A CALL
The next moment the two fluffy women had decided, without in the least
consulting James, that they would ascend to Helen's bedroom to look at a
hat which, James was surprised to learn, Helen had seen in Brunt's
window that morning and had bought on the spot. No wonder she had been
in a hurry to go marketing; no wonder she had spent "some" of his
ten-pound note! He had seen hats in Brunt's marked as high as two
guineas; but he had not dreamt that such hats would ever enter his
house. While he had been labouring, collecting his rents and arranging
for repairs, throughout the length and the breadth of Bursley and
Turnhill, she, under pretence of marketing, had been flinging away
ten-pound notes at Brunt's. The whole business was fantastic, simply and
madly fantastic; so fantastic that he had not yet quite grasped the
reality of it! The whole business was unheard of. He saw, with all the
clearness of his masculine intellect, that it must cease. The force with
which he decided within himself that it must cease--and
instanter!--bordered upon the hysterical. As he had said, plaintively,
he was an oldish man. His habits, his manners, and his notions,
especially his notions about money, were fixed and set like plaster of
Paris in a mould. Helen's conduct was nothing less than dangerous. It
might bring him to a sudden death from heart disease. Happily, he had
had a very good week indeed with his rents. He trotted about all day on
Mondays and on Tuesday mornings, gathering his rents, and on Tuesday
afternoons he usually experienced the assuaged content of an alligator
after the weekly meal. Otherwise there was no knowing what might not
have been the disastrous consequences of Helen's barefaced robbery and
of her unscrupulous, unrepentant defence of that robbery. For days and
days he had imagined himself in heaven with a seraph who was also a good
cook. He had forty times congratulated himself on catching Helen. And
now...!
But it must stop.
Then he thought of the cooking. His mouth remembered its first taste of
the incomparable kidney omelette. What an ecstasy! Still, a ten-pound
note for even a kidney omelette jarred on the fineness of his sense of
values.
A feminine laugh--Helen's--came down the narrow stairs and through the
kitchen.... No, the whole house was altered, with well-bred,
distinguished women's laughter floating about the stairs like that.
He called upon his lifelong friend and comforter--the concertina. That
senseless thing of rose-wood, ivory, ebony, mother-of-pearl, and leather
was to him what a brother, a pipe, a bull terrier, a trusted confidant,
might have been to another James. And now, in the accents of the
Hallelujah Chorus, it yielded to his squeezings the secret and sublime
solace which men term poetry.
Then there was a second, and equally imperious, knock at the door.
He loosed his fingers from his friend, and opened the door.
Mr. Emanuel Prockter stood on the doorstep. Mr. Emanuel Prockter wore a
beautiful blue suit, with a white waistcoat and pale gold tie; yellow
gloves, boots with pointed toes, a glossy bowler hat, a cane, and an
eyeglass. He was an impeccable young man, and the avowed delight of his
tailor, whose bills were paid by Mrs. Prockter.
"Is Miss Rathbone at home?" asked Emanuel, after a cough.
"Helen?"
"Ye-es."
"Ay," said James, grimly. "Her's quite at home."
"Can I see her?"
James opened more widely the door. "Happen you'd better step inside,"
said he.
"Thanks, Mr. Ollerenshaw. What--er--fine weather we're having!"
James ignored this quite courteous and truthful remark. He shut the
door, went into the kitchen, and called up the stairs: "Helen, a young
man to see ye."
In the bedroom, Helen and Sarah Swetnam had exhausted the Brunt hat, and
were spaciously at sea in an enchanted ocean of miscellaneous gossip
such as is only possible between two highly-educated women who scorn
tittle-tattle. Helen had the back bedroom; partly because the front
bedroom was her uncle's, but partly also because the back bedroom was
just as large as and much quieter than the other, and because she
preferred it. There had been no difficulty about furniture. Even so good
a landlord as James Ollerenshaw is obliged now and then to go to
extremes in the pursuit of arrears of rent, and the upper part of the
house was crowded with choice specimens of furniture which had once
belonged to the more magnificent of his defaulting tenants. Helen's
bedroom was not "finished"; nor, since she regarded it as a temporary
lodging rather than a permanent habitation, was she in a mind to finish
it. Still, with her frocks dotted about, the hat on the four-post bed,
and her silver-mounted brushes and manicure tools on the dressing-table,
it had a certain stylishness. Sarah shared the bed with the hat. Helen
knelt at a trunk.
"Whatever made you think of coming to Bursley?" Sarah questioned.
"Don't you think it's better than Longshaw?" said Helen.
"Yes, my darling child. But that's not why you came. If you ask me, I
believe it was your deliberate intention to capture your great-uncle.
Anyhow, I congratulate you on your success."
"Ah!" Helen murmured, smiling to herself, "I'm not out of the wood yet."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, you see, uncle and I haven't quite decided whether he is to have
his way or I am to have mine; we were both thinking about it when you
happened to call." And then, as there was a little pause: "Are people
talking about us much?"
She did not care whether people were talking much or little, but she had
an obscure desire to shift ever so slightly the direction of the
conversation.
"I've only been here a day or two, so I can scarcely judge," said Sarah.
"But Lilian came in from the art school this morning with an armful of
chatter."
"Let me see, I forget," Helen said. "Is Lilian the youngest, or the next
to the youngest?"
"My dearest child, Lilian is the youngest but one, of course; but she's
grown up now--naturally."
"What! When I saw her last, that day when she was with you at Knype,
she had a ribbon in her hair, and she looked ten."
"She's eighteen. And haven't you heard?"
"Heard what?"
"Do you mean to say you've been in Bursley a week and more, and haven't
heard? Surely you know Andrew Dean?"
"I know Andrew Dean," said Helen; and she said nothing else.
"When did you last see him?"
"Oh, about a fortnight ago."
"It was before that. He didn't tell you? Well, it's just like him, that
is; that's Andrew all over!"
"What is?"
"He's engaged to Lilian. It's the first engagement in the family, and
she's the youngest but one."
Helen shut the trunk with a snap, then opened it and shut it again. And
then she rose, smoothing her hair.
"I scarcely know Lilian," she said, coldly. "And I don't know your
mother at all. But I must call and congratulate the child. No, Andrew
Dean didn't breathe a word."
"I may tell you as a dreadful secret, Nell, that we aren't any of us in
the seventh heaven about it. Aunt Annie said yesterday: 'I don't know
that I'm so set up with it as all that, Jane' (meaning mother). We
aren't so set up with it as all that."
"Why not?"
"Oh, we aren't. I don't know why. I pretend to be, lest Lilian should
imagine I'm jealous."
It was at this point that the voice of James Ollerenshaw announced a
young man.
The remainder of that afternoon was like a bewildering dream to James
Ollerenshaw. His front room seemed to be crowded with a multitude of
peacocks, that would have been more at home under the sun of Mrs.
Prockter's lawns up at Hillport. Yet there were only three persons
present besides himself. But decidedly they were not of his world; they
were of the world that referred to him as "old Jimmy Ollerenshaw," or
briefly as "Jimmy." And he had to sit and listen to them, and even to
answer coherently when spoken to. Emanuel Prockter was brilliant. He had
put his hat on one chair and his cane across another, and he conversed
with ducal facility. The two things about him that puzzled the master of
the house were--first, why he was not, at such an hour, engaged in at
any rate the pretence of earning his living; and, second, why he did not
take his gloves off. No notion of work seemed to exist in the minds of
the three. They chattered of tennis, novels, music, and particularly of
amateur operatic societies. James acquired the information that Emanuel
was famous as a singer of songs. The topic led then naturally to James's
concertina; the talk lightly caressed James's concertina, and then
Emanuel swept it off to the afternoon tea-room of the new Midland Grand
Hotel at Manchester, where Emanuel had lately been. And that led to the
Old Oak Tree tea-house in Bond-street, where, not to be beaten by
Emanuel, Sarah Swetnam had lately been.
"Suppose we have tea," said Helen.
And she picked up a little brass bell which stood on the central table
and tinkled it. James had not noticed the bell. It was one of the many
little changes that Helen had introduced. Each change by itself was a
nothing--what is one small bell in a house?--yet in the mass they
amounted to much. The bell was obviously new. She must have bought it;
but she had not mentioned it to him. And how could they all sit at the
tiny table in the kitchen? Moreover, he had no fancy for entertaining
the whole town of Bursley to meals. However, the immediate prospect of
tea produced in James a feeling of satisfaction, even though he remained
in perfect ignorance of the methods by which Helen meant to achieve the
tea. She had rung the bell, and gone on talking, as if the tea would
cook itself and walk in on its hind legs and ask to be eaten.
Then the new servant entered with a large tray. James had never seen
such a servant, a servant so entirely new. She was wearing a black frock
and various parts of the frock, and the top of her head, were covered
with stiffly-starched white linen--or was it cotton? Her apron, which
had two pockets, was more elaborate than an antimacassar. Helen coolly
instructed her to place the tray on his desk; which she did, brushing
irreverently aside a number of rent books.
On the tray there was nothing whatever to eat but a dozen slices of the
thinnest conceivable bread and butter.
Helen rose. Emanuel also rose.
Helen poured out the tea. Emanuel took a cup and saucer in one hand and
the plate of bread and butter in the other, and ceremoniously approached
Sarah Swetnam. Sarah accepted the cup and saucer, delicately chose a
piece of bread and butter and lodged it on her saucer, and went on
talking.
Emanuel returned to the table, and, reladen, approached old Jimmy, and
old Jimmy had to lodge a piece of bread and butter on his saucer. Then
Emanuel removed his gloves, and in a moment they were all drinking tea
and nibbling bread and butter.
What a fall was this from kidney omelettes! And four had struck! Did
Helen expect her uncle to make his tea off a slice of bread and butter
that weighed about two drachms?
When the alleged tea was over James got on his feet, and silently slid
into the kitchen. The fact was that Emanuel Prockter and the manikin
airs of Emanuel Prockter made him positively sick. He had not been in
the kitchen more than a minute before he was aware of amazing matters
in the conversation.
"Yes," said Helen; "it's small."
"But, my child, you've always been used to a small house, surely. I
think it's just as quaint and pretty as a little museum."
"Would you like to live in a little museum?"
A laugh from Emanuel, and the voice of Helen proceeding:
"I've always lived in a small house, just as I've taught six hours a day
in a school. But not because I wanted to. I like room. I daresay that
uncle and I may find another house one of these days."
"Up at Hillport, I hope," Emanuel put in. James could see his mincing
imbecile smile through the kitchen wall.
"Who knows?" said Helen.
James returned to the front room. "What's that ye're saying?" he
questioned the company.
"I was just saying how quaint and pretty your house is," said Sarah, and
she rose to depart. More kissings, flutterings, swishings! Emanuel
bowed.
Emanuel followed Miss Swetnam in a few minutes. Helen accompanied him to
the gate, where she stayed a little while talking to him. James was in
the blackest gloom.
"And now, you dear old thing," said Helen, vivaciously bustling into the
house, "you shall have your _tea_. You've behaved like a perfect
angel."
And she kissed him on the cheek, very excitedly, as he thought.
She gave him another kidney omelette for his tea. It was even more
adorable than the former one. With the taste of it in his mouth, he
could not recur to the question of the ten-pound note all at once. When
tea was over she retired upstairs, and remained in retirement for ages.
She descended at a quarter to eight, with her hat and gloves on. It
appeared to him that her eyes were inflamed.
"I'm going out," she said, with no further explanation.
And out she went, leaving the old man, stricken daft by too many
sensations, to collect his wits.
He had not even been to the bank!
And the greatest sensation of all the nightmarish days was still in
reserve for him. At a quarter-past eight some one knocked at the door.
He opened it, being handier than the new servant. He imagined himself
ready for anything; but he was not ready for the apparition which met
him on the threshold.
Mrs. Prockter, of Hillport, asked to be admitted!