at him.
Dick raised an ashen face for a moment and said, hoarsely, "Take them
away."
Hester gathered up the children and took them back to the house through
the kitchen garden.
"Don't say we have arrived," whispered Rachel to her. "I will come on
with him presently." And she sat down near the prostrate vine-grower.
The president of the South Australian Vine-Growers' Association looked
very large when he was down.
Presently he sat up. His face was drawn and haggard, but he met Rachel's
dog-like glance of silent sympathy with a difficult, crooked smile.
"He is such a jolly little chap," he said, winking his hawk eyes.
"It was not your fault."
"That would not have made it any better for the parents," said Dick. "I
had time to think of that while I was shaking that little money-box.
Besides, it was my fault, in a way. I'll never play with other people's
children again. They are too brittle. I've had shaves up the Fly River
and in the South Sea Islands, but never anything as bad as this, in this
blooming little Vicarage garden with a church looking over the wall."
Hester was skimming back towards them.
"Don't mention it to James and his wife," she said to Dick. "He has to
speak at a temperance meeting to-night. I will tell them when the
meeting is over."
"That's just as well," said Dick, "for I know if James jawed much at me
I should act on the text that it is more blessed to give than to
receive."
"In what way?"
"Either way," said Dick. "Tongue or fist. It does not matter which, so
long as you give more than you get. And the text is quite right. It is
blessed, for I've tried it over and over again, and found it true every
time. But I don't want to try it on James if he's anything like what he
was as a curate."
"He is not much altered," said Hester.
"He is the kind of man that would not alter much," said Dick. "I expect
God Almighty likes him as he is."
Mr. and Mrs. Gresley, meanwhile, were receiving Mrs. Pratt and the two
Misses Pratt in the drawing-room. Selina and Ada Pratt were fine,
handsome young women, with long upper lips, who wore their smart sailor
hats tilted backwards to show their bushy fringes, and whose
muff-chains, with swinging pendent hearts, silk blouses and sequin belts
and brown boots represented to Mrs. Gresley the highest pinnacle of the
world of fashion.
Selina was the most popular, being liable to shrieks of laughter at the
smallest witticisms, and always ready for that species of amusement
termed "bally-ragging" or "hay-making." But Ada was the most admired.
She belonged to that type which in hotel society and country towns is
always termed "queenly." She "kept the men at a distance." She "never
allowed them to take liberties," etc., etc. She held her chin up and her
elbows out, and was considered by the section of Middleshire society in
which she shone to be very distinguished. Mrs. Pratt was often told that
her daughter looked like a duchess; and this facsimile of the
aristocracy, or rather of the most distressing traits of its latest
recruits, had a manner of lolling with crossed legs in the parental
carriage and pair which was greatly admired. "Looks as if she was born
to it all," Mr. Pratt would say to his wife.
Mrs. Gresley was just beginning to fear her other guests were not coming
when two tall figures were seen walking across the lawn, with Hester
between them.
Mr. Gresley sallied forth to meet them, and blasts of surprised welcome
were borne into the drawing-room by the summer air.
"But it was locked. I locked it myself." Inaudible reply.
"Padlocked. Only opens to the word Moon. Key on my own watch-chain."
Inaudible reply.
"Hinges! ha! ha! ha! Very good, Dick. Likely story that. I see you're
the same as ever. Travellers' tales. But we are not so easily taken in,
are we, Hester?"
Mrs. Gresley certainly had the gift of prophecy as far as the Pratts
were concerned. Mrs. Pratt duly took the expected "fancy" to Rachel, and
pressed her to stay at "The Towers" while she was in the neighborhood,
and make further acquaintance with her "young ladies."
"Ada is very pernickety," she said, smiling towards that individual
conversing with Dick. "She won't make friends with everybody, and she
gives it me" (with maternal pride) "when I ask people to stay whom she
does not take to. She says there's a very poor lot round here, and most
of the young ladies so ill-bred and empty she does not care to make
friends with them. I don't know where she gets all her knowledge from.
I'm sure it's not from her mother. Ada, now you come and talk a little
to Miss West."
Ada rose with the air of one who confers a favor, and Rachel made room
for her on the sofa, while Mrs. Pratt squeezed herself behind the
tea-table with Mrs. Gresley.
The conversation turned on bicycling.
"I bike now and then in the country," said Ada, "but I have not done
much lately. We have only just come down from town, and, _of course_, I
never bike in London."
Rachel had just said that she did.
"Perhaps you are nervous about the traffic," said Rachel.
"Oh! I'm not the least afraid of the traffic, but it's such bad form to
bike in London."
"That, of course, depends on how it's done," said Rachel; "but I am sure
in your ease you need not be afraid."
Ada glared at Rachel, and did not answer.
When the Pratts had taken leave she said to her mother:
"Well, you can have Rachel West if you want to, but if you do I shall go
away. She is only Birmingham, and yet she's just as stuck up as she can
be."
The Pratts were "Liverpool."
"Well, my dear," said Mrs. Pratt with natural pride, "it's well known
no one is good enough for you. But I took to Miss West, and an orphan
and all, with all that money, poor thing!"
"She has no style," said Selina, "but she has a nice face; and she's
coming to stay with Sibbie Loftus next week, when she leaves Vi
Newhaven. She may be Birmingham, Ada, but she's just as thick with
county people as we are."
"I did not rightly make out," said Mrs. Pratt, reflectively, "whether
that tall gentleman, Mr. Vernon, was after Miss West or Hessie Gresley."
"Oh, ma! You always think some one's after somebody else," said Ada,
impatiently, whose high breeding obliged her to be rather peremptory
with her simple parent. "Mr. Vernon is a pauper, and so is Hessie. And,
besides, Hessie is not the kind of girl anybody would want to marry."
"Well, I'm not so sure of that," said Selina. "But if she had had any
chances I know she would have told me, because I told her all about
Captain Cobbett and Mr. Baxter."