"The less wit a man has, the less he knows that he wants
it."--GEORGE ELIOT.
The Vicarage is within a stone's throw of the Dower House. On this
particular afternoon Mr. and Miss Black were solemnly seated opposite
each other at tea, and Mr. Black was ruefully reflecting, as he often
did at meal-times, on his sister's incapacity as a housekeeper.
We sometimes read in the biographies of eminent men how trains and boats
always eluded those distinguished personages, in spite of their pathetic
eagerness to overtake them; how their luggage and purses and important
papers fled from them; how their empty chairs too frequently represented
them on state occasions.
Miss Black was not eluded by such bagatelles as trains and omnibuses,
but by things of greater importance, by new-laid eggs, and fresh butter,
and cottage loaves. No egg until it was of advanced middle age would
come within a mile of Miss Black. The whole village was aware that old
Purvis sold her "potted eggs" at "new-laid" prices, and that she never
detected the lime on them. Scones and tea-cakes and loaves with
"kissing crust" remained obdurately huddled in the baker's cart at the
Vicarage back door. All that ever found their way into the house were
those unappropriated blessings, those emotionless rectangular travesties
of bread called "tin loaves."
Coffee and Miss Black were not on speaking terms. After years of deadly
enmity she had relinquished the fruitless struggle, and gave her brother
coffee essence instead for breakfast--two spoonfuls to a cup of tepid
milk.
Fire and water would not serve Miss Black. The bath water was always
cold at the Vicarage, and the drinking water was invariably warm.
Butter, that sensitive ally of the housekeeper, bore her a grudge. Miss
Black said all the Riff butter was bad. In London she had said the same.
Biscuits became demoralized directly they set tin in the house. The
first that emerged from the box were crisp, delicious, but in a day or
two they were all weary, tough, and tasteless. They were kept on plates
on sideboards in the sun, or thrust into mousy cupboards. She left off
ordering gingerbread nuts at last, which her brother liked, because they
all stuck together like putty. She attributed this peculiarity to the
proximity of the Rieben.
Miss Black was no more perturbed by the ostracism in which she lived as
regards the vegetable and mineral kingdom than Napoleon was by the
alliance of Europe against him. She combined a high opinion of herself
with a rooted conviction that everything vexatious or disagreeable was
inherent in the nature of things--a sort of original sin. It was in the
fallen nature of butter to be rancid, and eggs to be laid stale, and
milk to be sour, and villagers to cheat, and old people to be fretful,
and pretty women (like Annette) to be vain and unscrupulous, and men
(like her brother) to care inordinately about food and to be enslaved by
external attractions. She expected these things, and many more, as she
stumped through life, and she was not disappointed.
"I think you are wrong, Walter," she said, masticating a plasmon
biscuit, "in making Miss Georges take that bit in the anthem as a solo.
I went to see Mrs. Cocks this afternoon, and we got talking of the
choir, and I am sure she did not like it."
"I cannot steer my course entirely by Mrs. Cocks."
"Of course not. But she told me that in Mr. Jones's time----"
"I am rather tired of hearing of Mr. Jones and his times."
"In his time all the trebles took the solo together, to prevent any
jealousy or ill-feeling."
"I can't prevent jealousy of Miss Georges," said Mr. Black, looking
coldly at his sister, and then still more coldly at the cup of tea she
handed him, made quarter of an hour before by the young servant who, as
the Miss Blinketts who had trained her had faithfully warned Miss
Black, "mistook bubbling for boiling."
The tea was the consistency of treacle, and the cream his sister poured
into it instantly took the contorted worm-like shapes which sour cream
does take. Miss Black drank hers slowly, not finding it good, but
thinking it was like all other tea.
"You won't make the jealousy less by putting her forward in everything."
"It irritates me to hear Miss Georges' voice muffled up with Mrs. Cocks
and Jane Smith. I don't suppose Riff Church has ever had such a voice in
it since it was built."
"I'm sure I can't tell about that. But Miss Georges has been partly
trained for a public singer."
"Has she? I did not know that."
"The truth is we know very little about her. I am not sure we ought not
to have made more inquiries before we admitted her to the choir and the
Sunday school."
"My dear, pure good-nature on her part is responsible for her being in
either. And could anything be more ultra respectable than her aunts?"
"We don't know who her father was. I should not wonder if he were an
actor, her manner of singing is so theatrical. Not quite a good example
for the other trebles. She draws attention to herself."
"She can't help that, Angela. That is partly due to her appearance, for
which she is not responsible."
Mr. Black, patient and kindly by nature, showed to greater advantage
with his sister than with Annette, because he never attempted to show
Miss Black the sort of man he was. You could not be two minutes in her
society without realizing that she saw no more difference between one
person and another than she did between fresh eggs and stale. Men were
men to her, as eggs were eggs. And that was all about it.
"She is responsible for a good deal of the attention she courts," said
Miss Black scornfully, and with a modicum of truth on her side. "She
need not let her hair stand out over her ears, or make those two little
curls in the nape of her neck. And did you notice her absurd hat?"
"I noticed nothing absurd about it."
"When every one is wearing trimmed hats she must needs make herself
conspicuous in a perfectly plain straw with no trimming at all, except
that black ribbon tied under her chin. Everybody was staring at her last
Sunday."
"That I can well believe."
"I asked her where she had got that nice garden hat."
"Is it possible? How angry you would have been if she had asked you
where you got yours!"
Mr. Black glanced for the first time at a battered but elaborate
arrangement sprinkled with cornflowers, sitting a little crooked, like
a badly balanced plate, on the top of his sister's narrow head.
"She wasn't the least angry. There was nothing to be offended at. And
she said her aunt in Paris sent it her, who was a milliner."
"How like her to say that--to volunteer it!" said Mr. Black, aware that
his sister was watching how he took the news of Annette's connection
with trade. "But we must be careful how we repeat it. In this amazing
little world of Riff it might be against her to have a milliner for an
aunt."
"I don't see that Riff is more amazing than other places," said Miss
Black, who had already circulated the story of the dressmaking aunt with
the same diligence which she showed in the distribution of the parish
magazine. "I hope we can all be civil to Miss Georges, even if her aunt
is a dressmaker, and her father lower still in the social scale. She has
no _De_ before her name. And Georges is a very common surname."
"Indeed!"
"Perhaps you are thinking of asking her to change it," said his sister,
whose temper was liable to boil up with all the suddenness of milk.
"I had not got so far as that," he said, rising. "You must remember,
Angela, that you see a possible wife for me in every woman I exchange a
word with. It is very flattering that you should think so many might be
prevailed on to share my little Vicarage, but the Church only allows me
one wife, and the selection I believe rests with me."
"I know that. It's so silly to talk as if I expected anything
different."
"All I can say is that if I could delude myself into believing that Miss
Georges put on that hat or any other hat with a view to attracting me, I
should feel some alacrity in finishing my Sunday sermon, which I must
now do without any alacrity at all."
Miss Black swallowed the remains of her plasmon biscuit, and said in the
voice of one accustomed to the last word--
"Miss Georges is very good-looking, of course. No one admires that sort
of pale, clear complexion and calm manner more than I do. But you must
remember that they are merely the result of a constitution free from an
excess of uric acid. Non-gouty subjects always look like that."