"After all, I think there are only two kinds of people in the
world, lovers and egotists. I fear that lovers must smile when they
see me making myself comfortable, collecting refined luxuries and a
pleasant society round myself, protecting myself from an uneasy
conscience by measured ornamental acts of kindness and duty;
mounting guard over my health and my seclusion and my liberty. Yes!
I have seen them smile."--M. N.
The violet dusk was deepening and the dew was falling as Annette crossed
the garden under the apple trees on her return from the choir practice.
There was a light in Aunt Maria's window, which showed that she was
evidently grappling with the smoking embroglio which was racking two
young hearts. Even a footfall in the passage was apt to scare that shy
bird Aunt Maria's genius, so Annette stole on tiptoe to the parlour.
Aunt Harriet, extended on a sofa near a shaded lamp, looked up from her
cushions with a bright smile of welcome, and held out both her hands.
Aunt Harriet was the youngest of three sisters, but she had not realized
that that fact may in time cease to mean much. It was obvious that she
had not yet kissed the rod of middle age. She had been moderately
good-looking twenty years ago, and still possessed a willowy figure and
a slender hand, and a fair amount of ash-coloured hair which she wore in
imitation of the then Princess of Wales tilted forward in a dome of
innumerable little curls over a longish pinkish face, leaving the thin
flat back of her head unmitigated by a coil. Aunt Harriet gave the
impression of being a bas-relief, especially on the few occasions on
which she stood up, when it seemed as if part of her had become
momentarily unglued from the sofa, leaving her spinal column and the
back of her head behind.
She had had an unhappy and misunderstood--I mean too accurately
understood--existence, during the early years when her elder sister
Maria ruthlessly exhorted her to exert herself, and continually
frustrated her mild inveterate determination to have everything done for
her. But a temporary ailment long since cured and a sympathetic doctor
had enabled her to circumvent Maria, and to establish herself for good
on her sofa, with the soft-hearted Catherine in attendance. Her unlined
face showed that she had found her niche in this uneasy world, and was
no longer as in all her earlier years a drifter through life, terrified
by the possibility of fatiguing herself. Greatly to her credit, and
possibly owing to Catherine's mediation, Aunt Maria accepted the
situation, and never sought to undermine the castle, not in Spain but on
a sofa, which her sister had erected, and in which she had found the
somewhat colourless happiness of her life.
"Come in, my love, come in," said Aunt Harriet, with playful gaiety.
"Come in and sit by me."
Her love came in and sat down obediently on the low stool by her aunt's
couch, that stool to which she was so frequently beckoned, on which it
was her lot to hear so much advice on the subject of the housekeeping
and the management of the servants.
"I think, Annette, you ought to speak to Hodgkins about the Albert
biscuits. I know I left six in the tin yesterday, and there were only
four to-day. I went directly I was down to count them. It is not good
for _her_ to take the dining-room Alberts and then to deny it, as she
did the other day. So I think it will be best if I don't move in the
matter, and if you mention it as if you had noticed it yourself." Or,
"There was a cobweb on my glass yesterday. I think, dearest, you must
not overlook that. Servants become very slack unless they are kept up to
their work." Aunt Harriet was an enemy of all slackness, idleness, want
of energy, shirking in all its branches. She had taken to reading
Emerson of late, and often quoted his words that "the only way of escape
in all the worlds of God was performance."
Annette would never have kept a servant if she had listened to her
aunt's endless promptings. But she did not listen to them. Her placid,
rather happy-go-lucky temperament made her forget them at once.
"Have you had supper, dear child?"
"Not yet. I will go now."
"And did you remember to take a lozenge as you left the church?"
"I am afraid I forgot."
"Ah! my dear, it's a good thing you have some one to look after you and
mother you. It's not too late to take one now."
"I should like to go and have supper now. I am very hungry."
"I rejoice to hear it. It is wonderful to me how you can do without a
regular meal on choir nights. If it had been me, I should have fainted.
But sit down again for one moment. I have something to tell you. You
will never guess whom we have had here."
"I am sure I never shall."
"You know how much Maria thinks of literary people?"
"Yes."
"I don't care for them quite so much as she does. I am more drawn to
those who have suffered, whose lives have been shattered like glass as
my own life has been, and who gather up the fragments that remain and
weave a beautiful embroidery out of them."
Annette knew that her aunt wanted her to say, "As you do yourself."
She considered a moment and then said, "You are thinking of Aunt
Catherine."
Aunt Harriet was entirely nonplussed. She felt unable to own that she
had no such thought. She sighed deeply, and said after a pause, "I don't
want it repeated, Annette,--I learned long ago that it is my first duty
to keep my troubles to myself, to consume my own smoke,--but my
circulation has never been normal since the day Aunt Cathie died."
Then after a moment she added, with sudden brightness, as one who
relumes the torch on which a whole household depends--
"But you have not guessed who our visitor was, and what a droll
adventure it all turned out. How I did laugh when it was all over and he
was safely out of hearing! Maria said there was nothing to laugh at, but
then she never sees the comic side of things as I do."
"I begin to think it must have been Canon Wetherby, the clergyman who
told you that story about the parrot who said 'Damn' at prayers, and
made Aunt Maria promise not to put it in one of her books."
"She will, all the same. It is too good to be lost. No, it was not Canon
Wetherby. But you will never guess. I've never known you guess anything,
Annette. You are totally devoid of imagination, and ah! how much happier
your life will be in consequence. I shall have to tell you. It was Mr.
Reginald Stirling."
"The novelist?"
"Yes, and you know Maria was beginning to feel a little hurt because he
hadn't called, as they are both writers. There is a sort of freemasonry
in these things, and, of course, in a neighbourhood like this we
naturally miss very much the extremely interesting literary society to
which we were accustomed in London, and in which Maria especially shone.
But anyhow he came at last, and he was quite delightful. Not much to
look at. Not Mr. Harvey's presence, but most agreeable. And he seemed to
know all about us. He said he went to Riff Church sometimes, and had
seen our youngest sister in the choir. How I laughed after he was gone!
I often wish the comic side did not appeal to me quite so forcibly. To
think of poor me, who have not been to church for years, boldly holding
forth in the choir, or Maria, dear Maria, who only knows 'God save the
Queen' because every one gets up: as Canon Wetherby said in his funny
way, 'Does not know "Pop goes the Queen" from "God save the weasel."'
Maria said afterwards that probably he thought you were our younger
sister, and that sent me off into fits again."
"I certainly sit in the choir."
"He was much interested in the house too, and said it was full of
old-world memories."
"Did he really say that?" Annette's face fell.
"No. Now I come to think of it, _I_ said that, and he agreed. And his
visit, and his conversation about Mrs. Humphry Ward, comparing _David
Grieve_ and _Robert Elsmere_, quite cured dear Maria's headache, and we
agreed that neither of us would tell you about it in the absence of the
other, so that we might make you guess. So remember, Annette, when Maria
comes in, you don't know a word, a single word, of what I've told you."
Aunt Maria came in at that moment, and sat down on the other side of the
fire.
Aunt Maria was a short, sacklike woman between fifty and sixty, who had
long since given up any pretensions to middle age, and who wore her grey
hair parted under a little cap. Many antagonistic qualities struggled
for precedence in Aunt Maria's stout, uneasy face: benevolence and
irritability, self-consciousness and absent-mindedness, a suspicious
pride and the self-depreciation which so often dogs it; and the fatigue
of one who daily and hourly is trying to be "an influence for good,"
with little or no help from temperament. Annette had developed a
compassionate affection for both her aunts, now that they were under her
protection, but the greater degree of compassion was for Aunt Maria.
"Aunt Harriet will have told you who has been to see us," she said as a
matter of course.
Aunt Harriet fixed an imploring glance on Annette, who explained that
she had seen a dogcart in the courtyard, and how later she had seen Mr.
Stirling driving in it.
"I wished, Harriet," said Aunt Maria, without looking at her sister,
"that you had not asked him if he had read my books."
"But he had, Maria. He was only doubtful the first minute, till I told
him some of the names, and then----"
"Then the poor man perjured himself."
"And I thought that was so true how he said to you, 'You and I, Miss
Nevill, have no time in our hard-worked lives to read even the best
modern fiction.'"
"I found time to read _The Magnet_," said Aunt Maria in a hollow voice.
At this moment the door opened and Hodgkins the parlour-maid advanced
into the room bearing a tray, which she put down in an aggressive manner
on a small table beside Annette.
"I am certain Hodgkins is vexed about something," said Aunt Harriet
solemnly, when that functionary had withdrawn. "I am as sensitive as a
mental thermometer to what others are feeling, and I saw by the way she
set the tray down that she was angry. She must have guessed that I've
found out about the Alberts."
"Perhaps she guessed that Annette was starving," said Aunt Maria.